SALEM'S LOT: Stephen King's Vampire Masterpiece

Hinzugefügt: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]The vampire [music] is one of the most famous monsters in the history of fiction. While these blood-sucking children of the night have been around in some form for centuries, they were quickly solidified and brought into the mainstream with Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897. And in the years since, essentially every vampire story has been shaped by Dracula in some way. But what happens when a classic of horror literature meets a modern horror master?

[00:00:28]The result is Salem's Lot, the 1975 novel and the second published book by Stephen King. And in here, King swaps out Victorian London for small-town Maine, transposing Dracula into modern-day America and trading in Gothic castles for creepy mansions. And the result is one of King's best novels and a thought-provoking look into small-town secrets, how communities fall apart and fail to protect themselves, and a novel that is just as influential as and maybe even better than the book that inspired it. In the half-century since it was published, there have been five different adaptations of King's story.

[00:01:08]And while they range from being fan favorites to pretty much hated, I don't think that any of them have truly captured what made King's novel so special. Somewhere between faith, doubt, love, and hate lies a novel all about how little it takes to push a community permanently over the edge. So come with me as we travel to Salem's Lot, Stephen King's small-town vampire classic.

[00:01:52]By the time he had passed Portland going north on the turnpike, Ben Mears had begun to feel a not unpleasurable tingle of excitement in his belly. It was September 5th, 1975, and summer was enjoying her final grand fling. The trees were bursting with green, the sky was a high, soft blue, and just over the Falmouth town line, he saw two boys walking a road parallel to the expressway with fishing rods settled on their shoulders like carbines. If you've been following my channel, then you might have noticed that I'm slowly covering a variety of King's works.

[00:02:25]Christine, The Running Man, The Stand, Cycle of the Werewolf. And while King has certain themes that he always comes back to and that you'll find in Salem's Lot, he rarely covers stories that I would say can be classified as classic monsters. King's only true werewolf story is Cycle. His Frankenstein story is the incredible and haunting Revival, which I'd love to make a video on someday. Zombies can be found in Pet Sematary and Cell. Honestly, King is usually trying to make something a little different than exploring the well-worn classics. And throughout his more than half-century career, King has only really explored vampires a few times. The Night Flier and its pilot bloodsucker, Doctor Sleep and the sort of vampire steam breathers of The True Knot, and here in Salem's Lot and its related stories. But what made King want to cover such a well-known monster so early in his career? Well, let's go back to the beginning. By the time Carrie was published in 1974, King had been toiling away on trying to get his works published for years. With books like The Running Man and The Long Walk sitting in his drawer after being rejected and eventually being published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym years later.

