Over on his website, David Brin has a very interesting article about the "idiot plot," which only works if the protagonists are assumed to be idiots, living in an atomistic universe without any working organizations. Brin and I do not see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, to put it very mildly, but he makes some interesting points.
I was thinking about this while rereading Stephen King's Salem's Lot, and it occurred to me that Brin's analysis would kill that novel stone dead. Deader than a vampire with a hawthorn stake through the heart.
(The book came out in 1975; I don't propose to put spoiler space in here.)
King has said that a lot of the book was him riffing off Dracula, a novel he had taught in his career as an English teacher. However, the "small band of Fearless Vampire Killers versus Big Bad Vampire and his hordes of lesser vampires" schtick doesn't work in 20th-century America, I fear.
Just for starters, one of the Fearless Vampire Killers is a doctor. An M.D. I've known a few doctors in my time, and if they were confronted with what Dr. Cody sees, they'd have almost certainly been on the horn to a bunch of their professional colleagues...at the Center for Disease Control. And that goes double, triple, quadruple and with horseradish sauce on it if there's been an unusual rash of deaths lately, particularly of people whom nobody would expect to "just die." Or if bodies have been disappearing from morgues or funeral parlors.
I know that nowadays, people do not believe in vampires. However, I do think that a medical doctor, seeing a person that he not only knew was dead, but had personally autopsied, getting up and trying to attack people, would figure that "this is above my pay grade!" and call out the heavy hitters. Very few people are that invincibly skeptical.
Once you have the CDC and likely FEMA in on things, you seal off the town as thoroughly as you can, and check everyplace that a vampire or vampires might hide...and start with the Big Old Broody House Up On The Hill, for the gods' sake! And you do it by daylight. Evacuate the townsfolk; make up some lie about a disease if you have to.
But let us say that things go as they do in the book. Salem's Lot is a quiet little town, but it's not that out of the way, and the people who live there almost certainly have friends and family who'll start wondering just what the hell happened...why Aunt Sarah, who calls her nephews and nieces every Sunday, hasn't rung up for months, or why Joe, who was one of the most reliable workers you could ask for, suddenly didn't show up, even to collect his last paychecks. When you have a whole town full of people who've dropped off the map, Questions Will Be Asked. And that's assuming that none of the "desapericidos" has important relatives or friends.
It's like the Spaniards and the Aztecs. At first, when it was just odd-sounding rumors, it was reasonable for the Aztecs to blow off reports about the Spaniards. But more and more and more evidence started piling up, and by the time Cortez reached Tenochtitlan, the Aztecs believed. One "Salem's Lot" would have people believing in vampires, and almost certainly Taking Serious Steps to deal with the problem. Mandatory cremation, just for starters...I've never understood why that wasn't the rule in the Anita Blake universe, which has known about vampires and other nasties for a long time, but Laurell K. Hamilton is no worldbuilder and almost certainly didn't expect the Anitaverse to go on for so long or become so big.