One of the things that fascinated me the most about this novel was the way Stephen King plays around with the notion that our childhood fears are far more scarier than our adult fears. It draws upon the difference between our childhood fears and our adulthood fears. The following passage comes from the part in the novel where Hank Peters and Royal Snow are moving the boxes for Larry Crockett. This is one of the first instances I found in the book that really put childhood fears in perspective for the reader:
pg.101
"Hank felt a strain of fear enter his heart that he had not even felt in Nam, although he had been scared most of his time there. That was a rational fear. Fear that you might step on a pongee stick and see your foot swell up like some noxious green balloon, fear that some kid in black p.j.'s whose name you couldn't even fit in your mouth might blow your head off...But this fear was childlike, dreamy. There was no reference point to it. A house was a house-boards and hinges and nails and sills."
The difference that this passage shows us is that our childhood fears are irrational, whereas our adult fears are rational. Children have a much more open and imaginative mind than adults do. Hank and Royal are experiencing irrational fear when they enter the Marsten house. Like I mentioned in an earlier blog, the reason that irrational fear is so scary is because it is the fear of not knowing what's going on or why things are happening without an explanation. It's one thing to have a fear of heights because the consequence would be falling. That's a rational fear. An irrational fear, on the other hand, is fearing something that may or may not be true. You don't know if it is true or not and that is why it is so scary. You can't see an ending or a result to the fear and have no explanation for it.
Irrational fear was represented in 'Salem's Lot through vampires, the Marsten house, strange disappearances and reappearances of close friends and family. This aspect really made the book interesting because it opened up a realm of possiblities for where the plot might end up. This also continues my ideas that I mentioned about dreaming vs. realism. Are the characters believing what they're seeing or are they just dreaming it? In this case, irrational thinking might represent dreaming while rational thinking means realism.
*I ran across this site called Childhood Fears. It is a photographer who takes pictures using the theme of childhood fears.
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