Salem's Lot
According to government records, he previously used the name Kurt Breichen in his guise as an Austrian nobleman. As Breichen, he corresponded for twelve years with Hubert "Hubie" Marsten, a former Depression-era Boston hitman living in the town of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, or "The Lot". Marsten murdered his wife and committed suicide, but not before burning his letters with Breichen. The novel strongly implies that Marsten entered into an agreement with Breichen that allowed him to eventually come to Jerusalem's Lot.
In 1938 Breichen fled Germany due to a vampire hunt conducted by the Gestapo and settled in London, eventually securing naturalization as a British subject and adopting the English surname Barlow.
In 1975, Barlow arrives in Jerusalem's Lot in a box shipped overseas by his human familiar, an English businessman named Richard Straker. The two take residence in Marsten's former mansion, which is considered haunted by almost everyone in town. Straker poses as an antiques dealer and opens a shop in town. He tends to the shop and handles business arrangements while Barlow is never seen in public, telling inquiring visitors that Barlow is frequently away on business. Straker kidnaps a local boy, Ralphie Glick, and makes a human sacrifice of the child in an appeasement ritual. Ralphie's brother, Danny, becomes Barlow's first victim and begins to turn other locals.
Barlow makes his first appearance in the book when he encounters Dud Rogers, a hunchbacked dump custodian. Barlow also encounters Corey Bryant, a young telephone worker who has been tortured and ordered to leave town by Reggie Sawyer, the man Bryant was cuckolding. Knowing their desires, Barlow turns Rogers and Bryant.
Danny Glick later pays a night-time visit to one of his schoolmates, Mark Petrie. However, Mark, an intelligent and resourceful child, identifies Glick as a vampire and drives him off with a plastic cross. Mark sneaks into the Marsten House the next day with Susan Norton, intending to destroy Barlow. However, they are both captured by Straker; Susan is turned by Barlow and becomes a vampire, but Mark manages to escape, mortally wounding Straker in the process. Straker is later found hanging upside down, having been drained of his blood by Barlow. Petrie informs Susan's boyfriend, writer Ben Mears, of Susan's fate, and becomes part of the effort to destroy the town's vampires, together with Ben, the Catholic priest Father Callahan, doctor Jimmy Cody and the Lot's high school English teacher, Matt Burke.
When Father Callahan and Mark head over to Mark's parents to explain the danger that the family is in, the power is suddenly cut, and Barlow appears. He kills Mark's parents by smashing their heads together, but does not infect them. Barlow then takes Mark hostage briefly. Callahan pulls out his cross in an attempt to drive him off, and for a time it works, until Barlow challenges him to throw away the cross. Callahan, not having faith enough to do so, is overwhelmed by Barlow, who takes the now-useless cross and snaps it in two. Barlow then forces Callahan to drink his vampire blood, making him "unclean".
By now Mark has escaped, part of Barlow's deal with Callahan, and has fled to warn the others. At the end of the book, Barlow is destroyed by Ben Mears and Mark Petrie in the basement of Eva Miller's boarding house, whose residents have, like almost everyone else in the town, become vampires.
The town's locals remain vampires, even after the destruction of Barlow, and inevitably start to spread outside the town's limits into surrounding areas. Ben Mears and Mark Petrie flee the town, the only surviving members of the group which set out to stop Barlow and Straker. After recovering somewhat from the ordeal, they return a year later and set a brush fire near the Marsten House with the intent to burn down the town. The fire is intended to destroy as many vampires and their daylight hiding places as possible, as the beginning of an all-out effort by the two to destroy the vampire colony entirely.