[00:03:36]But with publishers not being interested in these novels before, King needed something new to stay in demand. With the author still teaching a course on fantasy and science fiction at the time, King became fixated on Stoker's Dracula while teaching it in class. And so, a simple thought struck King. What if Dracula came back in 20th century America? His wife Tabitha's answer, he'd probably be run over by a yellow cab on Park Avenue and killed. And so, King tabled the idea, only to quickly come back around to it by avoiding the obvious equation of London and New York, and embracing a new setting that would create a far different outcome. "It occurred to me that my wife was probably right," said King. "If the legendary count came to New York, that is. But if you were to show up in a sleepy little country town, what then?" And this is the seed that quickly grew into Salem's Lot. The 439-page novel, originally published on October 17th, 1975 by Doubleday, centers on Ben Mears, a novelist who has returned to his childhood home of Jerusalem's Lot after 25 years away to write his next book, hoping to be inspired by not just the small Maine town, but the supposedly haunted old Marsten house that terrified him in his youth. But Ben's return coincides with the arrival of the mysterious Richard Straker, who is opening an antique shop with his unseen partner, Kurt Barlow. Soon, a string of mysterious disappearances and deaths begin to plague the town, only for the Lot's old secrets and isolated nature to make it vulnerable to an ancient evil looking to spread its influence. It's a vampire. Kurt Barlow is a vampire. I know that's a secret for a lot of the book, but we've already been talking about it, and it's been 51 years since Salem's Lot was published, so let's just get that out there. And right from the start, King's book is in conversation with several different novels. He quotes from Shirley Jackson's Haunting of Hill House at the start, and the haunted nature of the Marsten house is pivotal to the plot here. Ben has a core haunting memory of entering the old house and seeing a ghost of the hanging corpse of its old owner, Hubie Marsten, who killed his wife and committed suicide years earlier. Eventually, it's revealed that Hubie was a serial killer of children, but the town turned a blind eye and after his death, the lot has refused to face the truth, leaving the old home abandoned. Eventually, it's bought by Straker and Barlow. The reason being that Hubie's evil, which the town never dispelled, turned the house into unhallowed ground, a perfect place for a vampire to nest. This is the underlying core truth of Salem's plot. Vampires be damned. This is a book about a community that fails to face its past sins and cannot come together to protect each other. The end result is supernatural, but the abuse, neglect, and eventual destruction of the town are very, very real. Ben, having left town decades ago and coming back after the death of his wife in a crash, being essentially an outsider and the counter to Barlow's evil, allows him to see what's going on and wake up a few choice others. The more of an anomaly they are in the community, the easier it is for them to see what's going on. Mark Petrie, who every lifelong horror fan loves, is only 10 years old, but his obsession with monsters and magic tricks gives him the awareness he needs to not be turned and to start fighting back. Matt Burke is a wise old teacher whose knowledge from reading vampire lore is similar to Dracula's Van Helsing, only for his weak heart to be his undoing. Dr. Jimmy Cody is fully convinced by fighting a newly turned Marjorie Glick, becoming the embodiment of science and health care to fight the infectious spread. Susan Norton is Ben's love interest, who is ultimately undone by her inability to fully believe. Heading off by herself to stake Barlow, but never fully believing he's a vampire until it's too late and she's turned, forcing Ben to kill her to save her soul. And finally, there is Father Callahan, the town's priest who is secretly an alcoholic and struggling with his faith. He is finally forced to act on his beliefs by the other vampire hunters, but his confrontation with Barlow is disastrous. King has also cited Thornton Wilder's play Our Town, which tracks a single small town across several individual days scattered across the years. And you can really see this influence in the chapters titled The Lot, which puts a focus on 'Salem's Lot as a whole. Structurally, 'Salem's Lot is broken into chapters named after the character they follow. Ben, Susan, Mark, Father Callahan, and a few others. But most of the chapters titled The Lot focus on the town as a whole, with the first tracking the community across a single full day that culminates in Straker sacrificing Ralphie Glick to allow Barlow to enter the town and begin his transformation of it. And each really showcases King's strength at creating complex social dynamics and giving even the smallest of characters captivating micro stories. Despite tracking an entire town, King paints very intimate pictures. He pauses to give insights into the minds of characters. He takes us sides into the ends of childhood, and he draws us deeper and deeper into the dark. They really add up to a dynamic little world that we see grow darker and more doomed each time we return to a lot chapter.

[00:08:58]And for the most part, Barlow, our head vampire, and Straker, his human thrall that prepares the way for him, operate outside of the book's focus, a lot like Dracula. We see their impact, catch glimpses of them as they strike, and follow our heroes as they follow their trail. But King's horror here is much less gruesome than you might expect.

[00:09:19]Instead, he uses the horror of implication rather than graphic detail, and I think it works incredibly well at unsettling and disturbing the reader. He reveals these horrors to us like we've snuck a peek when we shouldn't, only to regret it. These are the town's secrets, and some will later be known and some will never be known. The town keeps them all with the ultimate poker face. The town cares for Devil's work no more than it cares for gods or man's. It knew darkness, and darkness was enough.

[00:09:50]Here's what I think is so unsettling about Straker and Barlow's methods. It's not just that they slowly take over the town, but that they systematically target the community's most vulnerable townsfolk. If there was one big flaw in Dracula's plan, it's that of all the people he could have targeted, the guy went after a beautiful woman loved by at least four different powerful, rich, intelligent men. So, when things started to go bad, Mina wasn't alone and left to be preyed on. Everyone else, including the one true goat Quincy Morris, did everything in their power to stake this blood sucker and save the girl.

[00:10:25]Regarding Dracula, King said, "This book, written at the end of the 19th century, is about the triumph of science and technology over superstition. Once Count Dracula comes to London, he's screwed because they all use this Sherlock Holmes stuff to track him down.

[00:10:40]And I thought, well, that's great. The technology is great, and Bram Stoker was obviously totally fascinated by all these technical developments. But, when I sat down to write Salem's Lot, we were at the other end of the rainbow with a lot of pollution and resource depletion and nuclear waste. It seems to me that technology has outrun our morality.

[00:10:59]We've learned how to build a lot of things, but we've still got these bad [ __ ] tempers. So, I'm going to write this book and bounce it off of Dracula the whole time. But, at the end, the vampires are going to win. In Salem's Lot, Barlow first targets the people on the fringes of the town, the people who are seen as the dregs of society and unworthy of the community's care. The abduction and sacrifice of young Ralphie Glick is, of course, disturbing, even as King chooses the horrors of implication.

