Rats

Rats are a recurring creature in Jerusalem’s Lot whose appearances trace the town’s movement from familiar rural disorder into supernatural occupation. At first they belong to the ordinary ecology of dumps, trailers, cellars, and neglected property; as the story advances, their extraordinary size and multiplying numbers turn them into a visible symptom of the darkness gathering beneath the town. They are not merely background vermin. They make hidden corruption material, mobile, and difficult to contain.

Appearance and Habitat

Rats inhabit the Lot’s marginal and concealed spaces. The town itself is divided by roads into a nearly circular map, with wooded high ground in the northwest, farms and the Royal River to the northeast, more prosperous farmland in the southeast, and the trailer-filled Bend in the southwest. That last area is marked by junked cars, sewage odors, discarded beer cans, and makeshift housing, an environment in which vermin seem an inevitable consequence of social and physical neglect. The rats therefore belong especially to the town’s edges: places where waste accumulates, visibility diminishes, and respectable public life gives way to improvised survival.

Their most striking physical feature is scale. At the dump, Dud Rogers sees rats that can reach two feet from nose to tail, while later the creatures in the Marsten House cellar appear as large as small cats. Their numbers also seem unstable and excessive. Dud remembers having to shoot three dozen after setting the dump alight and considers poisoning them when their population begins to swell again. The narrative initially offers weather as a possible explanation, preserving an ordinary account even as the animals’ behavior becomes increasingly unnatural.

Encounters at the Dump and in the Cellars

At the smoldering dump, rats emerge from the wasteland among bottles, ash, coals, and small explosions from discarded aerosol cans and lightbulbs. Dud shoots one after it rises on its hind legs and stares at him with red-glittering eyes instead of fleeing. The moment changes the animal from pest to challenger: its boldness unsettles the man who is accustomed to killing rats and makes the dump’s burning bed of coals resemble a watchful eye.

That encounter also introduces the rats into the orbit of Kurt Barlow. Barlow, newly resident in the town and dressed with conspicuous formality, speaks of rats, owls, and wolves as predators of the night. His interest gives the creatures a place within the story’s nocturnal food chain and links their physical presence to the larger predatory order he represents. The rats are not identified as vampires, but their association with Barlow makes them part of the atmosphere through which his arrival is registered.

The cellar of the Marsten House intensifies the pattern. When Royal Snow and Hank Peters bring Barlow’s coffin into the house, Hank’s flashlight finds a huge rat sitting motionless on a table. It appears to grin before jumping down and trotting toward the cellar’s bend. As Hank searches the dusty space, the beam passes over a barrel, an old bureau, newspapers, and what may be clothing or a body. The rat’s stillness and deliberate retreat help convert the cellar from a storage area into a zone of concealed threat, where ordinary objects and signs of human remains become indistinguishable.

The rats recur in the novel’s subterranean scenes. In Eva Miller’s basement, Jimmy Cody descends expecting to see a pool table and instead encounters rats; in the original account of the scene, their appearance is the immediate reason the screams begin. Later, when Susan Norton and Mark Petrie move through the Marsten House cellar, the creatures are everywhere, apparently millions of them, packed two and three deep and leaving only a narrow path. Some are as large as small cats. One darts forward and bites at Mark’s foot before Susan drives it away with her crucifix, turning a religious object into a practical defense against the infestation.

The attack is not confined to the cellar. During the approach to the house, rats carpet the porch steps, squeaking and thumping across the boards, while others perch along the red railings like spectators. Ben Mears uses a flit gun while invoking God, and the spray immediately makes the rats writhe, squeal, and flee, some biting at their own flanks as if suddenly covered with hungry fleas. The scene gives the infestation a tactical function: before the vampire can be reached, the human investigators must first clear a living barrier of vermin.

From Nuisance to Horror Motif

The rats’ horror depends on gradual escalation. Their first appearances can be explained by the town’s dump, trailer settlement, aging buildings, and neglected cellars. The narrative repeatedly delays a fully supernatural explanation, allowing the reader to move from disgust to apprehension. A rat on a table is disturbing; a rat that does not move when illuminated is more disturbing; millions of rats that organize themselves into a pathway and close it behind intruders belong to a different order of threat.

This progression also makes the rats a measure of hidden pressure. The town insists that serious calamity cannot happen there and treats national wars and crises as distant television knowledge, but the rats occupy the spaces where that civic confidence fails: beneath houses, behind walls, around the dump, and inside the Marsten House. When the town’s residents awaken to danger without understanding it, turn on every light, and avoid looking through their windows, the atmosphere of unseen life outside their homes echoes the earlier cellar scenes. The rats give physical form to the knowledge that something is present even when no one can safely name it.

The creature motif is especially important because the rats are repeatedly connected with darkness without being reduced to a single supernatural explanation. Barlow describes night predators with admiration, and the later cellar scenes make the animals function as accomplices of the setting rather than as simple summoned monsters. Their enormous numbers suggest ecological imbalance, while their confidence suggests that the normal hierarchy between humans and vermin has been reversed. People who once shot or poisoned them must instead repel them with crosses, holy water, or insecticide-like spray.

Editorial and Narrative Significance

The rats also reveal the novel’s process of construction. Draft material preserves more frequent and more explicit rat imagery than the published narrative. The chapter involving Danny Glick and Others originally contained additional rat scenes, including the discovery of rats after Hank sees the cellar. The same pattern appears in Jimmy’s descent into Eva Miller’s basement, where the rats provide the original cause of the screams, and in the later sequence in which Ben and Mark must drive the animals away before reaching Barlow. Their recurrence shows how the creature motif was used to thicken the atmosphere of the Marsten House and its surrounding spaces, even when some of that material was later reduced.

In the related account of Chapelwaite, the narrator dismisses Charles Boone’s papers as forgeries produced by paranoid delusion but acknowledges that huge rats can still be heard in the walls. That final practical image preserves the motif beyond the central action: even when supernatural claims are questioned, the house remains materially infested. Rats thus occupy an unsettling middle ground between evidence and interpretation. They may be explained as vermin, yet their scale, number, and persistence keep them aligned with the story’s larger sense that evil is not an apparition hovering above ordinary life but a contamination working through its foundations.