Greetings, reader!
As has been evident from references in my blog, most conversations anyone has had with me this year, or sightings of me reading one horror classic or another while brushing my teeth or attending a lecture, I've been seriously hooked on Stephen King for the past 6-7 months. He is quickly becoming one of my all-time favorite authors, and I keep plowing through his books with an increasing tempo. While this project is still very much underway, I decided to share a ranking of his best books I've read so far, now that it's Literature Month - I might do a more revised ranking once I'm "done" with this phase and have read enough King to satisfy my craze for the time being.
The most notable classics that won't be found on today's list as I haven't read them yet are The Green Mile, Salem's Lot and 11/22/63, because I haven't found them from my local libraries yet. They're all on my shortlist for sure, and I will read them once I get the chance. Another notable work that is missing at this point is the notorious Dark Tower series, because I keep bumping into more and more "you should read this book and that book and also all of these books before reading The Dark Tower because it all ties in" stuff, and as incredibly curious and hyped as I am about the series, I'm stretching my patience trying to get through all of the connecting material before diving in. I want the best possible reading experience, and I like the feeling of saving The Dark Tower for the future, hidden away like a secret treat.
Anyways, out of the King books I've read so far, these are my favorites!
Here are my honorable mentions: Christine (1983), Doctor Sleep (2013), Here There Be Tygers (1968), The Long Walk (1979), The Reaper's Image (1969).
10. Lisey's Story (2006)
King has called Lisey's Story his own personal favorite of his own writings, and I can see why - while it is fictional, it's also so personal to him, that at times it doesn't feel fictional at all. Sure, there are fantasy elements and storylines not drawn from real life, but the parallels are clear: after surviving his notorious near-death experience, a part of the author's reflection process was to write a book - not about a famous horror author who tragically passes away, but about the widow of a famous horror author who tragically dies, trying to get over her husband's death while reminiscing their marriage.
There's a lot more to Lisey's Story than that, as there often is in the products of King's complex imagination, but at the very core, you have the idea of "oh man, imagine how hard it would've been for my loving wife if I had passed away?" turned into a 550-page testament to true love.
A book like this means so much more when coming from a mind like King's, a mind often so cynical and dark in what he writes, and believe me, that darkness also has its fair share of the spotlight in this one. But, when all is said and done, the big silver lining from King's often tragic life story - his by-all-accounts happy decades-lasting marriage with Tabitha King - is clearly the big inspiration behind this book, and after reading through the book's grim and disturbing parts, its central message feels all the more earned and powerful.
9. Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (1982)
This story, originally released as a part of the Different Seasons collection and technically counted as a novella by King standards (although I fully count it as a book, with its length well over 100 pages and its later prints as a solo book due to increased popularity), is a hard one to rank. It's such a peculiar case - a solid book, better than some King stories but not as good as others - and some motherf**ker named Frank, along with Morgan Freeman and company, went ahead and pulled the greatest movie of all time out of it.
I've spent so much time trying to wrap my head around this. Shouldn't Shawshank be much higher, just on the merits that it is the basis for the all-time great film? I mean, Stand By Me (1986) and Misery (1990) are very solid adaptations of King books and awesome movies in general, but not nearly as good as the Shawshank film. And it's not like the movie adaptation changes a lot of stuff, like Kubrick's The Shining (1980) - it just expands upon it.
But, yeah. Somehow it goes like this. The best metaphor I can think of is that King's Shawshank book is like Bob Dylan's Knockin' on Heaven's Door, and Frank Darabont's movie is the Guns N' Roses cover. The cover song is very rarely better than the original, just like the movie adaptation is very rarely better than the book, but in these cases, the later release manages to find something from the original and expand upon it to make it find its true potential. But, yeah - even if Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption isn't as much of a masterpiece as its cinematic adaptation, it cannot be understated how important and powerful of a story it is nonetheless - you couldn't make such a movie about an average book, that's for sure.