[00:11:28]But, Ralphie's abduction and then his older brother Danny's death from being bitten, really illustrates just how powerless Salem's Lot is in protecting their most vulnerable members. From there, it's people like town dump manager Dud Rogers, gravedigger Mike Ryerson, and the McDougalls, who both abuse and are abused, who are the next victims of the vampire. In each of these instances, King depicts how these individuals are made defenseless and vulnerable because the community does not include them and doesn't protect them in the ways that they should. And so, they're vulnerable to not just abuse from the people in their family and to addiction and alcoholism and any other failings in this small town, but a vampire in particular. If this society didn't shrink away from the darkness, then this wouldn't happen. But, as we can see with the Marsten House, Salem's Lot has failed to uncover its secrets and it's not going to start doing that now. Child victims, child heroes, small town secrets, writers haunted by their past, ancient evil. These are all recurring elements of King's stories, but they feel so fresh here. And King's most effective moments of terror are when he makes both the character and reader realize how, despite being in a town they know so well, they realize that at the moment supernatural evil has arrived, they are truly alone. In Harmony Hill Cemetery, a dark figure stood meditatively inside the gate, waiting for the turn of time. When he spoke, the voice was soft and cultured.

[00:13:05]"Oh, my father, favor me now. Lord of flies, favor me now. Now I bring you spoiled meat and reeking flesh. I have made sacrifice for your favor. With my left hand, I bring it. Make a sign for me on this ground, consecrated in your name. I wait for a sign to begin your work." The voice died away. A wind had sprung up, gentle, bringing with it the sigh and whisper of leafy branches and grasses, and a whiff of carrion from the dump up the road. There was no sound but that brought on the breeze. The figure stood silent and thoughtful for a time.

[00:13:42]Then it stooped and stood with the figure of a child in his arms. I bring you this. It became unspeakable. The other part of King's novel is something that you'll see pop up in his more mythical books. This battle between good and evil and a faith in a higher power that's tested when put in the conflict with a true monster from hell. When it comes to vampires, the material is all there from the start. Whatever might be said for their origins, the vampire's classic vulnerability to the cross and anything holy places them as the embodiment of evil. Toward the second half of the novel, Barlow comes to the forefront. A posh gentleman who grows younger as he consumes more victims.

[00:14:26]Eventually killing Straker when Mark wounds the familiar in his escape, his blood driving Barlow into a feeding frenzy. And what we see in Barlow and his vampires is an ancient, unstoppable evil. These bloodsuckers don't turn into bats or slowly charm. They dissipate in the mist and hypnotize their victims just by making eye contact. They're so incredibly powerful at night that it doesn't take much to understand just how screwed our heroes are in very little time. Even being pulled out into the sun during the day isn't enough, as their writhing unconscious bodies squirm their way back into the dark. One aspect I take issue with in the adaptations of the book is that crosses and holy objects work like super weapons against vampires regardless of faith. Whereas King's book really makes it clear that a level of faith and giving yourself over to a higher power, higher than the church and really any of man's understanding, is what's needed to fight Barlow, who asserts that he's older than the church and more powerful. The two sides of faith are demonstrated in opposite ways than you'd expect. On one hand is Father Callahan, the public servant of God who ends up facing Barlow when the vampire grabs young Mark and kills his parents. With his cross, Callahan can hold the master back, but can't stop him. So, Barlow challenges him to a battle of faiths, free from the symbol. Only Callahan is nowhere near the devout leader he needs to be to save the day, leading to Barlow not killing or turning him, but forcing him to drink his blood. Come, false priest, learn of a true religion. Take my communion.

[00:16:03]Understanding washed over Callahan in a ghastly flood. No, don't. Don't.

[00:16:09]>> But, the hands were implacable. His head was drawn forward, forward, forward.

[00:16:15]Now, priest, Barlow whispered. And Callahan's mouth was pressed against the reeking flesh of the vampire's cold throat, where an open vein pulsed. He held his breath for what seemed like eons, twisting his head wildly and to no avail, smearing the blood across his cheeks and forehead and chin like war paint. Yet, at last, he drank. This fate worse than death makes Callahan unclean to the point that the church building itself will not let him in. On the other side is Ben and Mark, the last two heroes standing, who coat themselves in holy water and eventually turn into golden, flaming visions of holy power, giving them just enough time to pull Barlow out of his hidden coffin and stake him. He brought the hammer down on the stake once more, and the blood that pulsed from Barlow's chest turned black.

