Note: This post was previously offered as a $.99 ebook on Amazon.com, but it's my belief it has become outdated in that format due to King's continued noteworthy output. The original paperback and audiobook are still available. They are problematic to update, but I believe they serve as a guidepost for beginning fans, with the caveat that King continues to be a vital, productive and iconic author. At the time, I limited the list to what I felt were the top twenty-five of King's works. I will, however, continue to update, expand and revise my little list on this blog as long as his work keeps appearing and as long as I'm able to keep reading it!
THE BEST STEPHEN KING BOOKS, RANKED IN ORDER
by
David Bain
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This list is subjective, presented in hopes of offering King fans new and old a brief, handy overview and exploration of this beloved author’s books.
For new fans - or newcomers considering delving into King’s fiction - King’s immense body of work can be daunting, overwhelming even, especially given that King, while known for horror fiction, has also produced works which could be classifiable in many other genres, from mystery to mainstream, from historical fiction to nonfiction overviews of his craft .
My hope is that this list can provide an easily digestible menu potential King readers can cross-reference with their own interests. It's my wish to provide insights into where they might want start or what they might want to read next.
The print and audio editions of this chapbook were published in July 2015 and do not include any of King’s works published after that time, though I’m planning to update this blog post periodically, time allowing.
If you feel like chatting with me about any of King’s works, why not hit me up on Twitter at @davidbainaa!
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Let the countdown begin…
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25. FIRESTARTER - King’s eighth novel is a chase novel, a road novel and certainly a suspenseful thriller. It also continues his fascination with children with psychic or supernatural abilities, which we also see in several books from the same general earlier era of his writing career, books like Carrie and The Shining.
In this case the protagonist is Charlie McGee, a pyrokinetic, a girl who can start fires with her mind. Charlie’s parents met during a government test of a drug referred to as “Lot 6” which had hallucinogenic effects not unlike LSD, but which left Charlie’s father, Andy, with “the push” - the ability to psychically force or encourage responses and actions in others and her mother with minor telekinesis - the power to move objects without touching them. Charlie’s powers, however, are on a completely different level from her parents - she can immolate entire structures at will and her power only seems to be increasing with no limit becoming apparent.
Charlie and her father are on the run from “The Shop”, the shadowy government association behind the drug tests. The novel begins in media res as Charlie and her dad are trying to outrun agents, but we soon learn that her mother was killed in a botched Shop attempt to abduct Charlie.
Soon we meet one of King’s many interesting villains, John Rainbird, a Cherokee war veteran who is also a ruthless assassin for The Shop.
The novel is filled with twists and unexpected turns as well as ever-present danger. It’s a quickly-read page-turner, and the only reason it isn’t higher on the list is because King has so many iconic characters and books that, while this might be a standout in another author’s catalog, it’s simply “another book” in King’s.
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24. THE RUNNING MAN - Originally published in 1985, Stephen King and his publisher NAL allowed The Bachman Books, a collection of four short novels written early in King’s career and originally released under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, to go out of print. King was concerned about the novel Rage, which is about a school hostage situation and shooting and is alleged to have inspired similar real-life incidents. The remaining Bachman books have subsequently been released as stand-alone novels (except in the U.K., where the collection is still published as a whole, albeit without Rage amongst its contents.)
The remaining novels include The Long Walk, about a futuristic dictatorship with a Hunger Games-like endurance walking competition and Roadwork, about a man driven to extreme measures and the edge of his sanity after his work, home and family life collapse. Both of these are worthy novels - Rage is as well, though it’s certainly understandable why King chose to censor it.
The best of The Bachman Books, however, is The Running Man. The premise is again somewhat similar to The Hunger Games. In a future world overrun with economic and social strife, the game show of the title allows contestants to go anywhere in the world with professional “Hunters” pursuing them.
There are exactly 101 chapters, counting down from 100 to zero, with the ending being one of King’s most adrenaline-fueled and satisfying. Even though The Running Man is early within the scope of King’s works, it’s one of his most tense and action-filled outings.
It is worth briefly noting that the movie version of The Running Man starring Arnold Schwarzenegger bears little resemblance to the novel beyond the basic premise.
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23. THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON - This short novel has its detractors - it’s mostly the story of a nine-year-old girl lost in the woods, the physical and mental challenges she must face and overcome, and her personal interior mythology, which both expands over the course of her sometimes surreal journey and helps her find and focus the mental wherewithal to keep going and complete the journey, taking on the endless hurdles - many of them seemingly insurmountable - as they come.
Naysayers find the young heroine too plucky, too verbose and too knowledgeable for her age, but for others, this is exactly what makes Trisha McFarland so appealing.
As usual with King, the story hooks the reader (at least those readers whom it does hook) with its specifics - Trisha’s love for the Red Sox pitcher of the title, for instance, a detail which at first seems minor character-building, but which eventually figures into the larger plot.
While the novel takes the form of an episodic adventure not unlike one that might have been written “for boys” in ages past - think Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe or several of Jack London’s novels - this “girl against nature” story stands a lot of the old tropes on their heads. It certainly updates the “survival gear”, for instance - Trisha’s primary resources are her Gameboy and Walkman and prepackaged snacks, for instance.
While it may not be to everyone’s taste - some argue The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is more YA than adult (and there is a pop-up book (albeit not one intended for your toddler), the novel stands as further proof that King has far more range than he’s generally given credit for.
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22. CUJO - The book that gave hundreds of canines across the globe their name. Most of the novel Cujo is a set-piece - a woman and her young son trapped in a broken-down car in the dooryard of an isolated farm on a hot day with a rabid St. Bernard roaming outside.
That is, more or less, literally the entire plot. There’s some story set-up to get Donna and her son Tad into the situation, as well as some asides showing the reader various aspects of King’s fictional town of Castle Rock, and there are a few people looking for the mother and son, adding to the tension, but most of the book is centered in the car in front of the farmhouse. The setting is minimal, as it might be in a stage play. (King has returned to this set-piece kind of storytelling a few more times in his career, notably in Gerald’s Game,.)
The limited scope and scale of the novel is an interesting counterpoint to King’s huge sprawling novels, like his It or The Stand or The Dark Tower series. In King’s hands, the claustrophobic setting only adds to the tension, rather than limiting it.
King discusses Cujo in On Writing, saying he doesn’t remember writing very much of the book as it was created while he was battling a heavy drinking problem, but he likes the novel and wishes he could remember enjoying the writing process.
It should be noted that many readers have a problem with the ending - which was indeed changed quite drastically for the popular 1983 filmed version.
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21. DUMA KEY - This is another novel that fans hailed as a “return to form” for King, but the truth is that, despite a few lesser works spread throughout a long career, King’s never really had a lasting bad stretch. Duma Key is nonetheless a strong, stand-out novel in King’s oeuvre.
Published in 2008, the book is, at least in part, a meditation on art, particularly the nature of its creation and its potential for destruction as well as healing.
The story’s protagonist is Edgar Freemantle, a construction contractor who loses an arm and suffers head injuries in an accident while on the job in Minnesota - a new setting for King. Taking his doctor’s advice, Freemantle relocates to the titular island in Florida - another setting previously unexplored in King novels. Soon after moving into “Big Pink” - the name of his conch-colored beachside vacation house, Freemantle begins to play around with his former hobby of sketching and soon turns to painting. It’s not long before Freemantle notices a psychic quality to his painting, as he learns things about his wife and daughter’s activities by painting them before he has verification in the real world.
To say much more would be to give too much away, but King only ratchets up the tension from this point, as Freemantle begins to sell his paintings, meanwhile discovering that there might be a haunting and malevolent supernatural entity in the waters of Duma Key that’s influencing his work - and other aspects of his life as well.
A little long-winded in spots, Duma Key offers plenty of scares and suspense, plus a wholly original paranormal enemy.
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20. UNDER THE DOME - King’s third-longest novel, after the uncut version of The Stand (1,153 pages) and It (1,138 pages). Some consider it a big, bloated whale of a book with a so-so, out-of-the-blue ending, but most find it a fascinating tale of what happens when the members of a community are stuck with and must come to terms with each other after an literal dome, impenetrable from either side, drops down over the town from nowhere - and the result is not always pretty for the myriad characters involved.
The book is, in many ways, a return to King’s earlier populist storytelling - much more of a straight-forward, character-driven adventure than much of his more recent material. That is to say, King basically sets up the premise of the novel and then lets the characters he’s established go at it, feuding, plotting and doing what they can or must in order to survive. The book can be read strictly on the surface, as a thrilling series of events, though it can also be seen as having plenty of subtext dealing with politics and environmental issues.
While the novel has resulted in a relatively popular television program, the tv show starts out faithful but eventually switches gears and strikes out on its own plot course.
The book drew controversy due to the premise of a small town being stuck under a dome having previously appeared as the focus of The Simpson’s Movie, but King had twice before tried to write the book - both uncompleted versions had gone under the working title of The Cannibals - and he eventually published draft pdf versions of the novel on his website which were obviously produced long before the cartoon movie.
