How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
What was he doing, coming back to a town where he had lives for four years as a boy, trying to recapture something that was irrevocably lost? What magic could he expect to recapture by walking roads that he had once walked as a boy and were probably asphalted and straightened and logged off and littered with tourist beer cans? (1.12)
Ben's thinking about recapturing the magic of his childhood. He does find magic in Jerusalem's Lot, though maybe not the magic he was looking for. Or maybe it is the magic he was looking for: Ben, as a writer, is a stand-in for Stephen King himself, and King picked the magic to put in the book. He could have gone with happy sparkly elves (or happy sparkly vampires even, like in Twilight), but instead he liked Dracula. Maybe that's really Ben's preference, too.
Quote #2
Small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremoniously from generation to generation. (2.222)
The vampires seem to come from outside (Barlow's a foreigner), but they're also horrors that were already lurking under the surface in 'Salem's Lot—comfy horrors, sitting in the rocking chair knitting, with home-cooking on the stove. You never know what's behind the curtains.
Quote #3
"On the other hand, there may be some truth to that idea that houses absorb the emotions that are spent in them, that they hold a kind of… dry charge. Perhaps the right personality, that of an imaginative boy, for instance, could act as a catalyst on that dry charge and cause it to produce an active manifestation of… something." (2.262)
Ben remembers seeing Marsten's corpse hanging in the room. He's not willing to say that it was just his imagination. For him, imagination is real—and you can see why, since he makes his money from his imagination. Those childhood nightmares go into the dry cell of your brain and come out as prose that makes money. You don't get more real than that.