No one would do it nowadays.
It was 1979. I was 7. And “Salem’s Lot” was on TV.
There have been over 40 films adapted from my father’s novels, and a host of television shows, mini-series and made-for-TV flicks, but in 1979, the Stephen King Cinematic Universe wasn’t a thing anyone could imagine. There had been only one other picture, a Brian De Palma smash based on his first novel, “Carrie,” and no doubt both of my parents were thrilled to see my dad’s work back on the screen. Giddy. At the beginning of the decade, my mother was working the counter at a Dunkin’ Donuts and fending off handsy customers, while my dad was sweating out night shifts in an industrial laundry. Famously, the first car they ever bought erupted into flames when they tried to start it, one day after driving it home. It must’ve been kind of hard to believe it was all really happening: not just successful books and a dizzying income, but movie stars milling about in productions based on my dad’s work.
In that era when there were only three networks, it was not unreasonable to believe that several million people were going to catch it (I have been unable to determine the actual viewership, but a conservative guess puts the audience at around 25 million). How could my parents not have been thrilled? How could they not have wanted to share the excitement with the whole family? Including the kids!
Don’t blame them. It was the ’70s. We didn’t wear seatbelts then, either, and my dad sometimes polished off a beer while he was behind the steering wheel and then chucked the empty out the open window. The past is a stranger place than the most foreign country.
So I stayed up late and I watched “Salem’s Lot” with them and after that did not sleep again until sometime in the summer of 1980, more or less.
It was the kid. It was that awful floating kid. I know I’m not alone in this — the terror inspired by that floating kid is practically a generational scar.
A traumatized boy of about 10, Danny Glick, comes awake in the middle of the night. He’s already been through a lot today: His kid brother, Ralphie Glick, disappeared in the town woods, having gotten himself either lost or abducted. Danny is confused, half-awake, and looks to his window, where in a dreamlike slow motion, Ralphie drifts up out of the swirling mist to float outside the glass. He looks as if he’s swimming in liquid darkness, and his eyes are the horrible, too-bright silver of mercury. And then he begins to scratch at the glass. He scratches like a cat to be let in. Grinning with a kind of stupid, hungry lunacy, mouth gaping to show an animal’s fangs.
I know I didn’t scream. Some terror will push you past the place where you can scream, will push you to a place where you can hardly draw breath. I don’t think my parents were aware that horror had pushed right through me like a silver needle pinning me to the couch — that I had been lanced with fright. I knew Ralphie Glick would be waiting outside my own window that night, and I was right. He was there that night and every night, until my parents took me to see “The Empire Strikes Back” the following year, and I was finally able to escape the Lot for the safer environs of Lando Calrissian’s Cloud City. I was never scared of Darth Vader. Vader would have been sucking his thumb and crying for mama if Ralphie Glick ever tapped on his window.
Even now, my father still sometimes complains about how hard it was to put me to bed when I was little. If he’s in the mood for someone to blame, he might ask himself why he couldn’t have written a nice little book about talking rabbits instead. (Actually I saw “Watership Down” around the same age, and it was not reassuring.)
At the time, we were living in Bridgton, Maine, and now and then my dad took me for walks, my small hand in his. Our perambulations led us by an abandoned chapel with boards nailed up inside the stained-glass windows. The paint was peeling and the steps leading to the front doors were rotted through; crows shouted at passers-by from the eaves. I’d squeeze my father’s hand a little tighter as we went past.
“Does that place worry you, Joe?” my father asked me once.
I nodded solemnly and whispered, “’Salem’s Yacht is there.”
•
“SALEM’S LOT” RETURNED TO TELEVISION in 2004, in a highly regarded remake with a stacked cast that included Rob Lowe, Andre Braugher, Donald Sutherland and James Cromwell; and then it was adapted for film, in Gary Dauberman’s energetic, faithful and feverishly scary 2024 reimagining. (There was also a theatrical sequel to the original 1979 mini-series, “Return to Salem’s Lot.” My dad’s advice on that one: “Don’t.”)
All of which raises the obvious question: What has inspired the film folks to throw so much money at this thing, again and again?
The answer is a novel of tightly contained force and clear, precise, unshowy writing — an unflinching descent into a bottomless nightmare. In its vast, carefully observed portrait of a dying Maine village, it has the breadth and understanding of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” Its underlying structure is based on the architecture of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” with the elderly teacher Matt Burke standing in for Van Helsing, Susan Norton for Mina, Jimmy Cody for Dr. Seward and Ben Mears as a stronger, steadier, more intellectual Harker. Late in the novel, “Lot”’s king vampire, Barlow, even writes a taunting letter to his pursuers, much as Dracula does in the final third of the Stoker novel. And as with the count in Stoker’s tale, Barlow spends most of his time offscreen, striking from the darkest of shadows. In this aspect, “’Salem’s Lot” also brings to mind the other most terrifying release from 1975, Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” which frightened audiences best by hiding rather than revealing the shark.