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19. KING’S NOVELLAS - King has four collections of novellas (short novels), Different Seasons, Four Past Midnight, Full Dark, No Stars and his most recent arguably the best of the three, If It Bleeds.
The earliest of the collections, Different Seasons, published in 1992, contains three novellas which have been turned into movies. Two of these films - Stand by Me, based on The Body, and The Shawshank Redemption, based on Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption - are iconic pieces of modern filmdom, among the most popular films ever made. The third, Apt Pupil, is, ahem, barely worth remembering - though the novella itself certainly has memorable images. Another tale, “The Breathing Method” is attempt on King’s part to tell a story in the manner of the Victorian “tale within a tale” and is only moderately successful.
Four Past Midnight is easily the least of the three collections. While two of the novellas have been filmed - the over-the-top television mini-series The Langoliers and the minor Johnny Depp vehicle Secret Window, Secret Garden - neither video version is particularly great, and it’s the same with the stories upon which they’re based, as well as the other two novellas herein: The Library Policeman and The Sun Dog. The stories here pass muster as horror stories, but none of them stand out when compared to the rest of the genre or even the rest of King’s catalog. Four Past Midnight is simply very mediocre King.
Full Dark, No Stars, on the other hand, provides some of King’s strongest storytelling in the shorter forms. There is the historical, slightly surreal “1922”, taking the form of a convoluted murder confession by an unreliable narrator. It is a masterful tale of supernatural revenge. “Big Driver” is a brutal, unflinching and very effective story of rape, violence and vengeance with enough twists to keep you reading despite the dark subject matter. “Fair Extension” might be the weakest of the four stories, but is at the same time a magnificent twist on the old “deal with the devil” trope. King makes no bones about the literal deal with the devil - it’s done in an almost tongue-in-cheek manner, but it’s where King takes the story from there that provides the deliciously devious pay-off. The final story, “A Good Marriage”, is the only one filmed so far; it’s a serial killer tale in which you might well see the first twist coming, but the ones after that will nab you!
His best collection of novellas, however, is his most recent, If It Bleeds, simply for the inclusion of "The Life of Chuck" This three-part tale, each section told in a different style, is something special. Somewhat experimental in structure,the story gives us nothing less than an overview of the importance, the grandness and the melancholy and mystery of every single human life. Also included are "Mr. Harrigan's Phone," a traditional horror piece; the title novella, which is really a sequel to King's novel The Outsider; and "Rat," which continues King's theme of writing about writers, but with such a great sense of creepiness, claustrophobia and worthy payoff that we can't fault him.
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18. JOYLAND - King has produced two shorter novels for Hard Case Crime, a publisher of paperback original hardboiled crime novels. They are Joyland and The Colorado Kid. Joyland is by far the better of the two.
It’s the story of Devin Jones, a college student who gets a summer job at the titular amusement park in a seaside town. A murder took place in the park in recent years, but the park has recovered and soon Devin finds himself adept at wearing the park’s Howie the Happy Hound mascot suit. He soon becomes interested in both the murder and a local woman, Annie, and her ill and handicapped son.
Joyland takes place in the early 1970s, and while there is some of King’s typical nostalgia for bygone eras, it’s less overwhelming than in some of his earlier work. King’s frequent trope of a handicapped character with special powers is also present, but again, there is a maturity to the presentation that might seem more heavy-handed in his older works.
While there are a few ghosts hanging around the park and the reader does eventually get to see them - sort of - the focus in Joyland is on real-life tensions and threats. The climactic showdown with the killer is thrilling and genuinely surprising, and the book’s denouement is effectively sentimental and true-to-life. King is often accused of overwriting and padding, but Joyland is a lean, smooth read leaving the reader with a memorable story that will only require a sitting or two to take in.
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17. DOCTOR SLEEP - This is the sequel to King’s The Shining, arriving 36 year’s after the earlier novel’s first publication.
The story picks up with, Danny Torrance, the psychic child from King’s classic novel (now just Dan), all grown up and fighting alcoholism - but not before we have a few scenes letting us know how Danny’s mentor, Dick Holloran, the cook from the haunted hotel in The Shining, taught him to “lock away” the ghosts he’s battled there.
We’re introduced to The True Knot, a band of roving psychics who travel in a caravan of Winnebagos and the like. These are a scary, well-characterized bunch, and they do some truly awful things on their journeys, as they gain sustenance from the pain and death of other psychics - mostly innocent, everyday mortals who don’t really know they’re psychic. It should be noted that while there is a lot of magic and wonder in this book, it contains one of the most horrific and agonizing death scenes in King’s entire canon - many reviewers note difficulty reading and dealing with the scene in question.
As noted, however, there is a certain sense of grandeur and marvel to this book - it delves into the territory of urban fantasy, a genre King doesn’t touch on much. There’s certainly a great deal of grit too, especially in the first half of the book as Dan works his way out of his problems with anger and booze - both of which he inherited from his long-dead father.
Despite the long stretch between the two books, Doctor Sleep serves as a satisfying continuation of Danny Torrence’s story. It would not be entirely necessary to read The Shining first - King provides enough clues and hints of backstory that the casual reader is unlikely to get lost - but, for all of Doctor Sleep’s merits, for those in search of chills and suspense, The Shining is a classic, and much higher on this list.
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16. THE DEAD ZONE - Even though this novel was turned into both a film and a television series, it’s often considered one of King’s minor works, as it’s a stand-alone novel without any significant connection to any other King milieu aside from the setting of the state of Maine.
However, with this being King’s sixth novel (at least under his own name - he’d also published at least one book as Richard Bachman), by this point of his career, with several eventual classics already under his belt, all of King’s writerly skills are in line, especially the pacing, suspense and characterization that make The Dead Zone such a page-turner.
The story deals with protagonist John Smith (yes, really), who, after an accident, wakes up from a years-long coma with the ability to see into some people’s lives via the sense of touch. Smith grapples with how he should use this ability and with the notoriety (both positive and negative) which it garners him. While Smith’s interior battles are interesting, it’s the overt plots and subplots into which his preternatural ability throws him that keep the reader turning the pages - namely a serial killer and the potential future into which an unbalanced political candidate might eventually throw not only the nation, but the world itself.
Published in 1979, The Dead Zone is steeped in 1970s politics, but one of King’s strengths has always seemed to be his ability to tell timeless stories despite the inclusion of “contemporary” details that don’t always age particularly well.
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15. THE GREEN MILE - Originally released as a serial, with a new volume being published every month for half a year, this historical novel is one of King’s most ambitious thematically, taking on religious and racial issues. Mostly set inside a bleak prison, the book nonetheless manages to incorporate a great deal of magical and fantastical elements.
The story is about Paul Edgecombe, a prison guard and the relationship he develops with a huge but simple-minded black inmate. As the plot progresses, Edgecombe soon discovers that Coffey has healing and other empathetic powers.
King, as he so often does, plays with time and memory - the book is in the form of a memoir which Edgecombe, more than 100 years old in the present, is writing in a nursing home.
King’s villains are almost always as intriguing as his protagonists, and The Green Mile is no exception. In addition to the vile inmates one might expect in a prison setting, one of Edgecombe’s fellow prison guards is truly despicable, and he serves as the catalyst of a couple of the novel’s more gut-wrenching scenes, including one that’s at the center of the serial chapter “The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix. The titular scene is truly among the most gruesome and difficult to read, emotionally speaking, of King’s entire oeuvre.
Despite its episodic origin, the novel as a whole reads well as a complete work - the serial format of the original publication virtually disappears for the reader of the complete volume in which the novel is now published.
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14. THE BILL HODGES TRILOGY - As of this writing, only the first two of the proposed trilogy of books featuring retired police detective Bill Hodges have been published, but MR. MERCEDES and FINDERS KEEPERS are riveting.
With nary a ghost or otherworldly element in sight - though King’s trademark grisly and macabre visions are certainly abundant - these books are pure twisting, turning, edge-of-your-seat thrillers. King keeps the surprises coming, and while the unusual group he gathers to look into the crimes perpetrated within the pages are interesting and engaging, the criminals are among his darkest and most believable.
Mr. Mercedes came out in 2014, the same year as King's interesting but ultimately lower-ranking (on this list) supernatural novel Revival, and introduced not only Hodges, but his young super-smart high school-aged assistant Jerome and off-kilter computer expert Holly.
Finders Keepers takes on an unusual structure, jumping back and forth several decades in time between two characters obsessed with the same writer for about the first third of the novel. One of these is a new antagonist operating in the 1970s. The other is a new protagonist, who was injured in the massacre which was the central event in Mr. Mercedes, and his family. Eventually all the threads merge and the main investigative team from Mr. Mercedes - Hodges, Jerome and Holly - finally enter into the plot for the tension-gripped second half.
The third book in the trilogy, originally announced as The Suicide King has been tentatively renamed End of Watch. No release date has been announced as of this writing.
