Contents

’SALEM’S LOT

One for the Road

Jerusalem’s Lot

Deleted Scenes

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 planned a section at the front called “Extracta,” where I would include notes, clippings, and epigrams about vampires, as Melville does about whales at the front of his book. Was I daunted by the fact that Moby-Dickonly sold about twelve copies in Melville’s lifetime? Not I; one of my ideas was that a novelist takes the long view, the loftyview, and that does not include the price of eggs. (My wife would not have agreed, and I doubt if Mrs. Melville would have, either.)

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 innovations, and the underlying thesis of his novel is clear: in a confrontation between a foreign child of the Dark Powers and a group of fine, upstanding Britishers equipped with all mod cons, the powers of darkness don’t stand a chance. Dracula is hounded from Carfax, his British estate, back to Transylvania, and finally staked at sunset. The vampire-hunters pay a price for their victory—that is Stoker’s genius—but that they will come out on top is never in much doubt.

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.)