There will probably never be another author like Stephen King. I’m not sure there ever could be.
Since the publication of his first novel, Carrie, fifty years ago, King has held dominion over the landscape of horror. He arrived during a resurgent interest in all things frightening–following the success of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971)—and quickly set about reshaping the genre in his own image. King has regularly published two or three books per year, a stream of words flowing incessantly west toward Hollywood. Almost everything he has ever written has been optioned or adapted for the screen, in some cases several times.
Such prolificacy has often led to sniffing criticism from those who consider him “merely” a horror writer (as if horror is anything “mere”). But for millions of readers and writers, he is our North Star, our Southern Cross. We navigate by him. I have interviewed hundreds of horror writers from all across the genre’s wide spectrum, and when asked for their inspirations and their gateways to fearful fiction, so many leap immediately to King. Nat Cassidy, author of 2022’s Mary: An Awakening of Terror, put it best, describing King as his “mother tongue.” He is not just a writer; he is an industry, an aesthetic, a genre of one.
Of course, in so long and varied a career, there are exhilarating highs, a few bewildering lows, and many unexpected diversions. The following list is an attempt to rank King’s published work in all its darkness, weatherworn beauty, and surprising weirdness. The man has written seventy-seven books, so some nod to brevity is required. Any published stories compiled within a larger collection will not be ranked singularly. That still leaves sixty-plus novels and more than a dozen collections of tales. Together, they form a dark constellation of stories that generations have traced, in wonder and fear and hope.
Below, I’ve ranked King's books in order from worst to best. Let’s get started.
That Faithful has made this list at all is a sign of my obsessive completionism. This chronicle of the Boston Red Sox’s 2004 season is almost unreadable to anyone who isn’t an aficionado of baseball. Early passages in which King and fellow über-fan O’Nan head to off-season training in Florida do capture something of the enthusiasm and nostalgia for the Great American Pastime. Beyond that, Faithful is a series of stats and fixtures as obscure as King’s most convoluted mythologies. A book for baseball fans only.
King’s first venture with the Hard Case Crime imprint is the most minor of novellas. The Colorado Kid is a half-baked tale of small-town journalism and an unsolved crime. For two hundred pages King teases us with the ingenuity of the mystery—seemingly inspired by the case of the Somerton Man—before…simply leaving it unresolved. Though the point is that some things can never be adequately explained, such a philosophy feels like a breach in the contract between reader and mystery writer.
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Around the world a sleeping sickness plunges women into a strange, cocooned state. If awakened, they turn homicidal. King and his son screw this global story down to a small town and its prison, where the plague is revealed to be something far odder and more mystical. It’s a bold attempt to tell a large-scale, female-focused story, but the politics, the metaphysics, and the characters never feel fully developed. It has all the hallmarks of classic King, but it’s his most unengaging novel.
The early-to-mid noughties saw the zombie shamble back to the forefront of the horror scene. At the same time, nineties technophobia got a new burst of digital energy. Cell brings the two together, with a malicious cell-phone signal turning the populace into the very-next-thing-to-undead. Despite its barnstorming first chapter and a moving, uncharacteristically ambiguous ending, Cell is often considered the “worst” Stephen King novel. It’s hard to argue. Characters are flatter than usual, King has done the dream-invading antagonist far better elsewhere, and rather ironically for a story structured around a single-minded road trip, the book never feels like it has any particular destination in mind.
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This oh-so-weird tale of “shit weasels” and aliens made of cancer is the other candidate for King’s least-loved novel. In this case, it’s an opinion that the author largely shares. There is some justification here; King wrote the book while recovering from his life-threatening car accident, and he confesses that the book was written under the influence of OxyContin. It shows. A superbly graphic opening (I repeat: SHIT WEASELS) is stretched too far and too thin. The final third is a confusion of italicised fragments as the heroes fight the alien foe on a psychological battlefield. Kudos for taking us back to Derry, where it is hinted that a great villain still slumbers, but it’s not enough to save this scatological misfire.
