Still among the best of Stephen King's novels, although you can tell it was an early one. I expect I'm being persnickety about English usage but it's irritating and distracting to read about characters in the book who 'hung' themselves as though they were pictures, instead of 'hanged' themselves as befits a grammatically proper suicide or execution. But minor points like that aside, what's wonderful about this novel is that it puts vampires in a context of normal life in a small town and makes them seem more chillingly plausible and genuinely scary than any amount of lurid tales from the crypt. This novel was written when vampires were vampires, rather than adolescent sexual fantasy material as they appear in more recent trendy books and tv productions. For me, this is the best vampire book, even better than Bram Stoker's original.