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13. ON WRITING - King’s seminal book on his craft. Part how-to, part autobiography, it’s one of the best books out there on writing and the writing life. Published at the turn of the century, the book made Entertainment Weekly’s “New Classics” list, which noted the top 100 best books from 1983 to 2008 - it was the only one of King’s works to make the list.
There’s some relatively rote advice such as “adverbs are not your friend,” but the real gems are more in King’s attitudes and personal insights. For instance, the writing of the book was interrupted by a major turning point in King’s life, namely being hit by a van while he was walking along a country road. King details his recovery and his struggle to return to writing.
Another one of the more fascinating details is King’s inclusion of part of the first draft of the short story “1408.” With his massive output and doorstopper-sized novels, many critics accuse him of only doing a first draft, but the sample shows a lot of care, filled as it is with King’s own notations, cross-outs, circles and arrows, etc.
Also notable is King’s suggested reading list at the end of the book. Several critics noted that it’s much more “literary” than they might have expected - this list was updated by King in 2010 for a tenth anniversary edition. (For an extensive - if now dated - list of King’s favorite then-contemporary horror novels, check out his 1981 nonfiction book Danse Macabre. The books are all still great.)
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12. CARRIE - Stephen King’s first novel. And yet it holds the precursors of almost every literary technique and focus King eventually perfects. First of all, it has a strong, if flawed, female protagonist. All of King’s protagonists are flawed - as good fictional protagonists should be - but let it also be said that strong female characters were still the exception rather than the rule when this novel first came out in 1974 - especially in horror fiction - and that King has subsequently continued this streak of real, competent and kick-butt females in his fiction from Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game through ...well, you can practically pick your King novel, there’s likely a fairly strong woman in it. It also seeks, within its relatively short page count - especially given King’s future output - to present a wide cross-section of its fictional setting, the town of Chamberlain, Maine, and seeks to combine genre with more literary values - the novel is, for example, mostly epistolary in its presentation, using newspaper clippings, letters, magazine clippings and so forth to tell its tale.
All this said, Carrie White, a telekinetic teenager, initially unaware of her extrasensory abilities, and certainly unaware of their ultimate power, also sits among King’s most naive and vulnerable characters, thanks to her repressive mother, and that is the novel’s strength. Ever feel repressed? Well, Carrie is your girl. Every nerd everywhere identifies with her, even if we weren’t victims of the infamous and iconic “tampon scene” which starts the novel and, arguably launched King’s entire career - helped to no small degree by the iconic Brian DePalma movie.
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11. BAG OF BONES - This is, simply put, King’s best ghost story after The Shining. It won the year’s best novel awards for both the British Fantasy Awards and the Horror Writers’ Association’s Bram Stoker Awards.
King returns here to his career-long explorations of family, loss and the often tragic effects of the distant past on the present.
While the protagonist Mike Noonan is yet again a writer - King has, of course, been disparaged for having so many writers as main characters - this works as more than a mere convenience for King this time; the use of devices such as writer’s block and the weaving of supernatural clues into one of Noonan’s works in progress add to the chilling effects this time out.
Noonan, already depressed and unable to write after the death of his wife four years prior, is rattled by nightmares centered on his summer lake home in rural, unincorporated Maine. Facing his fears, he moves there and eventually begins to write again - and to dredge up his own ghosts as well as the town’s, meanwhile falling in love with a local single mother, Mattie Devore, incurring the wrath of her wealthy father-in-law, and developing something of a psychic connection with her daughter.
The audio version of this book is notable first of all because King reads it himself, but also because there’s music which figures into the plot, including a complete rendition of a song by Sara Tidwell - a long-ago black blues singer, now one of the ghosts figuring largely into the main storyline.
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10. THE DARK TOWER - There are die-hard fans who have never read King’s massive eight-book epic, and there are also fans who haven’t read anything but this series.
Mixing elements of science fiction, Old West imagery and the structure of epic fantasy quests like The Lord of the Rings, The Dark Tower travels between our own world, parallel dimensions, and the world of Roland the Gunslinger, who quests for a mythical tower, said to be the hub of all worlds, while his own world has fallen into disrepair and ruin.
While the novels tell one large story, most of King’s other novels - at most of them with supernatural elements - also fit into the mythos. For instance, the priest from Salem’s Lot turns up later in the series and joins Roland’s fellowship for a time.
With long gaps in the original publication history of many of the books, and considering that King started the core books of the series when he was nineteen, concluding them when he was sixty-two, the series can sometimes feel somewhat inconsistent and wandering. Indeed, King significantly revised and edited the first book in the series in 2003, after it had already been in publication for twenty-five years. The jumps in time - at least two of the novels, Wizard and Glass and The Wind through the Keyhole, are almost entirely backstory, taking the reader to eras long before the main thread of the epic - can be irksome to readers who like their stories told in a linear fashion. (Then again, the natures of memory and time are major themes of the work.)
Their minor flaws notwithstanding, the books are filled with stark imagery, presenting strong set-pieces along each step of the journey. The true value of the series is in the sometimes utterly surreal blending of genres which King achieves. The concept of an Old West gunslinger leading a drug addict, a wheelchair-bound woman and others through a world of ancient technologies run amok with Gothic horrors like werewolves and vampires around every corner, meanwhile hopping through portals to not only our world but still other surreal times and dimensions sounds completely absurd, but it’s with exactly this scenario that King has suspended the disbelief of millions of enthralled readers
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9. KING’S SHORT STORIES - King’s novels weigh so heavily on our bookshelves - both literally and figuratively - that we often forget the man’s won an O Henry Award (in 1996, for “The Man in the Black Suit”), pretty much the highest honor there is for short fiction.
King started his career writing what would be classic short stories for … well, not the most classic (or classiest) of publications - namely men’s magazines - but he has since moved on to such bastions of the literary short story as Esquire, The New Yorker and The Paris Review, to name only a few.
While his earliest tales, like most of those collected in Night Shift and Skeleton Crew tend toward straight-forward scares designed to sell to specific markets, King’s best and most ambitious experimentation in literary structure have happened in his short stories rather than his novels. “Umney’s Last Case” (from Nightmares & Dreamscapes), for instance, is full-on metafiction, while tales like “N.” and “Harvey’s Dream” (both from Just After Sunset) play with the reliability (and perhaps even sanity) of their narrators - with “N.” being an original take on the epistolary tale, told via the characters’ letters and journals.
King’s true genius, however, is taking stories in his own preferred genres of horror and the supernatural and twisting the tropes, standing them on their heads. For example, “1408” (from Everything’s Eventual) is a deliciously over-the-top haunted house (well, haunted hotel room) story that simply should not work, but King is so expert at taking his time to first develop believable characters and then providing specific eerie details with striking imagery that what might be laughable in even most other horror authors’ hands turns into one of the most truly horrifying stories of the modern era. (Do yourself a favor and check out the audio version of King reading this story. It’s in a small collection called Blood & Cigarettes. King has a somewhat nasal voice, but you will be creeped out by the audio at the end of this tale!)
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8. PET SEMETARY - Easily the most psychologically devastating of Stephen King’s novels.
If you have children, if you value your family, this novel will address the worst of your fears and not be subtle about it.
One one level, this is a zombie tale, but on another, it’s a family drama. The dysfunction of the American family unit is a common enough theme in mainstream literature - it is, in fact, the theme at the core of the majority of modern literature, but, seeing families through the dark lens of horror, King can amplify and exaggerate what goes on at the dark heart of a family. As he did in The Shining, King does what few writers are willing to do - look into not only the affectionate and nurturing feelings we have for our families, but also our more possessive, needy and sometimes even resentful and burdensome feeling for the same. The entire book can be seen as a giant metaphor through which King explores these conflicting if not directly contradictory feelings.
The specific plot of Pet Sematary is difficult to summarize without spoilers. Suffice it to say the story owes a heavy debt to W.W. Jacobs’ classic story “The Monkey’s Paw” - though King’s take is even more dark and devastating. It’s a story about a man who truly loves his family and how far he is willing to go to protect and keep them.
This is one of King’s darkest and unflinching tales. There are few rays of light and the ending and specific events in the middle of the book have literally enraged fans. At the same time, during its initial rounds of publication - maybe exactly because of these controversial elements - it was King’s fastest-selling book.
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7. MISERY - Nary a spook to be seen in this brisk - and yet virtuoso - novel made famous by the fairly faithful Rob Reiner film, for which Cathy Bates won an Oscar as Best Actress.
Keeping the suspense torqued from the first scene, King manages to make even scenes excerpted from tacky romance novels add to the tension.
The novel’s protagonist is Paul Sheldon, a writer of the Misery Chastain novels. Thanks to an alcohol-induced bad decision, Sheldon wrecks his car and is recovered by “his number-one fan” - who happens to be, Annie Wilkes, a truly psychopathic nurse addicted to his novel. Problem is, Paul’s recently killed Misery off and the intent of the road trip was to deliver a new, rough, totally different kind of novel.