[00:17:05]Then, dissolution. It came in the space of 2 seconds, too fast to ever be believed in the daylight of later years, yet slow enough to recur again and again in nightmares with awful stop-motion slowness. But even then, the lot is too far gone for even an empowered Ben and Mark to destroy, forcing them to flee for their lives and bring us back to where the book started. He got behind the wheel and started the engine. And as he pulled out onto Railroad Street, delayed reaction struck him like a physical blow, and he had to stifle a scream. They were in the streets, the walking dead. Cold and hot, his head full of a wild roaring sound. He turned left on Joiner Avenue and drove out of Salem's Lot. It's a dark but inevitable ending. So many of the pages leading up to the final confrontation with Barlow detailed just how impossible it actually is to destroy what's probably hundreds of vampires hidden everywhere across the town. But more on Salem's Lot's epilogue in a few minutes. Salem's Lot was an immediate hit, but before we get to the adaptations, let's spend a couple more minutes in the world of the novel because there are two short stories that expand Salem's Lot and which you can both find here in Night Shift. And I think that these add a lot of interesting context to this world that would otherwise be pretty small and self-contained. The first is One for the Road, originally published in a 1977 issue of Maine magazine. The story takes place several years after the end of the novel and is being told by an old man named Booth, who lives in the town of Falmouth, just a few miles away from Salem's Lot. We come to learn that everyone in town knows that vampires dwell in the lot despite it all having burned down. But one night, deep into a winter blizzard, Booth and bar owner Tookey help a man whose car became snowed in while driving through the lot, leaving his wife and daughter behind to seek help. Of course, this New Jersey vacationer knows nothing of the lot, but when the trio goes to find his family, they've been turned into vampires, taking the man, with Booth and Tookey barely escaping. It's an absolutely fantastic piece of short horror, and King makes the blizzard just as scary and as dangerous as the vampires. And I really don't see snow and cold weather and vampires brought together in such a meaningful way in any major stories outside of this. And especially in a way that makes this blizzard just as dangerous or even more dangerous vampires. "One for the road" also confirms that Ben did succeed in burning down Salem's Lot, but it also shows that despite that, the town has continued on as this leaderless den of vampires. It's an absolute must-read for fans of the novel, and it adds a lot of darkness to the ending of Salem's Lot. The second is Jerusalem's Lot, originally published in 1978 in King's first short story collection "Night Shift", but actually written years before the novel, and it's completely different from the other two stories. Set in 1850, we follow a series of letters and journal entries from aristocrat Charles Boone and his servant Calvin, who move into his old ancestral home, only to come upon strange happenings and mysteries that soon lead them to the abandoned town of Jerusalem's Lot, which contains a satanic church and a copy of "De Vermis Mysteriis". This leads to encounters with the undead, the resurrection of a demigod monster, and madness. It's an awesome short story, and it's very, very, very Lovecraftian, which is a tiny subset of King's works, but I think he does it so well. Technically, it's related to Salem's Lot and its evil town apparitions and hints of Nosferatu explain why Barlow was drawn to this town in particular, but it's kind of its own thing. If you haven't read it, check it out. "Night Shift" is one of the best King short story collections. It was also given an adaptation in 2021, a 10-episode TV series called Chapelwaite, but it was on Epix and nobody saw it and who gives a [ __ ] so moving on. I think a big part of King's rise to mega fame and success is that the adaptations of his novels began almost immediately with Brian De Palma's Carrie in 1976 being the first, and the adaptations, as well as King's continued writing of novels and short stories, really not slowing down at all in the decades since. So, it's no surprise that shortly after 'Salem's Lot' was published, Warner Brothers picked up the rights. However, after several failed screenplay drafts for multiple screenwriters, WB producer Richard Kobritz suggested that the story was best suited as a mini-series, leading to Paul Monash, who had also worked on the 'Carrie' adaptation, writing the two-part TV movie screenplay. Most surprising is the hiring of Tobe Hooper, coming off the 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' and 'Eaten Alive' to direct a much more mainstream and much less graphic piece of horror, but I think he does great work here.

