Salem's Lot

I was about three hundred pages into this book—then titled Second Coming—when Carriewas published, and my first idea about novel-writing went west. It would be years before I would hear Alfred Bester’s axiom “The book is the boss,” but I didn’t need to; I learned it for myself writing the novel that eventually became ’Salem’s Lot.Of course, the writer canimpose control; it’s just a really shitty idea. Writing controlled fiction is called “plotting.” Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however…that is called “storytelling.” Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.

Given my dim view of small New England towns (I had grown up in one and knew what they were like), I had no doubt my version of Count Dracula would emerge completely triumphant over the puny representatives of the rational world arrayed against him. What I didn’t count on was that my characters weren’t content to remainpuny representatives. Instead they came alive and began to do things—sometimes smart things, sometimes foolishly brave things—on their own. More of Stoker’s characters are around at the finish of Draculathan at the end of ’Salem’s Lot,and yet this is—against its young author’s will—a surprisingly optimistic book. I’m glad. I still see all the nicks and dings on its fenders, all the scars on its hide that were inflicted by the inexperience of a craftsman new at his trade, but I still find many passages of power here. And a few of grace.

Doubleday had published my first novel, and had an option on my second. I had completed this one and another, what I thought of as a “serious” novel, called Roadwork.I showed them both to my then-editor, Bill Thompson. He liked them both. We had a lunch at which nothing was decided, then started to walk back to Doubleday. At the corner of Park Avenue and 54th Street—something like that—we were stopped by a DON’T WALK light. I finally pulled the pin and asked Bill which one he thought we should publish.

He said, “ Roadworkwould probably get more serious attention, but Second Comingis Peyton Placewith vampires. It’s a great read and it could be a bestseller. There’s only one problem.”

“What’s that?” I asked, as DON’T WALK changed to WALK and people started to move around us.

Bill stepped off the curb. In New York you don’t waste the WALK, even when decisions of moment are being made, and this—I might have sensed it even then—was one that would affect the rest of my life. “You’ll be typed as a horror writer,” he said.

I was so relieved I laughed. “I don’t care what they call me as long as the checks don’t bounce,” I said. “Let’s publish Second Coming.” And that was what we did, although the name was first changed to Jerusalem’s Lot(because my wife, Tabby, said that Second Comingsounded like a sex manual) and then to ’Salem’s Lot(because the Doubleday brass said Jerusalem’s Lotsounded like a religious book). I was indeed typed as a horror writer, a tag I have never confirmed or denied, simply because I think it’s irrelevant to what I do. It does, however, give bookstores a handy place to shelve my books.

Since then I have let go of all but one of my ideas about fiction-writing. It’s the one I came to first (around age seven, as I recall), and the one I’ll probably hold onto until the end: it’s good to tell a story, and even better when people actually want to listen. I think ’Salem’s Lot,for all its flaws, is one of the good ones. One of the scary ones. If you’ve never heard it before, let me tell it to you now. And if you have, let me tell it to you again. So turn off the television—in fact, why don’t you turn off all the lights except for the one over your favorite chair?—and we’ll talk about vampires here in the dim. I think I can make you believe in them, because while I was working on this book, I believed in them myself.

Center Lovell, Maine

June 15, 2005

Author’s Note

No one writes a long novel alone, and I would like to take a moment of your time to thank some of the people who helped with this one: G. Everett McCutcheon, of Hampden Academy, for his practical suggestions and encouragement; Dr John Pearson, of Old Town, Maine, medical examiner of Penobscot County and member in good standing of that most excellent medical specialty, general practice; Father Renald Hallee, of St John’s Catholic Church in Bangor, Maine. And of course my wife, whose criticism is as tough and unflinching as ever.

Although the towns surrounding ’salem’s Lot are very real, ’salem’s Lot itself exists wholly in the author’s imagination, and any resemblance between the people who live there and people who live in the real world is coincidental and unintended.

S.K.

Prologue

Old friend, what are you looking for?

After those many years abroad you come

With images you tended

Under foreign skies

Far away from your own land.

G

EORGE

S

EFERIS

ONE

Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son.

They crossed the country on a rambling southwest line in an old Citroën sedan, keeping mostly to secondary roads, traveling in fits and starts. They stopped in three places along the way before reaching their final destination: first in Rhode Island, where the tall man with the black hair worked in a textile mill; then in Youngstown, Ohio, where he worked for three months on a tractor assembly line; and finally in a small California town near the Mexican border, where he pumped gas and worked at repairing small foreign cars with an amount of success that was, to him, surprising and gratifying.

Wherever they stopped, he got a Maine newspaper called the Portland Press-Heraldand watched it for items concerning a small southern Maine town named Jerusalem’s Lot and the surrounding area. There were such items from time to time.

He wrote an outline of a novel in motel rooms before they hit Central Falls, Rhode Island, and mailed it to his agent. He had been a mildly successful novelist a million years before, in a time when the darkness had not come over his life. The agent took the outline to his last publisher, who expressed polite interest but no inclination to part with any advance money. “Please” and “thank you,” he told the boy as he tore the agent’s letter up, were still free. He said it without too much bitterness and set about the book anyway.

The boy did not speak much. His face retained a perpetual pinched look, and his eyes were dark—as if they always sca

When the book was written, they were living in a beach cottage off the highway, and they both swam in the Pacific a great deal. It was warmer than the Atlantic, and friendlier. It held no memories. The boy began to get very brown.

Although they were living well enough to eat three square meals a day and keep a solid roof over their heads, the man had begun to feel depressed and doubtful about the life they were living. He was tutoring the boy, and he did not seem to be losing anything in the way of education (the boy was bright and easy about books, as the tall man had been himself), but he didn’t think that blotting ’salem’s Lot out was doing the boy any good. Sometimes at night he screamed in his sleep and thrashed the blankets onto the floor.