These instruction are for Windows, on my Linux installation(Fedora 21) everything works by just installing serialport with npm (I don't know why!).
These are the steps I did to build node serialport for electron (formerly atom-shell) for Windows. I am completely certain there is a better way to do it, but since I struggled with it for quite a while, here is a solution anyway.
You need some version of Visual studio installed, I have VS 2012 Express for Desktop.