This might be the most suspenseful of all of King’s novels. King usually writes long, especially when working at novel length. He is not Hemingway. The discussion of brevity as a good or bad thing in fiction is for another forum, but in this novel, King seems to consciously write short, and is the better for it. Annie keeps Sheldon as a prisoner, her own personal writer, but he’s smart enough to escape during her all-to-quick trips from her isolated home to town for necessary errands, and this is when the tension is ratcheted the highest - these densely-packed, utterly intense moments when Sheldon discovers the twisted details of Annie Wilkes’ background.
There are several gory moments - I won’t include a spoiler, in case you haven’t seen the famous movie scene - but these are redeemed (as if they need to be) by Sheldon’s perseverance and the ultimately satisfying ending.
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6. IT - Although Pennywise the Clown, immortalized in the TV miniseries by Tim Curry, is the primary, show-stealing monster in Stephen King’s It, the novel serves, more or less, as a veritable encyclopedia of the horror genre. From serial killers to cosmic beings, from movie monsters to the horror of domestic abuse, from dark sewers to the dank halls of insane asylums, from the spectres of the past to the fear of what the future might hold, It includes an exploration of every possible angle of terror.
The plot bounces between two timelines - the group of central characters fighting the monster “It” first as young teenagers and then again thirty years later, as middle-aged adults. The monster, able to work at weak psyches, also enlists the aid of local bullies who grow up to be all-out psychopaths.
The non-linear telling of the fight against the monster in two different eras is the technical standout of this long (1000-pages-plus) and challenging novel, but, unfortunately, the ending of the book gets some flak from readers and fans, as it starts to clamber through the territory of symbolism with a very overt and, for many readers, queasiness-inducing metaphor for gaining adulthood.
Still, It makes us feel the hurts and terrors of not only childhood, but adulthood as well, and in scene after scene, we are reminded we are in the hands of a master storyteller and entertainer. While The Dark Tower series proper, with all seven books considered as a unit, is far longer - and It could technically be said to be part of the Dark Tower mythos, as could virtually any of King’s supernatural books - It remains King’s ultimate achievement in scale and scope of setting. He would not try anything as long again for a quarter of a century, until 2009’s Under the Dome - which, as you’ll see, is much farther down this list...
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5. 11/22/63 - King produced so many seminal works of horror during the earlier decade or two of his more than forty years as a writer, that it’s sometimes difficult to give proper credit to later novels and stories, no matter their genre. King has experienced something of a literary renewal in recent years - I won’t use the word “comeback,” as he was never exactly gone - and 11/22/63 is his best novel of that era.
On the surface, the plot would seem to be among the most hackneyed possible - a man goes back in time to try to stop the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But King eases the reader into the time travel aspect, getting the mechanics out of the way quickly and almost dismissing them, focusing on nostalgia and exquisite period detail.
Soon the reader is deeply involved in cross-country and cross-time adventures, and King combines research and expert characterization to bring such figures as Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife and other historical confidants of Oswald’s to life.
The book is filled with technical and literary invention. Whether he is having the protagonist cobble together remote listening devices from the early 1960s equipment available to him or working in a sweet, charming scene between two characters from still-innocent characters whom fans will know eventually go through the wringer in King’s novel It, the reader is swept along, engrossed.
King also handles well the potentially sticky problem of altered timelines, and the ending - concocted by King’s writer son Joe Hill as a slight alternate to what King originally had in mind - should satisfy most readers despite being bittersweet.
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4. THE TALISMAN (w/ PETER STRAUB) - Sprawling and epic, King combined forces with fellow bestselling horror author Peter Straub for 1984’s The Talisman. Weaving in elements of books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, King and Straub tell the lengthy tale of Jack Sawyer, a twelve-year-old who learns to flip between our world and The Territories, a medieval fantasy land, which parallels many elements of modern America.
Jack embarks on a cross-country quest to retrieve the titular magic item and save the life of his dying mother. Jack’s parents’ former business partner, Morgan Sloat and his “Twinner” - many people have counterparts in The Territories - are among his most formidable antagonists, while a benevolent sixteen-year-old werewolf - named simply “Wolf” - is often cited as one of readers’ favorite characters in King’s vast universe.
King and Straub also use the novel to make various larger statements about modern America which still hold up today, though the book was written decades ago. For example, Jack and Wolf must travel through a large section of The Territories called The Blasted Lands, a vast radioactive wasteland caused by spillover of nuclear testing in our world.
The sequel, Black House, tends to divide fans. It’s more complex and dense, with the writing having more stylistic variance and experimentation. And while The Talisman focuses mainly on fantasy and horror, Black House throws even more genres into the mix, namely hard-boiled noir mystery and police procedural with bloodier and even more surreal elements than the original. The sequel is, overall, much darker than the more traditionally epic fantasy of The Talisman, and the sometimes heavy-handed inclusion of several elements of King’s Dark Tower series further complicate things for the casual reader.
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3. THE SHINING - King’s third novel was turned into an iconic film by Stanley Kubrick and, much later, into a television mini-series scripted by King himself, but the book nonetheless holds secrets and pleasures as well as a level of tension and a build-up of suspense unparalleled by either screen adaptation.
The first hundred pages or so of the novel is little more than characterization as the reader gets to know the Torrance family and their dysfunctional ins and outs before the eventual antagonist - The Overlook, a haunted hotel - figures too much into the plot . This might sound like a detriment, but it’s actually a genius move by King - we see the family as a real, believable unit, with real, believable problems. Despite his reputation as a scaremonger, King is a deft enough writer to hold his own in this more mainstream territory, so that when the family finally moves into a haunted hotel, we see how the multiple ghosts and the supernatural “engine” of the monstrous place amplify young Danny Torrance’s latent psychic abilities as well as the psychological and familial problems already plaguing mother, father and son.
While King’s previous book, Salem’s Lot, painted on the broad canvas of an entire town, the focus here is tight, focusing on a minimal cast and the isolated, claustrophobic setting of the snowbound hotel. There is almost literally no escape or outside help possibly available to the Torrance family once the horrors begin in earnest, plus King builds in a ticking time bomb in the form of an untended boiler in the basement.
The ghosts in this novel are genuinely menacing and creepy - and they’re all the worse because they truly do wish to consume and psychologically destroy the family, especially its youngest and most vulnerable member. At the same time, King adds themes of friendship and mentorship in the form of Dick Holloran, a slightly psychic cook at the The Overlook, and there is, in the end, a sense of redemption and hope as well.
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2. SALEM’S LOT – Salem’s Lot is a vampire novel, and one of the best – no romances between 18-year-olds and post-centenarians, thank God – but it’s also a haunted house novel, a crime novel and something of an indictment of smalltown politics, just to mention a few of its major aspects.
And it’s one of the surprisingly few horror novels that harken back to the original, to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In both novels, the central head vampire (in this case, a real badass named Barlowe) is as much a presence looming over the entire plot and indeed the entire feel of the novel as he is merely a character in the book. This is what vampires should really be all about – they’re not just gore-soaked neck-biters or doe-eyed forlorn lovers, they’re overwhelmingly powerful, inescapable immortal evil, sucking your soul, your very will to fight away from you. (The epic battle between Barlowe and Callahan, the town’s priest, is a perfect example of this.)
Only King’s second novel, Salem’s Lot expands on everything he did right in Carrie. We have the overview and calling-to-task of society and the interplay of story threads, but here everything is done on a larger, grander scale – the social mores King is examining have moved way beyond high school, and the level of tension and breadth of the characters has grown up as well. King is known for mastering the art of presenting the entire scope of American small towns, but this is where he did it first, and it’s arguably the equal of his longer future achievements.
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1. THE STAND – This lengthy novel - over 1,000 pages - is, quite simply put, Stephen King’s true magnum opus – yes, most will say The Dark Tower series is King’s great epic work, his big lifetime achievement, but in truth The Stand, while technically part of the larger body encompassed by The Dark Tower, is also his only massively popular work likely to be embraced by every level of his fandom. Whether they know King from his books, from Netflix, from merely his reputation, The Stand is the work that everyone has heard tell about.
When a super-flu destroys most of the world’s population, the final remaining contingents of good and evil must band together under the enveloping arms of unlikely leaders and travel cross-country to even more unlikely destinations. A true epic, the tale encompasses the travails of geniuses and simpletons, cowards and heroes, generals, mercenaries and ordinary folks as they each, in turn, do everything they can for their side. There are moments when pure magic enters their lives, but, to King’s credit, even though they’re far removed from the conventions of our everyday world, most of the events are couched in stark reality, despite the fantastical goings-on.
While the book vexes some readers, as it contains not only King’s most controversial climax but also his most controversial ending – an ending which is more a question than a conclusion - The Stand remains his most endearing and engaging work.
Originally only 800 pages or so in length, it was expanded into an author-preferred “uncut edition” in 1990, the version which has since become the standard.
Author’s Afterword: I sincerely hope this list has been of some help to you in your appreciation of King’s work. It was a joy to revisit all of these novels while compiling this list - they’ve each been a great influence on my own work and my outlook on writing and life. Again, if you’d like to chat about King, horror or writing, feel free to hit me up on Twitter - @davidbainaa. Also, If you enjoyed this overview of the best of King’s work, please consider leaving a review. Word-of-mouth is crucial for any author to succeed. Even if your review’s only a line or two; it would make all the difference and would be very much appreciated!