But the book is perhaps most in debt to John D. MacDonald, the thriller writer my father has always admired above all others. In “’Salem’s Lot,” only my dad’s second published novel, one feels the author has not quite found his way to his own unique, mature voice. That wouldn’t come in full until the next book, “The Shining.” Here in “’Salem’s Lot” (and also in two other early works, “Roadwork” and the out-of-print “Rage”), he settles on a tone that echoes MacDonald’s sensibility and fondness for back-porch philosophizing. King’s characters, like John Dee’s, aren’t content to simply react. They want to understand: each other, themselves, the past, the predicament in which they find themselves, the nature of evil. Nor does their curiosity stop there — this is a book full of offhand speculation about the nature of the times, the perils of late-20th-century America and questions about how to be a woman in a new, liberated era. The heroes’ speculations mirror my dad’s own. When this book appeared, in 1975, a novel of suspense was still allowed to take a detour now and then, to explore an author’s preoccupations, whatever they might be: political, romantic, sexual, environmental, theological. Here in 2025, we know how unhealthy it is to ever pause to think about anything, and publishers resist letting any ideas creep into a work of entertainment. Books cost more and offer less than ever, and is there a word for that? Not shrinkflation. Maybe think-flation.
The effect of this voice is to create a narrative music that syncs perfectly with the rhythms of the plot. The last act of the novel alternates between the terror of Jerusalem’s Lot after dark, and the relief of day — in which, for a few agonizingly short hours, it is possible to take stock, make a fresh plan and prepare defenses. So, too, the prose saws back and forth from harrowing, bluntly stated depictions of peril, to the more meditative passages that represent a kind of internal daylight. Language is fitted to action, the two working in perfect concert, like the hammer and the stake.
•
FIFTY YEARS AFTER its initial publication (Doubleday printed just 20,000 copies of the hardcover, perhaps operating on the theory that “Carrie” had been something of a fluke), I don’t think I’m gaming for my pa when I say that “’Salem’s Lot” is one of the four most influential vampire stories ever told: Only “Dracula,” Anne Rice’s “Interview With the Vampire” and (sorry, haters) Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” have sunk their teeth so deep into the popular imagination. Craftsmanship may have a lot to do with its immediate success: the noted amalgamation of Wilder, Stoker and MacDonald; the accurate rendering of small-town Maine in the mid-70s; the deft handling of a massive cast; the strong bones of plot (although I hate to use that word — my dad often says he doesn’t trust plot, only story, and no, I don’t think they’re the same). And yet all that — all for which we have already accounted — doesn’t quite explain why “’Salem’s Lot” stuck around, doesn’t tell us why people are still reading it.
I have my own view. Take it for what it’s worth — one guy’s idea, no more authoritative than anyone else’s. I think stories of horror with true staying power last for exactly the same reasons certain stories of childhood wonder retain their perpetual popularity. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” has found fresh readers in each generation for exactly the same reason “’Salem’s Lot” keeps making new readers. The Overlook Hotel and the Land of Oz may have more in common, beneath the surface, than you might suspect.
People believe — want to believe — in a moral universe, a universe that confirms the existence of the human soul, a thing of incalculable worth that can be won or lost. If that heightened moral universe doesn’t exist in reality (I think it does, Richard Dawkins thinks it doesn’t, and you can form your own conclusions) then we will search for it in fiction. We don’t want to flee “’Salem’s Lot.” We want to live there. Evil is inflicted upon every life; what a relief it would be if it took an (in)human form and could be dragged out of its coffin and into the sunlight, to die screaming and in flames. AIDS, SIDS, pollution, global warming, drug addiction: To be human is to find oneself confronted with vast, terrible forces that lack form, that can’t be fought in any literal sense, hand-to-hand, stake to heart. That doesn’t satisfy us. It’s fine if there’s evil, wickedness, cruelty. We just want it to have a point. If we’re in this fight, we want to know there’s an enemy out there — not just bad luck and grinding, impersonal historical forces. More than that, though: Once you give evil a face and fangs, once you give it agency, it becomes possible to imagine a force opposed against it, a light that can drive out shadow.
In the novel’s most important passage, Father Donald Callahan finds himself face to face with the fanged fiend and raises a cross to hold him at bay: “The cross seemed to thrum with chained fire, and its power coursed up his forearm until the muscles bunched and trembled.” The totem of Callahan’s faith plugs itself into some rough, immense force, older than the earliest writings of Judeo-Christian belief: an overpowering, elemental rightness far greater than Barlow’s hungering, elemental wrongs. Callahan might’ve beaten the vampire right there and then, if he’d had more faith in his own faith, so to speak. But he mistakes the cross for power, which is a bit like confusing the lightning rod for the lightning bolt, and soon Barlow has him. Later in the story, Ben Mears will face a vampire alone and fend it off with a pair of wooden tongue depressors fashioned into a cross with medical tape. Placing his trust entirely in the timeless, limitless force behind the symbol, he fares a bit better.
The trappings are Christian but the energies at work here don’t fit so neatly into the shoe box of any one belief system. One autumn in Jerusalem’s Lot, two vast powers collide, like an icy cold front driving straight into a high-pressure warm front and producing a cataclysmic storm. Armies gather to serve one side or another (much as the legions form up to fight for Aslan or the White Witch in Narnia). The stakes are as high as they can get: a few hundred human souls, which might as well stand for the whole world in miniature. The story could not be more grown-up, but the engine under the hood is the stuff of the oldest fairy tales — the tales we learn as children and carry around in us for all the rest of our days, the narratives that shape our belief in a world beneath the world, the moral chessboard on which we all are called to battle (there are no conscientious objectors).
I occasionally ruminate on that hideous cliché so beloved by softheaded aunties: “Everything happens for a reason.” Sure, try that line out on someone who has lost an 18-month-old to a brain tumor, see how it lands. And yet this nasty old truism, which isn’t true at all, is only half a step away from something we suspect could be true: Everything might not happen for a reason, but maybe everything has meaning. The cosmos is imbued with meaning. So, too, a life, no matter how brief.
Your blood sings with purpose. Why do you think the vampire finds it so sweet?
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