'Salem's Lot is the story of writer Ben Mears and his return to the title location, his childhood home. Ben befriends local child Mark Petrie in the midst of an outbreak of vampirism begun by the arrival of the mysterious Austrian Kurt Barlow. Barlow is a master vampire who moves into the Marsden House, a haunted dwelling about which Ben hoped to write a novel. The town succumbs to the plague until Ben and Mark set fire to it and flee cross-country.
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