THE BEST STEPHEN KING BOOKS, RANKED IN ORDER
by
David Bain
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This list is subjective, presented in hopes of offering King fans new and old a brief, handy overview and exploration of this beloved author’s books.
For new fans - or newcomers considering delving into King’s fiction - King’s immense body of work can be daunting, overwhelming even, especially given that King, while known for horror fiction, has also produced works which could be classifiable in many other genres, from mystery to mainstream, from historical fiction to nonfiction overviews of his craft .
My hope is that this list can provide an easily digestible menu potential King readers can cross-reference with their own interests. It's my wish to provide insights into where they might want start or what they might want to read next.
The print and audio editions of this chapbook were published in July 2015 and do not include any of King’s works published after that time, though I’m planning to update this blog post periodically, time allowing.
If you feel like chatting with me about any of King’s works, why not hit me up on Twitter at @davidbainaa!
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Let the countdown begin…
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25. FIRESTARTER - King’s eighth novel is a chase novel, a road novel and certainly a suspenseful thriller. It also continues his fascination with children with psychic or supernatural abilities, which we also see in several books from the same general earlier era of his writing career, books like Carrie and The Shining.
In this case the protagonist is Charlie McGee, a pyrokinetic, a girl who can start fires with her mind. Charlie’s parents met during a government test of a drug referred to as “Lot 6” which had hallucinogenic effects not unlike LSD, but which left Charlie’s father, Andy, with “the push” - the ability to psychically force or encourage responses and actions in others and her mother with minor telekinesis - the power to move objects without touching them. Charlie’s powers, however, are on a completely different level from her parents - she can immolate entire structures at will and her power only seems to be increasing with no limit becoming apparent.
Charlie and her father are on the run from “The Shop”, the shadowy government association behind the drug tests. The novel begins in media res as Charlie and her dad are trying to outrun agents, but we soon learn that her mother was killed in a botched Shop attempt to abduct Charlie.
Soon we meet one of King’s many interesting villains, John Rainbird, a Cherokee war veteran who is also a ruthless assassin for The Shop.
The novel is filled with twists and unexpected turns as well as ever-present danger. It’s a quickly-read page-turner, and the only reason it isn’t higher on the list is because King has so many iconic characters and books that, while this might be a standout in another author’s catalog, it’s simply “another book” in King’s.
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24. THE RUNNING MAN - Originally published in 1985, Stephen King and his publisher NAL allowed The Bachman Books, a collection of four short novels written early in King’s career and originally released under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, to go out of print. King was concerned about the novel Rage, which is about a school hostage situation and shooting and is alleged to have inspired similar real-life incidents. The remaining Bachman books have subsequently been released as stand-alone novels (except in the U.K., where the collection is still published as a whole, albeit without Rage amongst its contents.)
The remaining novels include The Long Walk, about a futuristic dictatorship with a Hunger Games-like endurance walking competition and Roadwork, about a man driven to extreme measures and the edge of his sanity after his work, home and family life collapse. Both of these are worthy novels - Rage is as well, though it’s certainly understandable why King chose to censor it.
The best of The Bachman Books, however, is The Running Man. The premise is again somewhat similar to The Hunger Games. In a future world overrun with economic and social strife, the game show of the title allows contestants to go anywhere in the world with professional “Hunters” pursuing them.
There are exactly 101 chapters, counting down from 100 to zero, with the ending being one of King’s most adrenaline-fueled and satisfying. Even though The Running Man is early within the scope of King’s works, it’s one of his most tense and action-filled outings.
It is worth briefly noting that the movie version of The Running Man starring Arnold Schwarzenegger bears little resemblance to the novel beyond the basic premise.
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23. THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON - This short novel has its detractors - it’s mostly the story of a nine-year-old girl lost in the woods, the physical and mental challenges she must face and overcome, and her personal interior mythology, which both expands over the course of her sometimes surreal journey and helps her find and focus the mental wherewithal to keep going and complete the journey, taking on the endless hurdles - many of them seemingly insurmountable - as they come.
Naysayers find the young heroine too plucky, too verbose and too knowledgeable for her age, but for others, this is exactly what makes Trisha McFarland so appealing.
As usual with King, the story hooks the reader (at least those readers whom it does hook) with its specifics - Trisha’s love for the Red Sox pitcher of the title, for instance, a detail which at first seems minor character-building, but which eventually figures into the larger plot.
While the novel takes the form of an episodic adventure not unlike one that might have been written “for boys” in ages past - think Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe or several of Jack London’s novels - this “girl against nature” story stands a lot of the old tropes on their heads. It certainly updates the “survival gear”, for instance - Trisha’s primary resources are her Gameboy and Walkman and prepackaged snacks, for instance.
While it may not be to everyone’s taste - some argue The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is more YA than adult (and there is a pop-up book (albeit not one intended for your toddler), the novel stands as further proof that King has far more range than he’s generally given credit for.
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22. CUJO - The book that gave hundreds of canines across the globe their name. Most of the novel Cujo is a set-piece - a woman and her young son trapped in a broken-down car in the dooryard of an isolated farm on a hot day with a rabid St. Bernard roaming outside.
That is, more or less, literally the entire plot. There’s some story set-up to get Donna and her son Tad into the situation, as well as some asides showing the reader various aspects of King’s fictional town of Castle Rock, and there are a few people looking for the mother and son, adding to the tension, but most of the book is centered in the car in front of the farmhouse. The setting is minimal, as it might be in a stage play. (King has returned to this set-piece kind of storytelling a few more times in his career, notably in Gerald’s Game,.)
The limited scope and scale of the novel is an interesting counterpoint to King’s huge sprawling novels, like his It or The Stand or The Dark Tower series. In King’s hands, the claustrophobic setting only adds to the tension, rather than limiting it.
King discusses Cujo in On Writing, saying he doesn’t remember writing very much of the book as it was created while he was battling a heavy drinking problem, but he likes the novel and wishes he could remember enjoying the writing process.
It should be noted that many readers have a problem with the ending - which was indeed changed quite drastically for the popular 1983 filmed version.
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21. DUMA KEY - This is another novel that fans hailed as a “return to form” for King, but the truth is that, despite a few lesser works spread throughout a long career, King’s never really had a lasting bad stretch. Duma Key is nonetheless a strong, stand-out novel in King’s oeuvre.
Published in 2008, the book is, at least in part, a meditation on art, particularly the nature of its creation and its potential for destruction as well as healing.
The story’s protagonist is Edgar Freemantle, a construction contractor who loses an arm and suffers head injuries in an accident while on the job in Minnesota - a new setting for King. Taking his doctor’s advice, Freemantle relocates to the titular island in Florida - another setting previously unexplored in King novels. Soon after moving into “Big Pink” - the name of his conch-colored beachside vacation house, Freemantle begins to play around with his former hobby of sketching and soon turns to painting. It’s not long before Freemantle notices a psychic quality to his painting, as he learns things about his wife and daughter’s activities by painting them before he has verification in the real world.
To say much more would be to give too much away, but King only ratchets up the tension from this point, as Freemantle begins to sell his paintings, meanwhile discovering that there might be a haunting and malevolent supernatural entity in the waters of Duma Key that’s influencing his work - and other aspects of his life as well.
A little long-winded in spots, Duma Key offers plenty of scares and suspense, plus a wholly original paranormal enemy.
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20. UNDER THE DOME - King’s third-longest novel, after the uncut version of The Stand (1,153 pages) and It (1,138 pages). Some consider it a big, bloated whale of a book with a so-so, out-of-the-blue ending, but most find it a fascinating tale of what happens when the members of a community are stuck with and must come to terms with each other after an literal dome, impenetrable from either side, drops down over the town from nowhere - and the result is not always pretty for the myriad characters involved.
The book is, in many ways, a return to King’s earlier populist storytelling - much more of a straight-forward, character-driven adventure than much of his more recent material. That is to say, King basically sets up the premise of the novel and then lets the characters he’s established go at it, feuding, plotting and doing what they can or must in order to survive. The book can be read strictly on the surface, as a thrilling series of events, though it can also be seen as having plenty of subtext dealing with politics and environmental issues.
While the novel has resulted in a relatively popular television program, the tv show starts out faithful but eventually switches gears and strikes out on its own plot course.
The book drew controversy due to the premise of a small town being stuck under a dome having previously appeared as the focus of The Simpson’s Movie, but King had twice before tried to write the book - both uncompleted versions had gone under the working title of The Cannibals - and he eventually published draft pdf versions of the novel on his website which were obviously produced long before the cartoon movie.
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19. KING’S NOVELLAS - King has four collections of novellas (short novels), Different Seasons, Four Past Midnight, Full Dark, No Stars and his most recent arguably the best of the three, If It Bleeds.
