The novel begins after it is over. A tall man and a boy who is not his son drive a battered Citroën across America, working odd jobs, and wherever they stop the man buys a Portland newspaper and scans it for news of one small Maine town. In Mexico, the boy makes his first confession to a village priest, and the old man listens and says he will pray for them. Then comes a newspaper feature about a township whose people have simply gone, its shops boarded and its school empty. ’Salem’s Lot by Stephen King hands you the ending’s outline before the first chapter, and the dread comes from watching a cheerful autumn walk towards it.

How It Works

Ben Mears, a novelist whose wife died in a motorcycle crash two years earlier, returns in September 1975 to Jerusalem’s Lot, where he lived with an aunt as a boy. He wants to write about the Marsten House, the hilltop ruin where a gangster killed his wife and hanged himself in 1939, and where Ben, aged nine and on a dare, once opened an upstairs door and saw something he has dreamed about ever since. He arrives to find the house has been sold. A bald, courteous man named Straker is opening an antiques shop in town on behalf of a partner who is always away on business.

Then a boy disappears on a woodland path, and his brother falls ill with an anaemia no doctor can explain. The rules are the old ones, and King applies them like a lawyer: a threshold that must be crossed by invitation, crosses and holy water, the stake, and above all the sun. Characters check printed sunset times in the newspaper. The book is in three parts, and the middle one is a countdown.

What ’Salem’s Lot Builds Before Dark

The structure is the novel’s real engine. King has said he wanted to see what would happen if Stoker’s Count came to rural America, and in ’Salem’s Lot by Stephen King the answer is that nobody would notice for weeks. The town itself is the main character. One early chapter follows a single Wednesday from four in the morning to midnight in short time-stamped sections: a dairy farmer’s sulking son at the milking, the milkman, the boarding-house widow at her enormous breakfast, the school-bus driver who puts children off his bus for whispering, the dump keeper shooting rats, an affair at three in the afternoon. It reads like a census of small lives, and each one becomes a door the vampire can walk through.

That is the clever part. Because we know these people, the spread of the infection is plotted through gossip, grudges and secrets that already existed. The dread in ’Salem’s Lot by Stephen King is less about fangs than about a community too busy with its own business to look up at the hill.

What works

• Mark Petrie. A slight, bookish newcomer who builds Aurora monster models and fights a playground bully with cold tactics, he is the best-prepared person in town because he has read the monster magazines. His scene at a bedroom window, armed with a plastic cross from a model graveyard, is one of King’s finest.
• Matt Burke. The lonely high-school English teacher, a rock-and-roll fan with failing hearing, is the first adult to believe, and his courage is quietly moving.
• The sunset set pieces. A gravedigger filling in a child’s grave as the last light climbs the hill towards the Marsten House, one shovelful at a time, is horror built from rhythm alone.
• The final third. Part Three opens with a town ledger of weather and empty police reports and then cuts between dozens of homes as night falls. It is relentless.

Where It Gives Ground

None of these sinks ’Salem’s Lot by Stephen King, but the novel shows its age.

• The villain is an absence. Barlow barely appears, and when the long build-up finally reaches him, the reckoning resolves more conveniently than it deserves.
• The women are thin. The heroine’s chief role is to doubt and then to act alone at the worst moment, and most other women are gossips, victims or seducers.
• The exposition repeats. The same evidence is retold to new listeners several times, and the rules get a full classroom lecture.
• The slurs. Homophobic language runs through the narration and dialogue, along with ethnic labels typical of 1975, and some of it belongs to the narrative voice rather than a bigoted character.

Read These Next

If ’Salem’s Lot by Stephen King leaves you wanting another October read, our guide to more Halloween classics has a full shelf. These pair best:

1. Dracula by Bram Stoker, the novel King set out to transplant, rules and all.
2. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, whose opening King uses as his epigraph for Part One.
3. The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix, a funnier, angrier update of the same stranger-in-the-suburbs setup.
4. The Shining by Stephen King, for the evil-building idea pushed into a single hotel.
5. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, for an autumn town, two boys and a stranger who arrives with a business.

About Stephen King and Some ’Salem’s Lot Trivia

Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine, in September 1947 and was teaching English at Hampden Academy when the idea arrived. He had been teaching Stoker in a fantasy and science fiction course, and a supper-table conversation about where the Count would land in modern America became ’Salem’s Lot by Stephen King, his second novel after Carrie (1974). Doubleday published it in October 1975. Its successors include The Shining and The Stand, and he looks back on these early years in On Writing.

• He first called it Second Coming. His wife, Tabitha, thought that sounded like a cheap sex novel, so it became Jerusalem’s Lot, and the publisher trimmed it again because the longer name seemed too religious.
• It was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 1976.
• Tobe Hooper directed a two-part CBS miniseries in 1979, with David Soul as Ben Mears, filmed on location in Ferndale, California.
• King returned to the town in two stories in Night Shift (1978), Jerusalem’s Lot and One for the Road.
• One of the novel’s characters reappears decades later in the Dark Tower books, Wolves of the Calla and Song of Susannah.

The Last Word

The novel is fifty years old, and its slurs and its sidelined women show it. But ’Salem’s Lot by Stephen King remains the model for every small-town horror novel since, because it understood that the monster is only half the story. The other half is a town of gossips, drunks, lonely teachers and frightened children, drawn so well that losing them hurts. It takes the oldest vampire folklore and makes it local.

Start it on an October afternoon. Then check what time the sun goes down.