Stephen King's second-ever published novel 'Salem's Lot, originally titled Second Coming, was inspired by a brainstorm the author had wondering what would happen if Dracula came to contemporary small-town America. First published in 1975, the sprawling saga of the vampire Barlow, his familiar Straker, and an author named Ben Mears who means to destroy them became a bestseller. It was adapted into a successful by director Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) in 1979, then again for TV in 2004 by Mikael Salomon (Hard Rain).
(Confusingly, some of the filmed versions of the tale drop the apostrophe from the front of 'Salem's.) A new feature film version arrives on Max this week directed by Gary Dauberman of Annabelle Comes Home fame. Even though this is the third filmed version of 'Salem's Lot, there is a sequel story written by King himself that has surprisingly never been given an official adaptation.
“One for the Road” is narrated by an elderly widower named Booth and concerns an incident from years earlier that happened at a bar owned/operated by his friend Tookey in Falmouth, Maine. In true "a guy walks into a bar" tradition, one snowy night a yuppie from New Jersey named Lumley stumbles into Tookey's Bar half-frozen, claiming his car – along with his wife and young daughter – is stuck in a snowbank at nearby town Jerusalem's Lot. Terrified, Booth and Tookey explain to Lumley that "the Lot went bad" without spelling out the plague of vampirism which swept throug.