The earliest of the collections, Different Seasons, published in 1992, contains three novellas which have been turned into movies. Two of these films - Stand by Me, based on The Body, and The Shawshank Redemption, based on Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption - are iconic pieces of modern filmdom, among the most popular films ever made. The third, Apt Pupil, is, ahem, barely worth remembering - though the novella itself certainly has memorable images. Another tale, “The Breathing Method” is attempt on King’s part to tell a story in the manner of the Victorian “tale within a tale” and is only moderately successful.
Four Past Midnight is easily the least of the three collections. While two of the novellas have been filmed - the over-the-top television mini-series The Langoliers and the minor Johnny Depp vehicle Secret Window, Secret Garden - neither video version is particularly great, and it’s the same with the stories upon which they’re based, as well as the other two novellas herein: The Library Policeman and The Sun Dog. The stories here pass muster as horror stories, but none of them stand out when compared to the rest of the genre or even the rest of King’s catalog. Four Past Midnight is simply very mediocre King.
Full Dark, No Stars, on the other hand, provides some of King’s strongest storytelling in the shorter forms. There is the historical, slightly surreal “1922”, taking the form of a convoluted murder confession by an unreliable narrator. It is a masterful tale of supernatural revenge. “Big Driver” is a brutal, unflinching and very effective story of rape, violence and vengeance with enough twists to keep you reading despite the dark subject matter. “Fair Extension” might be the weakest of the four stories, but is at the same time a magnificent twist on the old “deal with the devil” trope. King makes no bones about the literal deal with the devil - it’s done in an almost tongue-in-cheek manner, but it’s where King takes the story from there that provides the deliciously devious pay-off. The final story, “A Good Marriage”, is the only one filmed so far; it’s a serial killer tale in which you might well see the first twist coming, but the ones after that will nab you!
His best collection of novellas, however, is his most recent, If It Bleeds, simply for the inclusion of "The Life of Chuck" This three-part tale, each section told in a different style, is something special. Somewhat experimental in structure,the story gives us nothing less than an overview of the importance, the grandness and the melancholy and mystery of every single human life. Also included are "Mr. Harrigan's Phone," a traditional horror piece; the title novella, which is really a sequel to King's novel The Outsider; and "Rat," which continues King's theme of writing about writers, but with such a great sense of creepiness, claustrophobia and worthy payoff that we can't fault him.
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18. JOYLAND - King has produced two shorter novels for Hard Case Crime, a publisher of paperback original hardboiled crime novels. They are Joyland and The Colorado Kid. Joyland is by far the better of the two.
It’s the story of Devin Jones, a college student who gets a summer job at the titular amusement park in a seaside town. A murder took place in the park in recent years, but the park has recovered and soon Devin finds himself adept at wearing the park’s Howie the Happy Hound mascot suit. He soon becomes interested in both the murder and a local woman, Annie, and her ill and handicapped son.
Joyland takes place in the early 1970s, and while there is some of King’s typical nostalgia for bygone eras, it’s less overwhelming than in some of his earlier work. King’s frequent trope of a handicapped character with special powers is also present, but again, there is a maturity to the presentation that might seem more heavy-handed in his older works.
While there are a few ghosts hanging around the park and the reader does eventually get to see them - sort of - the focus in Joyland is on real-life tensions and threats. The climactic showdown with the killer is thrilling and genuinely surprising, and the book’s denouement is effectively sentimental and true-to-life. King is often accused of overwriting and padding, but Joyland is a lean, smooth read leaving the reader with a memorable story that will only require a sitting or two to take in.
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17. DOCTOR SLEEP - This is the sequel to King’s The Shining, arriving 36 year’s after the earlier novel’s first publication.
The story picks up with, Danny Torrance, the psychic child from King’s classic novel (now just Dan), all grown up and fighting alcoholism - but not before we have a few scenes letting us know how Danny’s mentor, Dick Holloran, the cook from the haunted hotel in The Shining, taught him to “lock away” the ghosts he’s battled there.
We’re introduced to The True Knot, a band of roving psychics who travel in a caravan of Winnebagos and the like. These are a scary, well-characterized bunch, and they do some truly awful things on their journeys, as they gain sustenance from the pain and death of other psychics - mostly innocent, everyday mortals who don’t really know they’re psychic. It should be noted that while there is a lot of magic and wonder in this book, it contains one of the most horrific and agonizing death scenes in King’s entire canon - many reviewers note difficulty reading and dealing with the scene in question.
As noted, however, there is a certain sense of grandeur and marvel to this book - it delves into the territory of urban fantasy, a genre King doesn’t touch on much. There’s certainly a great deal of grit too, especially in the first half of the book as Dan works his way out of his problems with anger and booze - both of which he inherited from his long-dead father.
Despite the long stretch between the two books, Doctor Sleep serves as a satisfying continuation of Danny Torrence’s story. It would not be entirely necessary to read The Shining first - King provides enough clues and hints of backstory that the casual reader is unlikely to get lost - but, for all of Doctor Sleep’s merits, for those in search of chills and suspense, The Shining is a classic, and much higher on this list.
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16. THE DEAD ZONE - Even though this novel was turned into both a film and a television series, it’s often considered one of King’s minor works, as it’s a stand-alone novel without any significant connection to any other King milieu aside from the setting of the state of Maine.
However, with this being King’s sixth novel (at least under his own name - he’d also published at least one book as Richard Bachman), by this point of his career, with several eventual classics already under his belt, all of King’s writerly skills are in line, especially the pacing, suspense and characterization that make The Dead Zone such a page-turner.
The story deals with protagonist John Smith (yes, really), who, after an accident, wakes up from a years-long coma with the ability to see into some people’s lives via the sense of touch. Smith grapples with how he should use this ability and with the notoriety (both positive and negative) which it garners him. While Smith’s interior battles are interesting, it’s the overt plots and subplots into which his preternatural ability throws him that keep the reader turning the pages - namely a serial killer and the potential future into which an unbalanced political candidate might eventually throw not only the nation, but the world itself.
Published in 1979, The Dead Zone is steeped in 1970s politics, but one of King’s strengths has always seemed to be his ability to tell timeless stories despite the inclusion of “contemporary” details that don’t always age particularly well.
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15. THE GREEN MILE - Originally released as a serial, with a new volume being published every month for half a year, this historical novel is one of King’s most ambitious thematically, taking on religious and racial issues. Mostly set inside a bleak prison, the book nonetheless manages to incorporate a great deal of magical and fantastical elements.
The story is about Paul Edgecombe, a prison guard and the relationship he develops with a huge but simple-minded black inmate. As the plot progresses, Edgecombe soon discovers that Coffey has healing and other empathetic powers.
King, as he so often does, plays with time and memory - the book is in the form of a memoir which Edgecombe, more than 100 years old in the present, is writing in a nursing home.
King’s villains are almost always as intriguing as his protagonists, and The Green Mile is no exception. In addition to the vile inmates one might expect in a prison setting, one of Edgecombe’s fellow prison guards is truly despicable, and he serves as the catalyst of a couple of the novel’s more gut-wrenching scenes, including one that’s at the center of the serial chapter “The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix. The titular scene is truly among the most gruesome and difficult to read, emotionally speaking, of King’s entire oeuvre.
Despite its episodic origin, the novel as a whole reads well as a complete work - the serial format of the original publication virtually disappears for the reader of the complete volume in which the novel is now published.
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14. THE BILL HODGES TRILOGY - As of this writing, only the first two of the proposed trilogy of books featuring retired police detective Bill Hodges have been published, but MR. MERCEDES and FINDERS KEEPERS are riveting.
With nary a ghost or otherworldly element in sight - though King’s trademark grisly and macabre visions are certainly abundant - these books are pure twisting, turning, edge-of-your-seat thrillers. King keeps the surprises coming, and while the unusual group he gathers to look into the crimes perpetrated within the pages are interesting and engaging, the criminals are among his darkest and most believable.
Mr. Mercedes came out in 2014, the same year as King's interesting but ultimately lower-ranking (on this list) supernatural novel Revival, and introduced not only Hodges, but his young super-smart high school-aged assistant Jerome and off-kilter computer expert Holly.
Finders Keepers takes on an unusual structure, jumping back and forth several decades in time between two characters obsessed with the same writer for about the first third of the novel. One of these is a new antagonist operating in the 1970s. The other is a new protagonist, who was injured in the massacre which was the central event in Mr. Mercedes, and his family. Eventually all the threads merge and the main investigative team from Mr. Mercedes - Hodges, Jerome and Holly - finally enter into the plot for the tension-gripped second half.
The third book in the trilogy, originally announced as The Suicide King has been tentatively renamed End of Watch. No release date has been announced as of this writing.
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13. ON WRITING - King’s seminal book on his craft. Part how-to, part autobiography, it’s one of the best books out there on writing and the writing life. Published at the turn of the century, the book made Entertainment Weekly’s “New Classics” list, which noted the top 100 best books from 1983 to 2008 - it was the only one of King’s works to make the list.