Roughly once a decade, King releases a collection of novellas that show his gift for building character and worlds on a smaller scale. His most recent offering is the weakest, relying too often on rehashed themes. The title story is an entirely unnecessary sequel to The Outsider (2017), led by a character King loves but who leaves me cold. Mr. Harrigan’s Phone is a campfire tale of friendship between a teenage boy and an old man, featuring King’s patented Haunted Technology™. Rat is a Poe-esque story of madness and creative isolation that he’s already done so much more effectively several times before. Only The Life of Chuck swings for greatness. An elegiac experiment about the difference a single life can make, it’s genuinely lovely, but it doesn’t save the collection from feeling a little disposable.
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Cycle of the Werewolf began as an idea for a spooky calendar before King expanded it into an illustrated novella, organised around the monthly lycanthropic attacks on the town of Tarker’s Mills. As the bodies mount up, Marty Coslaw, a ten-year-old in a wheelchair, investigates which of the townsfolk howl with the moon. Cycle is King’s slightest book; despite the pulpy gorgeousness of Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations, the format is unavoidably superficial. Perhaps the greatest shame is that it means we never got a full-blooded werewolf novel from King.
If King occasionally repeats himself, well, it’s partly due to his obsession with certain themes, and partly because…c’mon…after fifty years and seventy-seven books, how could there not be retrodden ground? It’s exceedingly rare that King fails to bring something new to the mix, however, and Later does offer a particularly malicious ghost and a thrilling link to one of the author’s truly great novels. But otherwise it’s a strangely enervated trip to his school of supernaturally gifted children. Like The Colorado Kid, it’s published under the Hard Case Crime imprint, but whereas that book had a damp squib of an ending, Later closes with one of the most astonishingly batshit answers to a question that no one was really asking.
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Though he’s written more than fifty stand-alone novels, several loose sequels, and a whole multiverse connecting his fictional worlds, it took King forty years to try his hand at straightforward series fiction. The Bill Hodges Trilogy follows a middle-aged detective and his neurodivergent sidekick as they solve crimes. This, the middle volume, is easily the least engaging. As a crime story, Finders Keepers is… fine, one of King’s many explorations of the twisted relationship between writer and reader. In this case, though, he has nothing particularly new to say on the subject.
Gwendy’s Button Box is a belated return to Castle Rock, the fictional Maine town that we shall visit many times in later entries. It also features a villain with the initials R.F. For the initiated, this anchors the story firmly in King’s wider mythology. For everyone else, it’s a simple Faustian bargain between the darkly becloaked fellow and twelve-year-old Gwendy, for whom the titular box brings both personal reward and broader tragedy. I asked Richard Chizmar what it was like to collaborate with King. His answer: “Sheer terror and a wonderful experience.” Though the terror doesn’t manifest on the page, some of the wonder does, resulting in a book that’s closer to Ray Bradbury’s idyllic American fables than horror. It’s a lightweight start to a trilogy that grows in grandeur.
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Nearly a decade after the conclusion of the epic Dark Tower series, King returned to Mid-World for this inessential yet enjoyable addendum to the story. It falls somewhere in the middle of the overall saga as Roland and his Ka-Tet (this will all make sense later, I promise) weather a brutal storm telling stories. What follows is a pair of nested tales featuring dragons, wizards, and the fearsome Skin-Man. The Wind Through the Keyhole is only a minor extension of the vast world-spanning series that preceded it, but it does add flesh to the skeleton in Roland’s oedipal closet.
I was so excited when news of The Institute broke. Gifted children, a creepy facility deep in the Maine woods, a massive page count, and early comparisons to It: The stars seemed aligned for a return to the classic King of the paperback racks. In reality, The Institute is a solid novel, though only in its gasping escape sequence does it ever become more than that. It suffers a little from similarity to Stranger Things, and the orphaned Luke doesn’t quite capture the heart like other King children. But no one else writes adult fare from a child’s perspective so well, or so terrifyingly, and there are moments when the cold apathy of the Institute’s staff is more disturbing than any kiddie-devouring entity could hope to be.
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Black House is King’s first direct sequel, continuing the story he and Peter Straub began in The Talisman. Jack Sawyer, the boy hero, has grown up to become a police officer in pursuit of the child-killing “Fisherman.” It’s only fair, one supposes, that after setting the first book in King’s New England, the sequel should relocate to Straub’s Wisconsin. That’s seemingly as far as Straub’s influence goes, however, as Black House essentially serves as a satellite text to King’s increasingly engulfing Dark Tower mythos. Black House is a fun read with a memorably awful villain, whose unmentionable crimes are based on those of real-life killer Albert Fish. However, I wonder if, in forcing the book to serve the beam, it doesn’t squander some of the unique magic that King and Straub bottled the first time around.
