King has described the premise as a question he set himself while teaching Dracula to a high school class: what would happen if the Count arrived in rural twentieth century America rather than in Victorian London. The answer he wrote keeps Stoker's architecture and moves it. Barlow arrives by sea freight as Dracula does; Ben Mears is the outsider who writes everything down; Matt Burke is the teacher who is believed too late. What changes is the town, which in Stoker resists the vampire and in King is already hollow enough to be taken without a fight.