‘Salem’s Lot is a small New England town with white clapboard houses, tree-lined streets and solid church steeples. Of course there are tales of strange happenings – but no more than in any other such town.

Ben Mears has returned to the Lot to write a novel and exorcise the terrors that have haunted him since childhood – since the event he witnessed at the Marsten House.

He finds the house has been rented by a newcomer, a man who causes Ben some unease. And then things start to happen: a child disappears, a dog is brutally killed – nothing unusual, except the list keeps growing…

”Salem’s Lot’ was the first book in my Stephen King 2026 Reading Challenge. It was published in 1975 and was his second novel. I was fascinated to see how his writing has progressed since then. 

When Stephen King published ”Salem’s Lot’ in 1975, Vampire novels were not yet back in fashion. It appeared six months before Anne Rice’s ‘Interview With The Vampire‘, three years ahead of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s ‘Hôtel Transylvania’ and four years before John Badham’s star-studded ‘ Dracula’ movie with Frank Langella as Dracula, Laurence Olivier as Van Helsing, Trevor Eve as Harker. Jan Francis as Mina, and Kate Nelligan as Lucy).

Yet, even though Stephen King in some senses led the charge on the rehabilitation of the vampire novel ‘’Salem’s Lot’ is more Lit Fic than horror flick. It starts with a prologue, but not the usual kind, designed to reassure readers that the long novel they’re about to begin will deliver moments of terrifying horror, but rather to establish the scale of the impact of the unpleasantness in ‘’Salem’s Lot’. I read this slow, low-key start as a declaration that this was a book focused on what it would be like if a real vampire came to a remote village in modern-day Maine, rather than on delivering a string of increasingly improbable Jump Scare scenes. 

‘’Salem’s Lot’ explores the nature of evil rather than the nature of vampires. Stephen King displays the lives of the residents of ’Salem’s Lot in unforgiving detail, revealing a taint of vulgarity, venality, weakness and pain that, although banal, has the potential to be catalysed into overwhelming evil. There are two reagents of evil in ‘Salem’s Lot, the new-in-town vampire and the Marsten House, which drew him to the town. The violent acts committed in the Marsten House have made it a locus of evil. As a prelude to our first sight of the Marsten House, Stephen King shares a long quote from Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Haunting Of Hill House’, signalling that this haunted house on the hill will cast a long shadow over the residents of the Lot. Relatively little time is spent on the vampire at the heart of the story. More attention is paid to those who enable him, either by their willing actions on his behalf, or their refusal to recognise or respond to the early signs that evil is at work.

Although ”Salem’s Lot’ has many strengths, for me, it was a book that didn’t realise its potential. I felt that Stephen King couldn’t make up his mind whether he wanted this book to be THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL à la ‘Empire Falls‘ or whether he wanted it to make the case for evil as something lying latent in a small town, just waiting for the right reagent to activate it.

Much of the writing was very fine, if sometimes a little self-consciously so. I thought Chapter 10, which started: ”The town knew about darkness” and treated the Lot as if it were sentient, was an impressive piece of prose , but it was also a demonstration of the uneven pacing of the storytelling. I often felt that I was wading through a book that I might lose the desire to finish. It had the self-indulgent lack of discipline and arrogantly slow pace of a late John Irving novel.

The power of the book came from how vividly it described life in a small town in rural Maine and how the character of the people and the isolation of the place left it ripe for being suborned by a vampire. 

Surprisingly, it was the horror parts of the book that left me untouched. They lacked emotional impact. The scene where the only woman in the stop-the-vampire team finally goes to the Marsten House alone to confront the bad guys gave a clinical description of fear that I recognised as accurate, but that didn’t make me share her emotions.  

I listened to the audiobook version of ‘’Salem’s Lot’ narrated by Ron McLarty. I thought he got the tone right and delivered convincing voices for the main characters. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample.