Author Ben Mears returns to his childhood home of Jerusalem's Lot and sees the unchanged Marsten House looming over the town.

Ben meets a young local woman named Susan Norton in the town park while she reads one of his published novels.

Straker ambushes the Glick brothers on their shortcut through the woods and performs a ritual sacrifice of young Ralphie.

Danny Glick dies in the hospital from unexplained pernicious anemia just days after his younger brother vanishes without trace.

Matt Burke finds cemetery groundskeeper Mike Ryerson dead in his spare room after hearing a child's eerie laughter upstairs in the night.

Mark Petrie repels his dead friend Danny Glick from his bedroom window by brandishing a plastic cross from his monster model kit.

Floyd Tibbits, partially turned by Barlow, attacks Ben Mears outside the boardinghouse and beats him badly enough to require hospitalization.

Ben and Doctor Cody watch the body of Margie Glick rise from the funeral parlor table, confirming that vampires are real.

Straker ambushes Susan Norton and Mark Petrie inside the Marsten House and leaves Mark bound in rope in an upstairs room.

Mark Petrie escapes his bonds and races to the cellar, but arrives too late as Barlow vampirizes Susan.

The vampire hunters enter the Marsten House, find Straker hanging dead, and discover Barlow's taunting letter in the empty cellar.

Ben drives a stake through vampirized Susan's heart in the Marsten House cellar and runs screaming from the building.

Barlow arrives at the Petrie home ahead of Mark and Callahan, kills Mark's parents, and forces Father Callahan to drink his blood.

Doctor Cody falls through sabotaged cellar stairs onto upturned knives set as a trap by the boardinghouse vampires and dies.

Ben hammers a stake into the sitting-up Barlow just as the sun finishes setting in the boardinghouse root cellar.

Ben Mears returns to his childhood home of Jerusalem's Lot hoping to confront old fears, only to find the town already being infiltrated by the master vampire Barlow and his servant Straker. The Glick brothers become the plague's first victims, and a chain of deaths and disappearances follows as Barlow converts the townspeople one by one. A small group of survivors assembles to fight back, but loses members at every turn as Barlow proves far more dangerous than they imagined. Susan Norton is vampirized and Ben must stake her himself, while Father Callahan's faith shatters under Barlow's challenge, leaving only Ben and Mark Petrie to finish the fight. In the story's climax, Ben and Mark trace Barlow to the boardinghouse root cellar and Ben drives home the stake just as the sun goes down.

The vampire plague that destroys Jerusalem's Lot.

Ben visits the local realtor hoping to rent the Marsten House, only to learn it has already been sold to mysterious outsiders.

A large wooden crate is secretly delivered to the Marsten House basement, and delivery man Hank Peters watches one of its metal bands snap.

Danny Glick stumbles home alone, dazed and disheveled, with no memory of what happened to his younger brother Ralphie in the woods.

Father Callahan officiates at Danny Glick's burial and unwittingly closes the service by praying for Danny to receive new life.

Cemetery groundskeeper Mike Ryerson is supernaturally compelled to open Danny Glick's freshly filled coffin as the sun drops below the horizon.

Dud Rogers, the dump caretaker, encounters a shadowy stranger who professes love for nocturnal predators before attacking him in the darkness.

Matt Burke notices strange marks on Mike Ryerson's neck and invites the pale, sickly groundskeeper to sleep safely at his house.

Matt Burke drives a vampirized Mike Ryerson back out through the bedroom window with a crucifix, then collapses from a heart attack.

Susan Norton hears Mike Ryerson's inhuman voice coming from upstairs in Matt Burke's house and finally accepts that something supernatural is occurring.

Doctor Cody is recruited after telling Ben and Susan that all the bodies of suspected vampire victims have vanished from the county morgue.

Father Callahan visits a hospitalized Matt Burke and is gradually persuaded that the vampire outbreak terrorizing the town is genuinely real.

After drinking Barlow's blood, Father Callahan reaches his church door and is thrown back by a bolt of blue light.

Matt Burke suffers a fatal second heart attack at the hospital, leaving Ben Mears and Mark Petrie entirely on their own.

Ben and Mark return to the abandoned ghost town of Jerusalem's Lot carrying holy water blessed by a priest in Los Zapatos.

Ben and Mark set a fire in the dry brush near the Marsten House and watch the flames trickle toward it.

While the town of Jerusalem's Lot goes about its ordinary business, Barlow's arrival is preceded by careful preparation — his crate is delivered in secret and Straker begins turning victims one by one. The deaths of Danny Glick, Mike Ryerson, and eventually Floyd Tibbits spread through the community, but the town's institutions are far too slow to recognize the threat. The vampire hunters recruit Doctor Cody and Father Callahan to their cause, and Susan Norton's gradual conversion from skeptic to believer comes heartbreakingly too late to save her. After Callahan is spiritually broken and cast out by his own church, Matt Burke dies and leaves Ben and Mark to fight Barlow alone. The story ends with the two survivors returning to a ghost town and setting fire to the Marsten House as a first act of purification.

The hidden details behind 'salem's Lot's downfall.

Ben tells Susan he once entered the Marsten House as a child on a dare and saw Hubie Marsten's hanging apparition open its eyes.

Ben and Matt Burke discuss the Marsten House over drinks, with Ben theorizing it acts as a supernatural beacon that attracts evil men.

Father Callahan broods at the vicarage over his deep yearning to face true primal Evil rather than the petty sins of his flock.

Larry Crockett pays off delivery man Hank Peters with cash and implicit threats after Peters glimpses what may be Ralphie Glick's clothing.

Danny Glick, now a vampire, slips into the McDougall trailer during the night and kills ten-month-old baby Randy.

Ben recovers consciousness in the hospital and urgently tells Susan to visit Matt Burke and ask whether he knows Father Callahan.

Inside the Marsten House, Susan Norton and Mark Petrie discover a book bound in human skin depicting a child sacrifice ritual.

Vampirized Susan appears at Mark's window after he escapes the Marsten House, promising undead life is lovely while her face shows deep misery.

Father Callahan experiences a terrifying vision of the Catholic Church as a vast alien cosmic force that could drive any man mad.

Barlow offers Father Callahan a bargain: cast aside the cross and face the vampire armed with faith alone, and Mark goes free.

Callahan hesitates, the glow in his cross dies, and Barlow breaks it before forcing the defeated priest to drink vampire blood.

Mark Petrie remembers blue chalk on Barlow's sleeve and Doctor Cody realizes it came from a pool table at the boardinghouse.

Ben splits the root cellar padlock with a holy-water-blessed axe, his hands blazing with blue supernatural fire.

Barlow hypnotizes Mark Petrie inside the boardinghouse cellar; Mark draws a pistol and nearly shoots Ben before being knocked unconscious.

Ben and Mark clasp their glowing hands together, Ben declares his love for Mark, and they pry open Barlow's waiting coffin.

The battle against Barlow turns on a series of personal discoveries and failures of nerve rather than physical confrontation. Ben's childhood trauma in the Marsten House and the conversations that draw him together with Matt Burke and Susan Norton gradually reveal the true nature of what has come to Jerusalem's Lot. Evidence accumulates — a silenced witness, a baby's murder, a book bound in human skin — pushing each character toward or away from the belief that determines survival. Father Callahan's crisis of faith proves the turning point of the entire story: given a chance to defeat Barlow through pure spiritual courage, he hesitates and is destroyed as a man of God. In the final descent into the boardinghouse cellar, Ben and Mark must overcome both Barlow's hypnotic power and their own fear before Ben can drive the stake home and the two survivors can begin their long road back.