There’s some relatively rote advice such as “adverbs are not your friend,” but the real gems are more in King’s attitudes and personal insights. For instance, the writing of the book was interrupted by a major turning point in King’s life, namely being hit by a van while he was walking along a country road. King details his recovery and his struggle to return to writing.
Another one of the more fascinating details is King’s inclusion of part of the first draft of the short story “1408.” With his massive output and doorstopper-sized novels, many critics accuse him of only doing a first draft, but the sample shows a lot of care, filled as it is with King’s own notations, cross-outs, circles and arrows, etc.
Also notable is King’s suggested reading list at the end of the book. Several critics noted that it’s much more “literary” than they might have expected - this list was updated by King in 2010 for a tenth anniversary edition. (For an extensive - if now dated - list of King’s favorite then-contemporary horror novels, check out his 1981 nonfiction book Danse Macabre. The books are all still great.)
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12. CARRIE - Stephen King’s first novel. And yet it holds the precursors of almost every literary technique and focus King eventually perfects. First of all, it has a strong, if flawed, female protagonist. All of King’s protagonists are flawed - as good fictional protagonists should be - but let it also be said that strong female characters were still the exception rather than the rule when this novel first came out in 1974 - especially in horror fiction - and that King has subsequently continued this streak of real, competent and kick-butt females in his fiction from Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game through ...well, you can practically pick your King novel, there’s likely a fairly strong woman in it. It also seeks, within its relatively short page count - especially given King’s future output - to present a wide cross-section of its fictional setting, the town of Chamberlain, Maine, and seeks to combine genre with more literary values - the novel is, for example, mostly epistolary in its presentation, using newspaper clippings, letters, magazine clippings and so forth to tell its tale.
All this said, Carrie White, a telekinetic teenager, initially unaware of her extrasensory abilities, and certainly unaware of their ultimate power, also sits among King’s most naive and vulnerable characters, thanks to her repressive mother, and that is the novel’s strength. Ever feel repressed? Well, Carrie is your girl. Every nerd everywhere identifies with her, even if we weren’t victims of the infamous and iconic “tampon scene” which starts the novel and, arguably launched King’s entire career - helped to no small degree by the iconic Brian DePalma movie.
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11. BAG OF BONES - This is, simply put, King’s best ghost story after The Shining. It won the year’s best novel awards for both the British Fantasy Awards and the Horror Writers’ Association’s Bram Stoker Awards.
King returns here to his career-long explorations of family, loss and the often tragic effects of the distant past on the present.
While the protagonist Mike Noonan is yet again a writer - King has, of course, been disparaged for having so many writers as main characters - this works as more than a mere convenience for King this time; the use of devices such as writer’s block and the weaving of supernatural clues into one of Noonan’s works in progress add to the chilling effects this time out.
Noonan, already depressed and unable to write after the death of his wife four years prior, is rattled by nightmares centered on his summer lake home in rural, unincorporated Maine. Facing his fears, he moves there and eventually begins to write again - and to dredge up his own ghosts as well as the town’s, meanwhile falling in love with a local single mother, Mattie Devore, incurring the wrath of her wealthy father-in-law, and developing something of a psychic connection with her daughter.
The audio version of this book is notable first of all because King reads it himself, but also because there’s music which figures into the plot, including a complete rendition of a song by Sara Tidwell - a long-ago black blues singer, now one of the ghosts figuring largely into the main storyline.
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10. THE DARK TOWER - There are die-hard fans who have never read King’s massive eight-book epic, and there are also fans who haven’t read anything but this series.
Mixing elements of science fiction, Old West imagery and the structure of epic fantasy quests like The Lord of the Rings, The Dark Tower travels between our own world, parallel dimensions, and the world of Roland the Gunslinger, who quests for a mythical tower, said to be the hub of all worlds, while his own world has fallen into disrepair and ruin.
While the novels tell one large story, most of King’s other novels - at most of them with supernatural elements - also fit into the mythos. For instance, the priest from Salem’s Lot turns up later in the series and joins Roland’s fellowship for a time.
With long gaps in the original publication history of many of the books, and considering that King started the core books of the series when he was nineteen, concluding them when he was sixty-two, the series can sometimes feel somewhat inconsistent and wandering. Indeed, King significantly revised and edited the first book in the series in 2003, after it had already been in publication for twenty-five years. The jumps in time - at least two of the novels, Wizard and Glass and The Wind through the Keyhole, are almost entirely backstory, taking the reader to eras long before the main thread of the epic - can be irksome to readers who like their stories told in a linear fashion. (Then again, the natures of memory and time are major themes of the work.)
Their minor flaws notwithstanding, the books are filled with stark imagery, presenting strong set-pieces along each step of the journey. The true value of the series is in the sometimes utterly surreal blending of genres which King achieves. The concept of an Old West gunslinger leading a drug addict, a wheelchair-bound woman and others through a world of ancient technologies run amok with Gothic horrors like werewolves and vampires around every corner, meanwhile hopping through portals to not only our world but still other surreal times and dimensions sounds completely absurd, but it’s with exactly this scenario that King has suspended the disbelief of millions of enthralled readers
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9. KING’S SHORT STORIES - King’s novels weigh so heavily on our bookshelves - both literally and figuratively - that we often forget the man’s won an O Henry Award (in 1996, for “The Man in the Black Suit”), pretty much the highest honor there is for short fiction.
King started his career writing what would be classic short stories for … well, not the most classic (or classiest) of publications - namely men’s magazines - but he has since moved on to such bastions of the literary short story as Esquire, The New Yorker and The Paris Review, to name only a few.
While his earliest tales, like most of those collected in Night Shift and Skeleton Crew tend toward straight-forward scares designed to sell to specific markets, King’s best and most ambitious experimentation in literary structure have happened in his short stories rather than his novels. “Umney’s Last Case” (from Nightmares & Dreamscapes), for instance, is full-on metafiction, while tales like “N.” and “Harvey’s Dream” (both from Just After Sunset) play with the reliability (and perhaps even sanity) of their narrators - with “N.” being an original take on the epistolary tale, told via the characters’ letters and journals.
King’s true genius, however, is taking stories in his own preferred genres of horror and the supernatural and twisting the tropes, standing them on their heads. For example, “1408” (from Everything’s Eventual) is a deliciously over-the-top haunted house (well, haunted hotel room) story that simply should not work, but King is so expert at taking his time to first develop believable characters and then providing specific eerie details with striking imagery that what might be laughable in even most other horror authors’ hands turns into one of the most truly horrifying stories of the modern era. (Do yourself a favor and check out the audio version of King reading this story. It’s in a small collection called Blood & Cigarettes. King has a somewhat nasal voice, but you will be creeped out by the audio at the end of this tale!)
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8. PET SEMETARY - Easily the most psychologically devastating of Stephen King’s novels.
If you have children, if you value your family, this novel will address the worst of your fears and not be subtle about it.
One one level, this is a zombie tale, but on another, it’s a family drama. The dysfunction of the American family unit is a common enough theme in mainstream literature - it is, in fact, the theme at the core of the majority of modern literature, but, seeing families through the dark lens of horror, King can amplify and exaggerate what goes on at the dark heart of a family. As he did in The Shining, King does what few writers are willing to do - look into not only the affectionate and nurturing feelings we have for our families, but also our more possessive, needy and sometimes even resentful and burdensome feeling for the same. The entire book can be seen as a giant metaphor through which King explores these conflicting if not directly contradictory feelings.
The specific plot of Pet Sematary is difficult to summarize without spoilers. Suffice it to say the story owes a heavy debt to W.W. Jacobs’ classic story “The Monkey’s Paw” - though King’s take is even more dark and devastating. It’s a story about a man who truly loves his family and how far he is willing to go to protect and keep them.
This is one of King’s darkest and unflinching tales. There are few rays of light and the ending and specific events in the middle of the book have literally enraged fans. At the same time, during its initial rounds of publication - maybe exactly because of these controversial elements - it was King’s fastest-selling book.
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7. MISERY - Nary a spook to be seen in this brisk - and yet virtuoso - novel made famous by the fairly faithful Rob Reiner film, for which Cathy Bates won an Oscar as Best Actress.
Keeping the suspense torqued from the first scene, King manages to make even scenes excerpted from tacky romance novels add to the tension.
The novel’s protagonist is Paul Sheldon, a writer of the Misery Chastain novels. Thanks to an alcohol-induced bad decision, Sheldon wrecks his car and is recovered by “his number-one fan” - who happens to be, Annie Wilkes, a truly psychopathic nurse addicted to his novel. Problem is, Paul’s recently killed Misery off and the intent of the road trip was to deliver a new, rough, totally different kind of novel.
This might be the most suspenseful of all of King’s novels. King usually writes long, especially when working at novel length. He is not Hemingway. The discussion of brevity as a good or bad thing in fiction is for another forum, but in this novel, King seems to consciously write short, and is the better for it. Annie keeps Sheldon as a prisoner, her own personal writer, but he’s smart enough to escape during her all-to-quick trips from her isolated home to town for necessary errands, and this is when the tension is ratcheted the highest - these densely-packed, utterly intense moments when Sheldon discovers the twisted details of Annie Wilkes’ background.
