'Salem's Lot is about monsters eating you.

That may sound familiar. But this isn't just any book about monsters eating you: it's a book by Stephen King about monsters eating you. And the great state of Maine's very own Stephen King is the most popular creator of stories about monsters eating you in all of explored space. When a Stephen King monster eats you, you stay eaten.

Okay, when King published 'Salem's Lot back in 1975, he wasn't quite as well known for monsters eating you as he was to become. This was only his second novel. His first, Carrie (1974), did well, but still, it was early days. King was popular and going places, but you couldn't yet bury a fleet of overweight whales under copies of the novels he'd sold.

'Salem's Lot is a landmark on King's path to take up his crown as the king of the monstrous, and he does it in high style. His monsters don't just eat one person, or two, or three. They eat a whole freaking town.

The monsters here are vampires, and King's vampires have all the characteristics you'd expect from vampires: they don't like garlic, they hate crosses, and they need permission to enter a house. They're from Europe, and their hair is slicked back.

That's tradition, folks.

But even though King loves the oldies and goodies, he still wants to be up to date. So he hits on the scary idea that pretty much anybody around you could be a vampire. Seriously: vampires in 'Salem's Lot are everyone, which means everyone is a vampire. The monsters eat you because you were a monster to begin with. It's almost like we're in Night of the Living Dead land here, where the monsters eat you and you eat other folks and soon everybody's a monster and you can't tell the cheerful townsfolk from the children of the night.

King has said that 'Salem's Lot is one of his favorites, and he's expanded on it several times. Other folks have liked it, as well: it was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1976 and for a Locus Award for All-Time Best Fantasy Novel in 1987. It's been adapted as a TV miniseries twice, in 1979 and in 2004, and as a BBC radio play in 1995.

Scared yet? Fear not: Shmoop is here to give you some Vampire 101.

Vampires are one of the all-time great creepy horror villains. They're all sex and death and sexy death, turning everything innocent and good to eternal evil with fangs and buckets of blood.

But vampires in recent years have gotten sadly defanged. On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the vampires are little more than super-villains, strong and fast with wicked martial arts skills, but not that scary otherwise. Buffy stakes five or ten an episode and barely works up a sweat. In Twilight, the other massive vampire phenom, the vampires aren't even evil. They're sparkly romantic elves who fight for right, superheroes rather than supervillains.

And then there's 'Salem's Lot. Yeah, Stephen King's vampires aren't supervillains you can take out by casually tossing a stake through them. They're not superheroes you can rely on to sparkle and save you. They're virtually unkillable—as Reggie Sawyer discovers when he shoots a vampire with a shotgun and doesn't even slow it down. They're seductive—as Jimmy Cody discovers when one bites him and he disgustedly reports, "I liked it." (11.354) They are evil, and they are everywhere, and they will take you.

Don't get us wrong: we love us some Buffy and Twilight. But still, we can't help feeling that you lose something when your vampires stop being creepy, when all the dark, ugly things are pulled into the light and given a new coat of paint and a Dr. Who T-shirt so you can show them off at the latest sci-fi convention. A world in which even nightmares are cheerful starts to look a little drab, a little washed-out, a little one-dimensional. If life is going to feel like life, you need some undead without any shilly-shallying.