It’s almost impossible to convey the complexity of the Dark Tower series, even if you proceed in book order. So what chance is there when starting with the sixth book of seven? Especially when that book is a metafictional experiment connecting not only our world and the world of the Tower but also all the worlds created by Stephen King. Oh, and King…he’s a character in this one—a sort of literary MacGuffin whose survival is key to saving existence. It’s a testament to his character that he somehow pulls this off with humility and self-deprecation. Song of Susannah is not a bad book, just one that’s forced to do a lot of heavy metaphysical lifting in a series already weighted with mad ambition. By this point, though, you’re already in all the way.
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The first of King’s big eighties bestsellers on this list, Christine is beloved by many. To me, it’s the King book that comes closest to hubris (and yes, that includes the previous entry, in which King himself is a nexus of all realities). This story of a possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury and the twisted love triangle involving the car, the boy, and his girl has plenty of rockabilly B-movie appeal yet not enough to warrant nearly six hundred pages. It’s clearly a labor of love, as the effort of obtaining rights to a long list of fifties lyrics shows, but it’s the least successful book of King’s early prime.
Another recent novella set in Castle Rock, Elevation is at once a tragicomic fairy tale and a critique of the petty prejudice of small New England communities. Scott Carey is losing weight by the day, though his mass and appearance remain unchanged. At the same time, he comes into the orbit of a beleaguered lesbian couple. Frustratingly, Scott’s condition is never explained, nor does that speculative aspect of the plot entwine satisfactorily with King’s well-meaning but naive take on LGBTQ+ issues. Nonetheless, the climax is a small moment of bittersweet joy, most reminiscent of my favourite short story, “Pop Art,” written by King’s son Joe Hill.
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The concluding chapter of the Bill Hodges Trilogy is better than the second and slightly inferior to the first. There is a sense that King has either lost confidence in the gritty crime aspect of the series or is just bored. Either way, he can’t resist injecting some supernatural shenanigans into the mix. The concept of a bed-bound villain with the ability to drive his victims to suicide is potentially chilling, but when King introduces a mesmeric mobile-phone app, things take a turn for the silly. End of Watch refines the central pairing of Bill and Holly to great emotional effect. Though it more than earns the pathos of its ending, I was glad to move on from the series. King seemed to feel the same, but he’s since returned to Ms. Gibney in three further stories, with a fourth to come.
What is it about being high that gets King thinking about aliens? Dreamcatcher was written on painkillers and The Tommyknockers was created with King’s “heart running at one hundred and thirty beats a minute and cotton swabs stuck up my nose to stem the coke-induced bleeding.” This story of extra-terrestrial ghosts and their weird technological influence is often considered to be the nadir of King’s fiction, so readers may be annoyed to find it ranked above Christine. However, despite the ridiculousness of the premise and an anticlimactic ending, the book has an endearing, freewheeling whimsy. And an early section, in which the alcoholic James Gardener drunkenly navigates the cocktail party from hell, is a great example of how sometimes King’s character-building diversions can be the real treasures buried in the story.
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By 1996, Stephen King seemed to grow tired of the standard approach to novel writing. Not only did he opt to write The Green Mile in Dickensian instalments, but he also wrote Desperation and The Regulators as a pair of “sister” novels with the same characters, though in very different universes. The former was credited to King, while The Regulators, the more off-kilter of the two, was posed as a posthumous release by Richard Bachman (King’s pseudonym). In The Regulators, the demonic Tak possesses an autistic child and leverages the boy’s obsession with TV shows to transform a suburban street into a lurid pastiche of the Old West. It’s a bizarre, often nasty variation on the community spirit that is so often the warm heart of King’s fiction.
Thinner was the last novel published under the Bachman alias before King’s alter ego died of “cancer of the pseudonym” in 1985. It’s a simple morality tale about a man cursed to lose weight regardless of how much he eats, with all the Bachman hallmarks: a streamlined narrative, amoral characterisation, and an ending that is pure, cruel comedy. Thinner is one of a series of morsels served between the grand feasts of The Talisman and It, but it leaves a delightfully nasty taste.
From: Esquire US