Mine was Salem’s Lot which was a gift from a friend for my 13th birthday. Apparently, she thought my interest in celebrity ghost stories and reincarnated ghost children extended to horror in general which is not really true. Psuedo-documentaries of real life hauntings I can handle, horror movies and books not so much.

But I did read this because hello, Stephen King and the book wasn’t as bad as I was expecting (and by bad I mean causing me nightmares, not the literary merit). It takes a typical horror plot with a standard horror lead (According to Hendrix’s awesome deep dive into horror pulp Paperbacks from Hell which I recommended last year): Ben Mears has returned to his childhood town of Jerusalem Lot, ME to write about the haunted Marsten House that traumatized him as a child. But there’s more than just the creepy Marsten House that has Mears spooked this time. Locals are disappearing and seemingly returning in the dead of the night to bring more into their nest of vampires.

Yep, it’s vampire attack season y’all, and Mears turns into the ripped spontaneous action hero he was born to be, giving up his old job to take on the more exciting, never ending battle with the undead for this tiny town.

Another thing I must confesss was that I was completely surprised by the vampires. Maybe I was in denial, maybe I just thought King didn’t do vampires, but I completely missed all the clues up to the big reveal. It’s funny now but I remember I was disappointed at the reveal because vampires had been a big trend in the early 2000s-10s so this felt like a cliche. Of course, Kinbg wrote this in the 70s so I’m sure it was more intriguing then but I guess trends are cylical like that.

So yeah, that’s the story of the first and to this date, only horror book I’ve read. Comment below about yours!