Salem's Lot

 

 

Contents

 

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Author’s Note

 

’SALEM’S LOT

 

 

Prologue

 

Part One

The Marsten House

 

Chapter One Ben (I)

 

Chapter Two Susan (I)

 

Chapter Three The Lot (I)

 

Chapter Four Da

 

Chapter Five Ben (II)

 

Chapter Six The Lot (II)

 

Chapter Seven Matt

 

Part Two

The Emperor of Ice Cream

 

Chapter Eight Ben (III)

 

Chapter Nine Susan (II)

 

Chapter Ten The Lot (III)

 

Chapter Eleven Ben (IV)

 

Chapter Twelve Mark

 

Chapter Thirteen Father Callahan

 

Part Three

The Deserted Village

 

Chapter Fourteen The Lot (IV)

 

Chapter Fifteen Ben and Mark

 

Epilogue

 

One for the Road

Jerusalem’s Lot

Deleted Scenes

 

Afterword

Copyright

 

 

For Naomi Rachel King

“…promises to keep.”

 

 

Introduction to ’Salem’s Lot

By Stephen King

 

My father-in-law is now retired, but when he was working for Maine’s Department of Human Services, he had a very cool sign in his office. It said ONCE I HAD NO CHILDREN AND EIGHT IDEAS. NOW I HAVE EIGHT CHILDREN AND NO IDEAS. I like that because once I had no published novels and roughly two hundred ideas about the art and craft of writing fiction (two hundred and fifty on a good day). Now I have just about fifty published novels to my credit and only one surviving idea about fiction; a writing seminar as taught by yours truly would probably last about fifteen minutes.

One of the ideas I had in those good old days was that it would be perfectly possible to combine the overlord-vampire myth from Bram Stoker’s Draculawith the naturalistic fiction of Frank Norris and the EC horror comics I’d loved as a child…and come out with a great American novel. I was twenty-three, remember, so cut me a break. I had a teaching certificate upon which the ink had hardly dried, I had published eight short stories and I had a perfectly insane amount of confidence in my own ability, not to mention a totally ridiculous sense of my own importance. I also had a wife with a typewriter who liked my stories—and those last two things, which I took for granted then, turned out to be the most important things of all.

Did I really think I could combine Draculaand Tales from the Cryptand come out with Moby-Dick? I did. I really did. I even pla

In any case, I liked the idea of my vampire novel serving as a balance for Stoker’s, which has to go down in history as the most optimisticscary novel of all time. Count Dracula, simultaneously feared and worshipped in his dark little European fiefdom of Transylvania, makes the fatal mistake of taking his act and putting it on the road. In London he meets men and women of scienceand reason,by God—Abraham Van Helsing, who knows about blood transfusions; John Seward, who keeps his diary on wax phonograph cylinders; Mina Harker, who keeps hers in shorthand and later serves as secretary to the Fearless Vampire Hunters.

Stoker was clearly fascinated by modern inventions and i

When I sat down to write my version of the story in 1972—a version whose life-force was drawn more from the nervously jokey Jewish-American mythos of William Gaines and Al Feldstein than from Romanian folk-tales—I saw a different world, one where all of the gadgets Stoker must have regarded with such hopeful wonder had begun to seem sinister and downright dangerous. Mine was the world that had begun to choke on its own effluent, that had hooked itself through the bag on diminishing energy resources, and had to deal not only with nuclear weapons but nuclear proliferation (big-time terrorism was, thankfully, at that time still over the horizon). I saw myself and my society at the other end of the technological rainbow, and set out to write a book that would reflect that glum idea. One where, in short, the vampire would end up eating the fearless vampire-hunters for lunch. (Which he, as a vampire, would eat at midnight, of course.)