8. Carrie (1974)
King's debut work is incredibly solid for a debut - while there are some instances where the writer still had room to improve, the overall impact and creativity of Carrie is more than enough to warrant a spot in the top ten. The select few weaknesses are mainly that the horror isn't all that scary (something King would go on to master better than anyone in history), and that the language, from word choices to the flow of sentences, isn't quite as great as it would be in King's prime, as the young writer still had room to grow.
That being said, Carrie is one hell of a book. It's one of King's most emotionally powerful works, with the story working as a gripping statement against both bullying and religious fundamentalism. It's also staggering that a male writer, who hasn't admittely had the overall best track record with writing female characters and has had his share of poor-taste sexist undertones in some of his books, managed to tap into his inner feminist with his very first book, truly getting inside the teenage girl protagonist's head without being creepy or dismissive.
But the best thing about Carrie, by far, is the insanely creative story structure - interspersed between the actual chapters, there are mini-chapters that read as (fictional yet real-feeling) scientific studies, newspaper articles etc. written several years after the story's events. This is such a cool and imaginative way of fleshing out the story's fictional universe, and it makes the end product a very addictive read.
7. Hearts In Atlantis (1999)
Hearts In Atlantis reads like a tribute to, a hazy memory of, and a closure-giving funeral service for the 1960's. The book falls into the middle ground of a novel and a short story collection, as it consists of five stories that read as their own individual novellas, yet each of them is connected in various ways, and the theme binding them all together is the Vietnam War. The first story, Low Men In Yellow Coats, lays down the pre-Vietnam atmosphere of the early 60's with a loss-of-innocence story that also ties into King's Dark Tower mythos, because the author is one ambitious bastard. The final story lets the reader to return to the first story's main character, decades later, in a thoroughly changed America, as a nice poetic bow on things.
The three stories in between are gripping tales with their own viewpoints, each featuring side characters from the first story and various connections ranging from neat and mind-blowing to haunting and heartbreaking. My personal favorite is the title story Hearts In Atlantis, where a group of college students get equally hooked on an ongoing card game that turns their promising academic careers into worrying gambling addiction, and on the fist-pumping adrenaline of protesting and the anti-war movement.
The story paints such a vivid picture of the late 60's that it made me quite sure of what I would've been up to had I been alive back then - as honestly as the book describes the pitfalls of rebellion and the toll the era had on that generation later on, not to mention the dangers from losing one's reputation to getting beat up by policemen, there's just no way that I wouldn't have joined in with those giving a voice to the voiceless. King's writing explains why the protest movement became so enormous - amidst all the chaos and trouble and turmoil, there was something truly addictive and soul-sparking, something unique that can't quite be captured, yet this book might be the closest you get.
6. The Body (1982)
Fun fact: King himself considers Stand By Me (1986), the coming-of-age film based on this book, to be the hands-down best big-screen adaptation that has been made from any of his books. Less fun fact: when knowing King's life story, especially the tragic part of him witnessing a friend getting struck by a train and dying as a child (an event that many have speculated to traumatize him and inspire many of his darker works), it becomes quite gripping to consider just why he might have such a soft spot for this particular story with its particular themes.
But, yeah, The Body is a deeply moving one, and definitely one of King's best non-horror stories. I love it how it's so much rougher-around-the-edges than pretty much any other coming-of-age story, with absolutely no extra fluffiness or softness, yet it still manages to be touching. Usually coming-of-age stories have wholesome character archs with conventionally likable characters, but here you have these four dumb kids who are total idiots, each of them coming from horrible circumstances, their discourse filled with profanity and insults of the ugliest kind - yet still, there's something so raw and real about it all that the end result feels all "oh man, remember what it was like to be child in the summer?".
Oh, and the final few paragraphs? An emotional gut punch of the highest order, and one that had me instantly in tears.
