’Salem’s Lot was the novel that started to make people realise Stephen King was a new voice in horror, and that he wasn’t going away. We follow the story of Ben Mears, an author who has returned to his childhood town to write his next bestseller. What he finds, however, is a darkness placed deep in the heart of the town.

I remember the first time I read ’Salems Lot that I wasn’t overly impressed. Perhaps it’s simply a product of the over-saturation of vampire fiction that accompanied my childhood. I was firmly a Bela Lugosi vampire child, being introduced to the Universal Monsters at the ripe old age of about 4 or 5, and adoring it.

I happened to be about 9 when the Twilight books came out, and I just remember being so over vampires. They just weren’t quite as scary as they once were, and I remember reading ’Salem’s Lot as a teenager and thinking there was a version of this that I would have found terrifying – but the ship had long since sailed.

Unfortunately, I still feel about the same. I just don’t think vampires are my fear point. They’re more like old friends than they are anything else. Re-reading this one felt like an admirable attempt to make something scary on King’s part, and I know that fault lies with me more than anything else.

We follow our main character, Ben Mears, an author seeking his newest story, to ’Salem’s Lot, a small town in the middle of Nowhere, America. Having spent some formative years here, and having a healthy dose of trauma from the town nipping at his heels, he embeds himself in the day-to-day as best he can.

However, things have changed recently in ’Salem’s Lot. There’s a new tenant in the Marsten House, which has the lion’s share of the lore in town, and he’s starting to snack on the townsfolk.

Ben as a protagonist is very much an imprint for the reader. He’s sweet, and he’s strong, and he’s not particularly notable in his own way. He’s definitely a character of circumstance, and he could have spent his whole life unremarkable. His romance with Susan is also lovely, and would have been entirely pedestrian if not for the introduction of vampires into their story.

Susan, herself, is less fleshed out than she could have been, too. She’s definitely a presence in the book, and she shows the woes of trying to escape from a small-town mentality and family. She doesn’t feel fully formed, but I think that’s more so a product of who she is rather than King’s writing. She’s never had a chance to grow and become her own self.

For the trifecta of our main characters, we come to Mark. Mark is an absolute sweetheart of a kid, and he makes for a wonderful character. He is strong in the face of all odds, and the bond he forms with Ben is a very lovely thing in the face of everything horrible in this book. It’s a found-family bond that proves to be galvanised against anything the world throws at them.

The story itself is a Dracula retelling, in a way, but with an American focus. I recall King saying that his wife, Tabitha, said if Dracula had popped up in the modern day, he’d probably ‘get run over by a yellow taxi in New York’ and Stephen picked a small town for that very reason. It’s certainly more of a Nosferatu than a Universal Monsters Dracula, and that has to be admired – there’s an alarming dearth of such material in literature. Vampires so often are made romantic or aesthetically appealing, which is only one side of their story.

Generally, particularly after such a long time alive, a certain element of humanity has to be lost. ’Salems Lot does this admirably, making Barlow, King’s vampire, a fearsome foe. He’s largely absent, as well, which is somehow more eerie. Straker, King’s Renfield character, the familiar or servant of Barlow, who faithfully carries out his bidding, shows no qualms about killing anyone and everything for the satisfaction of his master.

There are no holds barred in the book either. Children, infants, the elderly, people in the prime of their lives – everyone is fair game. The scene with Sandy trying to feed her dead baby is horror at the very peak, and it evokes the very dark nature of our humanity at the edge of society we don’t like to think about.

The climax of the book and the eventual abandonment of The Lot by Ben and Mark is a fitting end. There’s no winning when it comes to something so insurmountable, and they return eventually with the intention of destroying everything by fire.

The parallels to Carrie here are notable – there’s a destruction of everything with fire, and I think that’s something that you see throughout King’s early novels on an ongoing basis. For something to be purified, you need to cleanse it with flame. It’s an interesting motif, and one that we see for quite a few books yet.

I do think ’Salem’s Lot has great utility as an analogy for moral panic and moral poisoning in a small town. There’s a definite sense of how quickly even the best are taken in by a charming smile and approach from a stranger with bad intentions. The way that the vampire curse spreads through town is definitely an interesting progression, and it speaks to the toxicity of such things.

It’s also a really good horror novel, and contains so much that is at the very extreme of human nature. I just don’t think that I’m ever going to love it in the same way I love some of his other work, and that’s okay.