There are several gory moments - I won’t include a spoiler, in case you haven’t seen the famous movie scene - but these are redeemed (as if they need to be) by Sheldon’s perseverance and the ultimately satisfying ending.
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6. IT - Although Pennywise the Clown, immortalized in the TV miniseries by Tim Curry, is the primary, show-stealing monster in Stephen King’s It, the novel serves, more or less, as a veritable encyclopedia of the horror genre. From serial killers to cosmic beings, from movie monsters to the horror of domestic abuse, from dark sewers to the dank halls of insane asylums, from the spectres of the past to the fear of what the future might hold, It includes an exploration of every possible angle of terror.
The plot bounces between two timelines - the group of central characters fighting the monster “It” first as young teenagers and then again thirty years later, as middle-aged adults. The monster, able to work at weak psyches, also enlists the aid of local bullies who grow up to be all-out psychopaths.
The non-linear telling of the fight against the monster in two different eras is the technical standout of this long (1000-pages-plus) and challenging novel, but, unfortunately, the ending of the book gets some flak from readers and fans, as it starts to clamber through the territory of symbolism with a very overt and, for many readers, queasiness-inducing metaphor for gaining adulthood.
Still, It makes us feel the hurts and terrors of not only childhood, but adulthood as well, and in scene after scene, we are reminded we are in the hands of a master storyteller and entertainer. While The Dark Tower series proper, with all seven books considered as a unit, is far longer - and It could technically be said to be part of the Dark Tower mythos, as could virtually any of King’s supernatural books - It remains King’s ultimate achievement in scale and scope of setting. He would not try anything as long again for a quarter of a century, until 2009’s Under the Dome - which, as you’ll see, is much farther down this list...
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5. 11/22/63 - King produced so many seminal works of horror during the earlier decade or two of his more than forty years as a writer, that it’s sometimes difficult to give proper credit to later novels and stories, no matter their genre. King has experienced something of a literary renewal in recent years - I won’t use the word “comeback,” as he was never exactly gone - and 11/22/63 is his best novel of that era.
On the surface, the plot would seem to be among the most hackneyed possible - a man goes back in time to try to stop the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But King eases the reader into the time travel aspect, getting the mechanics out of the way quickly and almost dismissing them, focusing on nostalgia and exquisite period detail.
Soon the reader is deeply involved in cross-country and cross-time adventures, and King combines research and expert characterization to bring such figures as Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife and other historical confidants of Oswald’s to life.
The book is filled with technical and literary invention. Whether he is having the protagonist cobble together remote listening devices from the early 1960s equipment available to him or working in a sweet, charming scene between two characters from still-innocent characters whom fans will know eventually go through the wringer in King’s novel It, the reader is swept along, engrossed.
King also handles well the potentially sticky problem of altered timelines, and the ending - concocted by King’s writer son Joe Hill as a slight alternate to what King originally had in mind - should satisfy most readers despite being bittersweet.
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4. THE TALISMAN (w/ PETER STRAUB) - Sprawling and epic, King combined forces with fellow bestselling horror author Peter Straub for 1984’s The Talisman. Weaving in elements of books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, King and Straub tell the lengthy tale of Jack Sawyer, a twelve-year-old who learns to flip between our world and The Territories, a medieval fantasy land, which parallels many elements of modern America.
Jack embarks on a cross-country quest to retrieve the titular magic item and save the life of his dying mother. Jack’s parents’ former business partner, Morgan Sloat and his “Twinner” - many people have counterparts in The Territories - are among his most formidable antagonists, while a benevolent sixteen-year-old werewolf - named simply “Wolf” - is often cited as one of readers’ favorite characters in King’s vast universe.
King and Straub also use the novel to make various larger statements about modern America which still hold up today, though the book was written decades ago. For example, Jack and Wolf must travel through a large section of The Territories called The Blasted Lands, a vast radioactive wasteland caused by spillover of nuclear testing in our world.
The sequel, Black House, tends to divide fans. It’s more complex and dense, with the writing having more stylistic variance and experimentation. And while The Talisman focuses mainly on fantasy and horror, Black House throws even more genres into the mix, namely hard-boiled noir mystery and police procedural with bloodier and even more surreal elements than the original. The sequel is, overall, much darker than the more traditionally epic fantasy of The Talisman, and the sometimes heavy-handed inclusion of several elements of King’s Dark Tower series further complicate things for the casual reader.
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3. THE SHINING - King’s third novel was turned into an iconic film by Stanley Kubrick and, much later, into a television mini-series scripted by King himself, but the book nonetheless holds secrets and pleasures as well as a level of tension and a build-up of suspense unparalleled by either screen adaptation.
The first hundred pages or so of the novel is little more than characterization as the reader gets to know the Torrance family and their dysfunctional ins and outs before the eventual antagonist - The Overlook, a haunted hotel - figures too much into the plot . This might sound like a detriment, but it’s actually a genius move by King - we see the family as a real, believable unit, with real, believable problems. Despite his reputation as a scaremonger, King is a deft enough writer to hold his own in this more mainstream territory, so that when the family finally moves into a haunted hotel, we see how the multiple ghosts and the supernatural “engine” of the monstrous place amplify young Danny Torrance’s latent psychic abilities as well as the psychological and familial problems already plaguing mother, father and son.
While King’s previous book, Salem’s Lot, painted on the broad canvas of an entire town, the focus here is tight, focusing on a minimal cast and the isolated, claustrophobic setting of the snowbound hotel. There is almost literally no escape or outside help possibly available to the Torrance family once the horrors begin in earnest, plus King builds in a ticking time bomb in the form of an untended boiler in the basement.
The ghosts in this novel are genuinely menacing and creepy - and they’re all the worse because they truly do wish to consume and psychologically destroy the family, especially its youngest and most vulnerable member. At the same time, King adds themes of friendship and mentorship in the form of Dick Holloran, a slightly psychic cook at the The Overlook, and there is, in the end, a sense of redemption and hope as well.
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2. SALEM’S LOT – Salem’s Lot is a vampire novel, and one of the best – no romances between 18-year-olds and post-centenarians, thank God – but it’s also a haunted house novel, a crime novel and something of an indictment of smalltown politics, just to mention a few of its major aspects.
And it’s one of the surprisingly few horror novels that harken back to the original, to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In both novels, the central head vampire (in this case, a real badass named Barlowe) is as much a presence looming over the entire plot and indeed the entire feel of the novel as he is merely a character in the book. This is what vampires should really be all about – they’re not just gore-soaked neck-biters or doe-eyed forlorn lovers, they’re overwhelmingly powerful, inescapable immortal evil, sucking your soul, your very will to fight away from you. (The epic battle between Barlowe and Callahan, the town’s priest, is a perfect example of this.)
Only King’s second novel, Salem’s Lot expands on everything he did right in Carrie. We have the overview and calling-to-task of society and the interplay of story threads, but here everything is done on a larger, grander scale – the social mores King is examining have moved way beyond high school, and the level of tension and breadth of the characters has grown up as well. King is known for mastering the art of presenting the entire scope of American small towns, but this is where he did it first, and it’s arguably the equal of his longer future achievements.
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1. THE STAND – This lengthy novel - over 1,000 pages - is, quite simply put, Stephen King’s true magnum opus – yes, most will say The Dark Tower series is King’s great epic work, his big lifetime achievement, but in truth The Stand, while technically part of the larger body encompassed by The Dark Tower, is also his only massively popular work likely to be embraced by every level of his fandom. Whether they know King from his books, from Netflix, from merely his reputation, The Stand is the work that everyone has heard tell about.
When a super-flu destroys most of the world’s population, the final remaining contingents of good and evil must band together under the enveloping arms of unlikely leaders and travel cross-country to even more unlikely destinations. A true epic, the tale encompasses the travails of geniuses and simpletons, cowards and heroes, generals, mercenaries and ordinary folks as they each, in turn, do everything they can for their side. There are moments when pure magic enters their lives, but, to King’s credit, even though they’re far removed from the conventions of our everyday world, most of the events are couched in stark reality, despite the fantastical goings-on.
While the book vexes some readers, as it contains not only King’s most controversial climax but also his most controversial ending – an ending which is more a question than a conclusion - The Stand remains his most endearing and engaging work.
Originally only 800 pages or so in length, it was expanded into an author-preferred “uncut edition” in 1990, the version which has since become the standard.
Author’s Afterword: I sincerely hope this list has been of some help to you in your appreciation of King’s work. It was a joy to revisit all of these novels while compiling this list - they’ve each been a great influence on my own work and my outlook on writing and life. Again, if you’d like to chat about King, horror or writing, feel free to hit me up on Twitter - @davidbainaa. Also, If you enjoyed this overview of the best of King’s work, please consider leaving a review. Word-of-mouth is crucial for any author to succeed. Even if your review’s only a line or two; it would make all the difference and would be very much appreciated!