5. The Shining (1977)
I'm a big fan of Stephen King's book The Shining. I'm a big fan of Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining (1980). Is it a good adaptation? Hell no, and I can see why King hates the film. It disregards many of the book's key themes and narratives, wildly replacing it with Kubrick's own visions that had nothing to do with the book, and it just happened to become a cinematic masterpiece, even though its masterpiece-ness has very little to do with the book it's based on. It's like the Rage Against The Machine cover of Bruce Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad - bafflingly different, but weirdly good as its own thing.
But, yeah, if I had to choose, the book is even better. And yes, I've called The Shining the greatest horror film of all time, so ranking the book that I consider even better than that at #5 really gives you an idea of how much I like Stephen King's books. The Shining is delightfully spooky, heavily psychological, and surprisingly emotional towards the end.
As I mentioned in last week's blog as an example of how interpretational King's stories are, The Shining can be viewed as a supernatural tale about a haunted hotel with a cursed and fascinating lore, as the dark forces haunting it take control of protagonist Jack Torrance, who as an extra spice of character writing is also a recovering alcoholic. Or, it can be seen as a tale specifically about an alcoholic family father's struggle to stay sober, with the fantasy elements being mere symbolism. Both takes are fascinating and neither is wrong, King is just an ambigious genius.
4. Pet Sematary (1989)
The edition of Pet Sematary that I borrowed from the library had a foreword by King, written years after the book's initial publication, where he explains why he considers this to be his hands-down scariest book. He explains how much inspiration it drew from real life, how dark the thought process behind the book's conception was, and how after writing the initial draft, he kept it hidden in a closet for years, afraid that he had 'finally gone too far'. Needless to say, I've never read a foreword that made me more excited to read what was ahead. And God damn, the end result lived up to the hype.
Is Pet Sematary King's scariest book? That's up for debate, and I'd personally put it on a tied #1 spot with It, because nothing in this world is as scary as the very scariest chapter in King's 1200-page masterpiece. But Pet Sematary is more consistently spooky from start to finish, and as It is so much more than mere horror, I'd single Pet Sematary out as King's finest hour as purely a horror writer. As the ranking shows, there are three books of his that I liked even more as overall pieces of literature, but in terms of pure horror, Pet Sematary is the gold standard.
King's words create vivid mental images, heart-stopping moments of cold terror, and chills-down-your-spine moments of authentic creepiness that no movie (or no other author) could accomplish to such a degree. The book was written in the 80's, often credited to be King's very prime, when he was already mature enough to have the literary skills, still young enough to have the energetic drive, and admittedly cocaine-fueled enough to have the hectic high-stakes intensity and pressure, that his words bring you intimately into the fictional world, feeling everything the characters feel, seeing what they see with your mind's eye. The book is also perfectly paced, with events escalating in a well-flowing and adrenalizing fashion.
3. Misery (1987)
There were a few parts in Misery where I was moved to the verge of tears by King's words, without the subject matter in those parts being one bit emotional by nature - I was moved simply by how good his writing is. There was a paragraph where he describes main character Paul's obsessive drive for writing, using nasty language to describe just how addictive and unhealthy it had become, and the images conjured by King's word choices were so vivid that I was touched by how any human could write literature this well, with such perfect sentences that paint such clear pictures.
The premise of Misery is one of King's many instances where he reflects on some own issues through fiction - a writer is kidnapped by an obsessive fan, one who is unhappy with her favorite character being killed off in her favorite book series, and she forces the man to write a new book where he brings her back to life. Sure, that sounds like King dealing with pressure and expectations from fans, but that's just the tip of the iceberg - the author revealed that he realized years later that the whole ordeal was a metaphor for his cocaine addiction, with Annie Wilkes serving as the human representation of the crazy drug that kept the author writing with such an intense and unhealthy drive. The metaphor is so subtle and between-the-lines that King himself didn't realize it when writing the book, and only came to the conclusion later in life.
