I don't want to say that this is derivative, entirely, although - as King's afterword states - the influence of Dracula is both immense and immediately apparent. Granted, I struggle to think of a vampire novel in which this is not the case, but I still really enjoyed it. King is always compulsively readable, and the book is extremely creepy. The vampires scratching at second floor windows will never fail to make me shudder, and I freely admit that this was the point, in the middle of the night, when I stopped reading and decided to wait for daylight before I picked the book back up again.

Where King succeeds particularly well here, I think, is in his depiction of a small town that becomes ever more isolated, and in showing just how easy it is for that isolation to go unremarked. Monster stories in general are so dependent on geography, on hunting grounds and places of easy camouflage, and I liked how both the physical and moral settings of the book underpinned this. 'Salem's Lot may be a small and isolated community, but it's also one where everyday human evil is ever-present - domestic violence, child abuse, gossip and ignorance. It's so easy for true corruption to sneak in because corruption is already embedded there, albeit in miniature.

I do find it slightly unfortunate that the main character, Ben Mears, is so overshadowed by the supporting cast. Both Mark and Father Callahan seem much stronger characters to me. Mark, in particular, seems an early rendition of Bill Denbrough, and I'm far more interested in seeing what happened offscreen to Callahan than I am in anything that actually happened to Ben throughout the book.

In an edition-specific note: apparently Goodreads lists illustrated editions separately to non-illustrated, which is slightly irritating, so I'll be cutting and pasting most of this to a non-illustrated edition directly. I read the illustrated (which wasn't really - three or four photographs in 600 pages does not count as illustrated, if you ask me) version, but a reading list I'm working my way through only lists the non-illustrated, so... Anyway, the illustrated edition includes two related-but-average-short stories, and a series of deleted scenes which reminds me of sausage-making and law more than anything else. Stick with the normal version, I'd say, where the solidity of the end isn't lessened by all that extra material.