Is there an audiobook of 'Salem's Lot?

Yes. 'Salem's Lot has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Ron McLarty and Joe Hill.

How long is the 'Salem's Lot audiobook?

The 'Salem's Lot audiobook runs 17 hr 37 min.

'Salem's Lot by Stephen King book cover for the Book of the Day horror book review

Our score

4.8/ 5

Incredible

Listen to 'Salem's Lot free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

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EDITION PUBLISHEDOctober 1975

Genres

Fiction Horror Gothic

Themes

Evil settling into an ordinary placeFaith tested past its breaking pointSmall-town secrecy and willful denialChildhood fear of the house on the hill

'Salem's Lot

Name: 'Salem's Lot
Price: 9.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Stephen King

Stephen King

Stephen King's second novel drops Dracula into 1970s rural Maine and lets him get to work. A writer comes home to Jerusalem's Lot to face the house on the hill, children begin vanishing, and the town's talent for minding its own business turns out to be the monster's best asset.

The Review

Our take

Here is the question 'Salem's Lot spends six hundred pages answering: how many people can disappear from a town of thirteen hundred before anyone official does something about it? King's answer is patient, specific, and worse than a reader expects going in. It starts with a boy in the woods. Then the boy's brother. Then a gravedigger, a bar owner's wife, the man who runs the dump. Nobody calls the state police, because everybody has a reasonable explanation, and the reasonable explanations keep arriving faster than the bodies.

The structural gamble is that the town gets to be the protagonist. King breaks the story again and again to walk Jerusalem's Lot at first light, following the milk route, the school bus, the dump keeper who shoots rats for entertainment. Affairs conducted in parked cars. A young mother behind a closed door doing something to her baby that nobody will report. All of it is small-scale rot, none of it supernatural, and all of it load-bearing. By the time Barlow settles in, the reader has been shown a place that already keeps secrets out of habit. A vampire does not need to hide in a town where nobody looks. The cost of that method is a slow first two hundred pages, and anyone who wants fangs by chapter three will feel every one of them.

Something specific happens to the reading around the halfway mark. Those town vignettes stop being scenery and turn into a casualty list. New names get scanned for exposure: who lives alone, whose bedroom window faces the trees, who would not be missed for a week. King plays fair the whole way. His monster runs on the old rules, invitation and threshold and daylight, stated openly and never bent when bending would be convenient. The tension comes from watching people who know the same folklore the reader knows fail to believe it in time. The schoolteacher works it out first and gets treated precisely the way any town treats a man who says that word out loud.

The Marsten House sits above all of it with the patience of a bad memory, and Ben Mears carries a private reason for coming back that wires the haunting directly into him. The back half becomes a siege, and King protects nobody. Characters the story appears to be building around go, and several of them go badly. Father Callahan's thread is the cruelest material in the novel and the most honest: a priest with real faith finds out what that faith is actually made of, at the moment the answer costs the most. Setup honored, and then some. The close offers the town no rescue, and the final movement reads as grim arithmetic rather than victory.

Why you should read

Classic vampire horror played completely straight
Ensemble casts where nobody is safe
Small-town New England atmosphere over gore
Readers who liked The Shining and want more King

What to expect

A slow, deliberate first two hundred pages
Dozens of townspeople introduced before the siege
Old vampire rules honored without cheating
No rescue waiting at the end for the town

What holds up half a century later is the daylight. King wrote the definitive American vampire novel as a work of realism, so most of the horror gets delivered between errands. A school bus with an empty seat. A phone ringing and ringing at a house where somebody is definitely home. An ordinary Maine afternoon with slightly fewer people in it than there were last week. The dark parts are frightening. The bright parts are worse.

Reviewed by Quinn · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.8/ 5

Incredible

Listen to 'Salem's Lot free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

Buy on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.

Where to read or listen

Is there an audiobook of 'Salem's Lot?: Yes. 'Salem's Lot has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Ron McLarty and Joe Hill.
Listen to 'Salem's Lot free with an Audible trial
We earn from qualifying Amazon purchases.
How long is the 'Salem's Lot audiobook?: The 'Salem's Lot audiobook runs 17 hr 37 min.
How much does 'Salem's Lot cost?: On Amazon: Kindle $9.99, Paperback $9.92, Hardcover $24.99. Prices as of August 26, 2026 at 3:46 AM EDT and may change.

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Common questions

What is 'Salem's Lot about?: Here is the question 'Salem's Lot spends six hundred pages answering: how many people can disappear from a town of thirteen hundred before anyone official does something about it? King's answer is patient, specific, and worse than a reader expects going in. It starts with a boy in the woods. Then…
Is 'Salem's Lot worth reading?: We scored 'Salem's Lot 4.8 out of 5. Stephen King's second novel drops Dracula into 1970s rural Maine and lets him get to work. A writer comes home to Jerusalem's Lot to face the house on the hill, children begin vanishing, and the town's talent for minding its own business turns out to be the monster's best asset.