8 Fascinating Facts About Stephen King’s ‘ ’Salem’s Lot’ for Its 50th Anniversary

After stunning the publishing world—and terrifying readers—with his 1974 debut novel Carrie, author Stephen King had a lot to live up to. His sophomore effort would help determine if King was a one-book wonder and whether the horror genre in general could continue to have mass-market appeal.

King’s answer arrived in the form of ‘Salem’s Lot, his 1975 novel about a man who returns to the quaint New England hometown of the title and finds it lousy with vampires. Though it sold a staggering 3 million copies in paperback, it’s sometimes overlooked in King’s bibliography. (The New York Times didn’t even bother to review it.) In honor of the 50th anniversary of the publication of ’Salem’s Lot, here’s more on King’s writing process, an unfortunate printing error, and a scene editors deemed too disturbing to publish.

1. ’Salem’s Lot was inspired by Dracula.
2. It was written in a trailer.
3. ‘Salem’s Lot originally contained a sequence too horrible to publish.
4. There’s a printing error in the original version of ‘Salem’s Lot.
5. ’Salem’s Lot introduced a pivotal Dark Tower character.
6. ’Salem’s Lot didn’t sell well at first.
7. ’Salem’s Lot led to Creepshow.
8. King didn’t love the first adaptation of the novel.

’Salem’s Lot was inspired by Dracula.

Prior to his publishing success, King was a high school English teacher—a job he kept even after the hardcover release of Carrie, since the book had only sold a somewhat tepid 13,000 copies. (It became a sensation when it was later issued in paperback.) As a teacher, King used Bram Stoker’s 1897 thriller Dracula in his fantasy and science fiction curriculum, which kept the book at the front of his mind and later led to a question: What if Dracula surfaced in contemporary America?

“One night over supper I wondered aloud what would happen if Dracula came back in the twentieth century, to America,” King once recalled of the book’s origins. “ ‘He’d probably be run over by a Yellow Cab on Park Avenue and killed,’ my wife said. That closed the discussion, but in the following days, my mind kept returning to the idea. It occurred to me that my wife was probably right—if the legendary Count came to New York, that was. But if he were to show up in a sleepy little country town, what then? I decided I wanted to find out, so I wrote ’Salem's Lot, which was originally titled Second Coming.”

‘Salem’s Lot follows Ben Mears, a writer who returns to ‘’salem’s lot (short for Jerusalem’s Lot, which technically makes the s lowercase when referring to the town in the book itself) and finds that disappearances may be linked to the mysterious Kurt Barlow and Richard Straker, recent transplants who may be using the townsfolk as sustenance for Barlow’s bloodlust.

It was written in a trailer.

While ‘Salem’s Lot followed Carrie’s publication, it was actually written prior to Carrie being picked up by Doubleday as a paperback—meaning King had yet to see the $200,000 paycheck that would change his fortunes. While writing ‘Salem’s Lot, he and wife Tabitha lived in a trailer in Hermon, Maine, which King dubbed “the a**hole of the universe, [or] at least within farting distance of it.” King said he wrote the book after teaching for the day and while sitting in a “cramped furnace room.”

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‘Salem’s Lot originally contained a sequence too horrible to publish.

In a 1983 interview with Playboy, King was asked if anything was off-limits in his pursuit of frightening readers. He recalled a passage in ’Salem’s Lot that proved too repulsive—not for him, but for publisher Doubleday.

“I had a scene in which Jimmy Cody, the local doctor, is devoured in a boardinghouse basement by a horde of rats summoned from the town dump by the leader of the vampires,” King said. “They swarm all over him like a writhing, furry carpet, biting and clawing, and when he tries to scream a warning to his companion upstairs, one of them scurries into his open mouth and squirms there as it gnaws out his tongue.”

Doubleday refused to accept the manuscript with the scene, prompting King to kill Jimmy with knives instead. “But, s***, it just wasn’t the same,” he said.

There’s a printing error in the original version of ‘Salem’s Lot.

Doubleday published ’Salem’s Lot in 1975, but it’s possible their editorial process was a bit too rushed. The book’s cover jacket refers to a “Father Cody” character, but no such person is in the book. The summary conflated two characters: Father Callahan, a priest who runs afoul of the vampires, and Jimmy Cody, the local doctor in town.

’Salem’s Lot introduced a pivotal Dark Tower character.

While shared universes are common in pop culture today, they were less prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s. Much of King’s work, however, is tethered to itself, with characters and references weaving their way in and out of his various novels. One of the earliest examples of the King-verse is Father Callahan, a priest in ’Salem’s Lot who later turns up in King’s Dark Tower series.

In the vampire novel, Callahan faces the vampire brood but winds up being forced to drink blood, an offense that places him into a self-imposed exile. His story is picked up in the 2003 Dark Tower sequel Wolves of the Calla, which sees Callahan having the ability to detect vampires. He joins protagonist Roland Deschain through the remainder of the book series.

’Salem’s Lot didn’t sell well at first.

As with Carrie, hardcover sales for ’Salem’s Lot weren’t spectacular. The 400-plus page novel, which retailed for $7.95 in hardcover, sold only modestly well. It wasn’t until it hit paperback ($1.75) that genre fans began to pick it up, thanks in part to paperback publisher New American Library’s promotional efforts, including a store standee and a minimalist new all-black cover with a spot of blood.

By the time The Shining was released in 1977, however, King’s books began moving briskly in both formats. The change, he reasoned, was due to disposable income. “I think my audience shifts up,” he said in 1981. “A lot of people started reading my books when they were 15 and now they’re older and can afford to buy a hardcover.”

’Salem’s Lot led to Creepshow.

Like virtually all of King’s works, Hollywood was intent on adapting ‘Salem’s Lot into a feature film. The rights were purchased by Warner Bros., who then approached Night of the Living Dead director George A. Romero. Romero was interested, but the studio pivoted, opting instead to turn the book into a made-for-television miniseries.

That put Romero off the project, but he and King had another conversation about collaborating on an anthology horror movie. The result was 1982’s Creepshow, a film written by King and directed by Romero that was heavily influenced by the E.C. Comics horror titles both men had read as kids. (King also appeared in a segment; his son Joe plays a kid in the wraparound sequences.)

King didn’t love the first adaptation of the novel.

When ’Salem’s Lot eventually aired as an ABC miniseries in 1979, King wasn’t actually able to view it: television reception at his residence in Maine was poor. Instead, he had a watch party at a local pub using videotapes provided by the network. He didn’t think the vampire make-up was good—King disliked how much the main vampire, Barlow, resembled Nosferatu’s creature—but thought it was decent overall.

“Considering the limitations of TV, ’Salem’s Lot could have turned out a lot worse than it did,” he told Playboy in 1983.

At the time, there was some discussion of turning the book into a recurring television series, which King thought was a bad idea given television being “too institutionally fainthearted” for serious horror. The novel got two more adaptations in 2004 and 2024, respectively. King called the latter “quite good.” (You can watch the trailer above.)