King has suggested that what people fear most can be boiled down to disruption. He often uses the theme of the outsider who disrupts the status quo and exposes the slimy pallid things hidden under an idyllic surface. Historically, the vampire has represented disruption in three ways—the outsider bringing disruptive customs and beliefs, or the outsider bringing disease from another village; internally, the vampire represents social or moral deviance, especially sexual deviance (the vampire bite being a glaringly obvious metaphor) arising from within the group.

Barlow certainly disrupts the status quo, and he brings a plague from outside, but he primarily represents the internal threat of social and moral decay already eating the town from within. Before the arrival of Straker and Barlow, ’salem’s Lot and the Marsten House have been in a state of suspension ready to be tipped over into chaos by the intrusion of the outsider(s). Chapters 3 and 14 contain taxonomies of the moral degeneracy in the citizens of ’salem’s Lot. The residents of the town are already vampires of a kind. They suck out one another’s lives with greed, child abuse, adultery, sadism, petty malice, bullying, murder, arson, and a multitude of private addictions and obsessions.