[00:22:05]When the TV movie to King's novel, Hooper's mini-series follows the overall plot and ideas of the story, just with a lot of the narrative streamlined to becoming a more focused, clean structure. Some characters are combined or dropped, the story has to move along faster, and the climax is a lot more straightforward. In King's novel, Ben and company's final confrontation with Barlow and the town's final fall into being a giant vampire den is a lot slower, a lot more painful. It's the unbearable realization that our heroes are simply not strong enough to turn back the tide. And so, all they can really do is destroy the head vampire to weaken the group and then run, which leads to the long search that culminates in the basement of Eva Miller's boarding house. Given everything that came before, you'd swear that the final fight with Barlow would culminate in the Marsten House, but this is one final twist that makes everything go much harder for our heroes and underlines the final corruption of the lot. Of course, that works a lot better in a novel, so it's not surprising that the climax of Hooper's movie is one long siege on the Marsten house that leads to the entire town being burned down. Effective, if a little rushed. And overall, I'd say that Hooper's mini-series is a solid adaptation that can't really capture all the incredible details and deeper meaning that makes King's book into a powerful piece of horror. But, it's still pretty creepy and memorable.

[00:23:30]Hooper's atmosphere works really well, especially in moments like the Glick kids floating outside the window or the Barlow jump scares. With the head vampire turned into an animalistic echo of Nosferatu here, instead of the more classical version of the book. What I really like about Hooper's adaptation is that it creates a really stark contrast between the everyday reality of the town and the supernatural horror overtaking it. There's probably too much time allotted for the town side characters.

[00:23:58]The hour and a half-long part one is very focused on side plots that go nowhere in the second half. But, when our growing number of vampires invade with some very stylish atmosphere, their appearances become much more frightening because of how they disrupt the world.

[00:24:13]In some ways, moments in Hooper's version, like the Glick boys with extra creepiness added by filming their floating in reverse, the Barlow reveals, and the finale with a vampire Susan attacking Ben and Mark, are as famous as anything in King's novel. I can't really say the same for any other adaptation of Salem's Lot that's been made in the time since. The next is actually a sequel to Hooper's movie, 1987's A Return to Salem's Lot, which actually hit theaters. Directed and co-written by Larry Cohen, who by this point had already made cult classics like It's Alive, God Told Me To, Q, and The Stuff.

[00:24:50]With frequent lead actor Michael Moriarty here as an anthropologist who comes back to his old hometown of Salem's Lot after years away with his estranged son, only to find that it's now secretly home to vampires. The twist is that the vampires are revealed to secretly be society's most hated and persecuted people group, and want Moriarity's character to document them and make them a bible, with the town's leader being the powerful Judge Axel.

[00:25:15]There is romantic interests, the son wanting to be turned into a vampire, an old Nazi hunter that gets involved, and what I guess is supposed to be comedy sprinkled throughout. Look, I really don't like this movie in general, but as a Salem's Lot movie, it's even worse, which is a thought I'll come back to in a minute. It's very bad. After that, BBC made a radio drama adaptation in 1994, and TNT made their own two-part mini-series in 2004, with Rob Lowe as Ben Mears, Rutger Hauer as Barlow, Donald Sutherland as Straker, and James Cromwell as Father Callahan, among others. It's a fine adaptation, but it's been mostly forgotten, as it never really did enough to replace Hooper's version as the fan favorite. It does, however, move the story into the modern day, and accidentally gives me big supernatural vibes, derogatory. And finally, there's the 2024 feature film adaptation, written and directed by Gary Dauberman, which was shot in 2021 and put in the can until it was released on HBO Max, with its original runtime of around 3 hours chopped down to an hour 50. And you can probably guess that this is a really failed adaptation. It's unfortunate because all the pieces are all there. A solid cast, good cinematography, some nice atmosphere, but whether it's due to a severe misunderstanding of King's novel, or the studio-mandated editing chopping out the guts of the film, the 2024 Lot is just a collection of set pieces jammed together without any interesting characters or deeper meaning. On its own, it's not a terrible movie, but as a Lot adaptation, freaking trash. Even cool moments like Ben and Mark discovering that the entire town is sleeping in the trunks of their cars at the drive-in, which leads to a huge fight, are silly because these must be the dumbest vampires ever. Yes, Susan is given more to do here, essentially swapping her role with Matt's, but this has no deeper meaning, no resonant take on the fall of the community, and at the end, Ben and Mark kill off every vampire and leave town happy? Yeah, all our friends and family died horrible deaths, but we rock. Hit my music.

