This paper investigates the autobiography of Damien Echols. The autobiographical subject, Echols, depicts his life as a marginalized youth during the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties in Arkansas, USA. It also explores the years that Echols spent on Death Row after having been arrested along with two other youths for the murder of three eight-year-old boys; a crime all three of the accused denied having committed. In 2011, after eighteen years of incarceration, the three now grown up men were released from prison. The author of this paper discusses biography and especially autobiography as a genre and explores to what extent memories represent the actual life the autobiographical subject, Echols, has lived and if memories are or can be truthful.

This paper investigates narrative and thematic structures in Damien Echols? autobiography Life After Death (2012) and Stephen King?s horror novel ?Salem?s Lot (1975). In Life After Death Echols tells the tale of his eighteen-year incarceration on Death Row in Arkansas/USA. He also uses his childhood memories to overcome hardships in the prison system. ?Salem?s Lot by Stephen King deals with the invasion of vampires in a small town in rural Maine in the North East corner of the United States.  The author of this study discusses if and how Damien Echols was inspired in his writing by the writings of Stephen King.