Even Stephen King’s afterword to Salem’s Lot is better than the new movie

Some of my favorite Stephen King writing isn’t even in the text of his stories. Rather, it’s in the little messages he writes to his Constant Readers, included in his forewords, afterwords, and author’s notes. The writing around the stories reinforces the down-to-earth voice that keeps his supernatural tales grounded. Despite vampires, werewolves, and transdimensional monsters that take the playful form of a killer clown, King’s characters still listen to the Stones and talk about current politics. His direct addresses keep these moments from feeling like bullshit, and are often elegant encapsulations of his own storytelling abilities. The new adaptation of Salem’s Lot is a reminder of how much is lost when King’s voice vanishes from his work—and how great King’s 1999 afterword to Salem’s Lot is.

As I noted in my review of Gary Dauberman’s barebones adaptation, the version of Salem’s Lot that went straight to Max after sitting dormant in a coffin for years is broadly identifiable as King’s work, but only just. Montages of small-town signifiers compensate for actually building out the interpersonal mechanisms of the town, a single gossip standing in for a community always up in each others’ business. Boxes are quickly checked for the first few minutes before Dauberman’s script scrambles to assemble his vampire-slayers and pit them against monsters whose ranks have grown with an immediacy antithetical to dread.

None of this is wrong, per se. King, looking back at Salem’s Lot nearly 25 years after Doubleday published it in 1975, recalled that this “putting a team together” element of Dracula was his favorite part of Bram Stoker’s book. He compared the heroes’ globetrotting pursuit of the vampire to The Lord Of The Rings—it’s unsurprising that a recurring element in King’s fiction is a stubborn group of adventurers getting in way over their heads.

But that’s pretty much all 2024’s edition of Salem’s Lot takes away from its source material. It arbitrarily gathers its unbalanced D&D party of an author, his lover, a doctor, a priest, and a kid, then rolls for initiative. Everything Dauberman cuts for time, condensing the 439-page book into less than two hours, exsanguinates the story. Characters like Mike Ryerson, Larry Crockett, and Father Callahan become jumpscares, punchlines, and numbers to up the kill count. Those in the town all too happy to cover for a vampire (or too caught up in their own problems to care) simply disappear, or turn on a dime. Ben Mears is reduced to a barely-warm body, the main character by default. We could go over just how deeply the film deviates from the book, but an even more telling comparison is how the lifeless movie holds up to just a few pages of King’s postscript.

King’s afterword digs deeper into his Salem’s influences—spanning from Al Feldstein and Ghastly Graham Ingels’ bloodthirsty EC Comics to George Romero’s groundbreaking Night Of The Living Dead—but does so while backdooring in endearing insight about the author himself. Just like his novel, it’s a well-balanced blend of pathos and plot, one that takes its time for asides and color because it knows that’s how you keep a reader hooked. It’s about reading, and writing, and style, and the tangible passion for the written word that wears and tears at the pages and spines of old library books. It has characters and a narrative arc, spread across decades. It’s also about King’s mother.

The latter encouraged King’s reading habits, but with the addendum of “that’s trash” whenever King picked something a little lurid. But she only ever forbade “bad trash,” which as any pop cultural omnivore knows is a different category entirely. Dracula and those EC Comics were trash, according to King’s mom. Peyton Place, another notable influence on Salem’s Lot, was bad trash. King naturally gobbled it all up, each defamation only encouraging him. As he describes the mustard-dabbed, whiskey-stained pages of Stoker’s book, borrowed from Stratford Public Library by his mother, the small Connecticut town and the life he once lived there leap from the page. Kiddie King buying nickel comics from “a local notions store called The Kennebec Fruit Company” is just as vivid as his mom’s eye-rolling tolerance of the habit—far more vivid, say, than anything the children of the Lot get up to in 2024.

As King takes us through his history with Salem’s Lot, he looks clear-eyed at his shortcomings as a writer. Noting that his work is often more of its time than he’d like it to be, King recalls everything that got wrapped up in his story: The high and low vampires of pop culture, the post-Vietnam pessimism, the brainstorming sessions with his wife, the closeness to a text one acquires when teaching it to high schoolers. As he inverted Dracula, constructing a world and community where a vampire could thrive as opposed to a modern city where ancient evil struggled to find purchase, King found his story getting away from him. He’d initially assumed that the vampires would win. But during the course of writing, he found that, though it was “easier to imagine characters who grow smaller as a result of their trials,” “Ben Mears…wanted to be big. Wanted, in fact, to be a hero.”

I’ve always found King’s descriptions of this process, where stories and characters want independently of his own intentions, evocative and charming. It’s a self-effacing way to answer that “Where do your ideas come from?” question, a way to reference the magic of imagination without sounding highfalutin’ or overly cheesy. And, especially when the character in question is an obvious stand-in for King (just another imperfect author, trying his damnedest), this hopeful heroism in the face of overwhelming evil is endearing. It wouldn’t work if his characters didn’t grow so naturally over the course of our brief time with them. But it does, because they do. On the other side of this, it’s impossible to imagine Dauberman’s versions of these characters wanting anything (except maybe for their movie to end). They have a one-track mind for the plot, their humanity as tenuous as the monsters they stake.

After King leads us through his childhood, his love affair with vampires, and his stint teaching English, he closes with a personal passage:

The woman who brought me Dracula from the Stratford Public Library never saw ’Salem’s Lot. By the time the first draft was completed, she was too ill to read much—she who read with such enjoyment over the course of her life—and by the time it was published, she was dead. If she had read it, I like to think she would have finished the last hundred pages in one of her marathon chain-smoking readathons, then laughed, put it aside (not without some affection), and pronounced it trash.

But maybe not bad trash.

At the end of the day, after all the questions about the origin story of and inspirations for Salem’s Lot that he must have fielded for decades at Q&As, the thing King associates mostly closely with the book is his mother’s death. Couching this sentiment in aw-shucks self-awareness around peddling trash (but not bad trash), King speaks to us on our level. Not as a bestselling author or a vampire expert or a horror legend, but as a son who misses his mom.

King’s non-fiction bookends aren’t always so intimate. Sometimes, like in The Green Mile, they meander off to discuss, I shit you not, a Popeye porn comic someone once sent him. (“Gosh, there’s nothing like the human imagination, is there?” King remarks.) But they’re always vital, immediate, and representative of what his writing values. They’re filled with the kind of folksy conversationalism that pumps blood through the hearts of his stories. Without that voice, without that human spirit, a King adaptation finds itself in an even worse category than bad trash: just plain bad.