How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
In a way she was the town, a fat widow who now went out very little, and who spent most of her time by her window dressed in a tentlike silk camisole, her yellowish-ivory hair done up in a coronet of thick, braided cables, with the telephone on her right hand and her high-powered Japanese binoculars on the left. The combination of the two—plus the time to use them fully—made her a benevolent spider sitting in the center of a communications web that stretched from the Bend to east 'salem. (3.423)
Mabel Werts is here presented as the community itself: bloated, spider-like, corrupt, feasting on gossip. She's also a little like the reader, who eagerly gulps down all the noxious doings in the novel—better informed even than Mabel, right?
Quote #5
And the day seemed to stand still for them, and Vinnie Upshaw began to make another cigarette with sweet, arthritic slowness. (4.274)
The slow, never-changing conversation of the men at the agricultural store stands in for the unchanging small-town life… and also for the unchanging life of the undead.
Quote #6
"Not all the gossip in a small town is open gossip. There are secrets. Some of the secret gossip in ''Salem's Lot has to do with Hubie Marsten. It's shared among perhaps only a dozen or so of the older people now—Mabel Werts is one of them… It's strange, you know. Even Mabel won't talk about Hubert Marsten with anyone but her own circle… The secrecy concerning that aspect of Hubie and his wife is almost tribal." (9.187)
Here Matt sees 'Salem's Lot as a tribe, with secret signs and rites centering on Hubie Marsten. The vampires, linked also to Marsten, are tribal evil secrets made flesh—not so much an infestation as a buried truth there all along.