Just Finished Reading (for the 3rd Time) 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King

I've been slowly plodding back through the collected works of my favorite author, Stephen King...a few days ago I reviewed on of his early stories, The Long Walk, that he wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.  While waiting for his first published novel, Carrie, to be available on my library's audiobook for checkout, I decided to go ahead and reread the next one he did, titled Salem's Lot.  I first read it about twenty years ago or so, and then reread it in 2017...click HERE for my review article back then.  I don't want to just repeat what I wrote back then, so I encourage you to first read that six-year-old article.  Salem's Lot, published in 1975,  is about vampires...a clear tribute on the part of King to Bram Stoker's classic 1897 novel Dracula.  Here, two sinister figures from Europe arrive in the sleepy Maine town of Jerusalem's Lot...Straker and Barlow...ostensibly to set up an antique furniture shop.  But fiction writer Ben Mears suspects something bad going on in the old Barlow House that looms over the town where they have moved...Mears in his childhood experienced a life-changing, horrible vision when he went inside this "haunted house" on a dare.  As people in 'Salem's Lot begin to disappear one by one, Mears and others like his new girlfriend Susan Orton, precocious young Mark Petrie, physician Jim Cody, English teacher Mark Burke and Catholic priest Father Callahan join up to investigate, increasingly suspecting, against common sense skepticism, the existence of vampires around them.  Everything I love about Stephen King novels is here, including excellent development of the characters that reveals their deeper motives and emotions as well as a building climax that is wonderfully suspenseful.  And his ending leaves a tantalizing bit to the reader's imagination, another of his literary talents I've come to enjoy.  Father Callahan would go on to appear in King's Dark Tower series...his travails in 'Salem's Lot revealed this story's God as coldly righteous, devoted to shutting out the unclean in spirit...very "Old Testament".  This novel isn't very long and is readily available both from public libraries...the audiobook version free through the Libby's service...and bookstores or Amazon, preferably used.  Now, on to Carrie...