[00:27:22]Okay, cut my music. One major flaw in every adaptations of Salem's Lot that I have to call out as a major botch is the way that Father Callahan is used. In each of these, Callahan is a pretty minor sub-character, and he has a brief confrontation with Barlow, and then he is either killed or he's turned into some new servant of the vampire like in the 2004 version. It's a super disappointing approach to what I think is one of the most tragic and fascinating aspects of the novel, and I think it really underlines the limitations of these adaptations. As the Lot falls, the power of faith and this small war between ancient good and evil comes to the forefront, while the constructs of society fall away. That's really absent in any of the movies or mini-series that have been made for the material, and the lack of interest in Father Callahan's fate shows that clearly. Now, I'm sure that Father Callahan never shows up again in any sort of giant King epic, but this is really not about that. One of the most effective elements of Salem's Lot is the realization that many of its main characters have that the home they knew, the life they lived, everything they thought was guaranteed in life has ended before they even knew it. The vampire takeover of the Lot is a precipitous change. It doesn't happen all at once, and it's not slow enough to stop, but the turning point happens before our characters can really do anything about it. As for Father Callahan, his weak faith has led to him being damned for the rest of his life. And the last we see of him is him taking a bus as far away from Salem's Lot as possible, forced to wander the earth marked like Cain. But everyone in Salem's Lot is cursed to a dark fate. It's not just the people who die in battle or are turned by Barlow's forces. Ben and Mark are tormented by their inability to save the town and go on the run for months, living in Mexico. But with Ben still obsessively looking for news of the Lot, one of the only living beings who truly knows what's happening there. Finally, the two return to the Lot during the day, seeing its lifeless husk and knowing what evil is sleeping just out of sight. Knowing that it's a hopeless task to actually find and stake every vampire in town, Ben starts another wildfire, just like the one that nearly burned the town down decades earlier.

[00:29:43]But there's something about the detached, passive way in which the fire starts that robs this cleansing of its victory. It's only a dead town hopefully dying its final death. They watch the smoke transfixed, fascinated. It thickened. A tongue of flame appeared. A small popping noise issues from the pile of dead brush as twigs caught. "Tonight, they won't be running sheep or visiting farms," Ben said softly. "Tonight, they'll be on the run. And tomorrow you and me," Mark said and closed his fist.

[00:30:18]His face was no longer pale. Bright color glowed there. His eyes flashed.

[00:30:23]They went back to the road and drove away. In the small clearing overlooking the power lines, the fire in the brush began to burn more strongly, urged by the autumn wind that blew from the west.

[00:30:35]We never know exactly what happens to Ben and Mark's quest, but it's a dark, self-destructive victory at best. And whether it's the open ending of the book or the final confrontation and continued flight of Hooper's mini-series, or Ben's lonely death at the end of the 2004 version, the torment of Salem's Lot goes on forever, both for the living and the undead. Maybe on some dark and lonely night, you'll find yourself in an empty old town somewhere in the deep woods of Maine. And although the homes might seem empty, although the signs have been burned down, although there's not a soul in sight, you won't be alone for long.

[00:31:27]Thanks for watching today's video and happy Summerween. This is the first video in my now annual tradition of a Summerween series. If you've been watching since last year or have been looking back at old videos, June is the start of Summerween. And it's time when I get to talk about horror for a whole month, or maybe two. We'll see. And as I mentioned, I've been slowly going through the works of Stephen King and I wanted to do Salem's Lot next. And to really cover all of the classic monsters he's adapted in his many different novels. Like I said before, I've covered Cycle of the Werewolf, now I've done Salem's Lot, and I'd love to do Revival soon. Of course, Salem's Lot is one of his most popular and influential books, given all the different adaptations that it's had over the years. And I think it's a true classic. This is one of the all-time great vampire stories. I really, really love this book so much.

[00:32:18]And I think that the adaptations, while some of them are solid, are nowhere near as good as the book. It has so much complexity, so many rich characters, so many fascinating pieces and moments to it, so many great micro stories, so much tragedy, and so much thematic [music] resonance that it's impossible for any adaptation to get that all in there. So, hopefully by watching this video, it either got you interested in actually reading Salem's Lot or going back and rereading it because it's so awesome.

[00:32:49]I'd love to hear your thoughts on Salem's Lot, your own personal favorite vampire stories, whether they're movies or books or TV shows or video games, and maybe your favorite character from Salem's Lot, as well as other King stories you'd like for me to cover [music] in the future. Like I said, this is the start of Summerween, so there are a lot of great videos that I have been very excited to make coming up very soon. As always, a huge thank you to my patrons and members for their continued support. And if you'd like to be a patron or member, it's only $2 a month for early access to every video and exclusive reviews. So, until next time, I hope that you're taking care of yourselves and staying out of the Lot.