Salem's Lot

I thought, 'Oh my God, this guy is working with a very tired, almost exhausted, trope and he's making something really vibrant out of it.' So I became a huge Stephen King fan on the spot." Neil Gaiman recalls that "My first encounter with Stephen King, long before I met him in the flesh, was on East Croydon station in about 1975.

While teaching a course on fantasy and science fiction for students at Hampden Academy, King was inspired by Dracula, one of the books covered in the class.

'He'd probably be run over by a yellow cab on Park Avenue and killed,' my wife said. (In the introduction to the 2004 audiobook recording that Stephen King read himself, he says it was he who said, "Probably he'd land in New York and be killed by a taxi cab, like Margaret Mitchell in Atlanta" and that it was his wife who suggested a rural setting for the book.) That closed the discussion, but in the following days, my mind kept returning to the idea.

I decided I wanted to find out, so I wrote Salem's Lot, which was originally titled Second Coming." Though King initially planned to title the novel Second Coming, he changed it to Jerusalem's Lot on the advice of his wife, novelist Tabitha King, who thought the original title sounded too much like a "bad sex story".

King's paperback publisher bought the book for $550,000.

King expands on this thought of the 20th-century vampire in his essay for Adeline Magazine, "On Becoming a Brand Name" (February 1980): "I began to turn the idea over in my mind, and it began to coalesce into a possible novel.