Furthermore, Misery shows how well King masters suspense even when not writing horror. This is a thriller about two people in a cabin, with no supernatural elements (unless you count the neat tie-in reference to The Shining), but it has you scared and worried and flipping pages with a high pulse just like the creepiest horror novels out there. King's creative storytelling structures are also present here, as we're treated to many full pages and chapters of the fictional book-within-a-book that the protagonist is writing, throughout the novel, and these out-of-genre excerpts are a delight.
2. The Stand (1978; revised edition in 1990)
As I mentioned in last week's post, The Stand isn't over 1200 pages long because it's particularly detailed, or because the story goes on forever. It's over 1200 pages long because the scope of the story is the largest I've ever beheld. The amount of people, locations, storylines and threads coming together in this post-apocalyptic, character-driven horror-spiced tale of human nature is just off the charts.
The story is about a deadly virus that changes society as we know it forever (haha, can you imagine?), and for the first several chapters, we just meet a whole bunch of different characters that have nothing do with each other, all over the United States, living their normal lives. The spread of the virus is fascinating to follow, as there are so many well-thought-out real-world factors affecting how it gets around, as life starts to change very slowly, and King truly thinks through every possible aspect of society and how they'd react to such a change (and the coronavirus era proved his thinking quite right, even if Covid was thankfully less deadly than this one).
300 pages into the book, we haven't even met the main villain yet (or, arguably, the main hero). And, 300 pages into the book, even though you know you've read the equivalent of one normal start-to-finish novel, it feels like you're still in the very beginning, because the well-built threads are only beginning to unravel. It takes a truly magnificent writer to keep you all excited about the first act and build-up when having read hundreds of pages - but King sure was up for the job. Another effect of The Stand's scope and length is that when a major character is killed off about 800 or 900 pages into the story, it feels like you've lost a friend, as you've spent chapters upon chapters getting to know this fleshed-out human, their backstory, their secrets and fears, all of it - and it feels like a devastating gut punch to know that said character won't be there for the final resolution.
Oh, and what a resolution it is. Profound to the maximum. There's a chapter, I think it's the second-last or third-last one, that goes on forever and keeps the reader in a state of unforeseen suspense and desparation, sweating while flipping the pages to see how it all shakes out, the reading experience downright painful in the most beautiful way. And the final lines of the epilogue? Deep thoughts, man, and important ones as well. The Stand is often called King's masterpiece, and I can see why.
1. It (1986)
"The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain"
That's the first line of the book. And I'd argue it contains more storytelling than some books do from cover to cover.
It was the first Stephen King book I read, several years ago, inspired to read the whole thing because of how much I liked the film It (2017) and wanting to read it before catching the sequel It: Chapter Two (2019). I'll have to re-read it in the near future, possibly as the last project of my 'King phase', to check if it really is better than The Stand, as those two are pretty much deadlocked for the #1 position. But based on how I remember the book, I just have to put it at #1 for now - it instantly made it into my top 5 favorite books of all time, and made me sure that one day I'd have to dive into the rest of the King mythos because God damn, the dude can write.
The memorable and fleshed-out characters. The balance between sweet coming-of-age wholesomeness and gruesome horror. The spooky, intricate and larger-than-life lore. The insanely imaginative structure of the story, with the chapters jumping back and forth between the 1950's narrative and the 1980's narrative (often switching from one to the other mid-sentence) while lore-deepening interlude chapters are placed at key transitions. The one chapter, towards the end, written from the point-of-view of It itself, which is probably the most mind-bending writing I have ever witnessed. The surreal climax, one that could never be captured on the big screen. The humor. The heartbreak. The descriptions of the fictional town of Derry, Maine making the reader feel like they've lived there their entire life.
Yeah, It's a good one.
Thank you for reading! Tune in next week as I return to my usual movie/TV themes, while also continuing today's themes - that's right, next week's post is the top 10 Stephen King adaptations on the big screen!
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