When Stephen King released “Salem’s Lot” in 1975, vampires were so out of fashion that the publisher didn’t want to mention them on the jacket flap. In recent decades, a few pop-culture phenomenon—“Buffy” a decade ago, “Twilight” now—have brought waves of fans (read: teen-age girls) back to the genre.

These vampires are lost souls, Carroll said, the type that women long to make their “projects.” The sex, King pointed out, is invariably adolescent—“they just want to bite the girl’s neck”—and Rosenberg elaborated: the self-loathing Edward from “Twilight” is “actually very safe, because of his own morality.” King asked if there was a parallel between maintaining abstinence and not wanting to suck her blood? Rosenberg didn’t miss a beat: “Absolutely.”

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