The 10 Best Stephen King Books

Start with The Shining if you want to see why King became a household name. A recovering alcoholic takes a winter caretaker job at a snowbound Colorado hotel, bringing his wife and young son, and the place slowly feeds his worst instincts. It works as a haunted-house story, but the deeper fear is a father you can't trust. The idea came from a night King spent at the Stanley Hotel. This cheap pocket copy has small print.

It is King at full size: seven kids in a Maine town face a shape-shifting killer that often wears a clown's face, then return as adults to finish the job. The story cuts back and forth between the two decades, and the childhood half is where it shines, full of bike rides, bullies and loyalty. At over 1,100 pages it sags in places. The violence is graphic, and one scene involving the children drew wide criticism.

For a short, fast read, Misery keeps almost everything inside one farmhouse. A famous novelist wakes up after a car crash in the care of his self-described biggest fan, a former nurse who wants him to bring back the heroine he just killed off. There is nothing supernatural here: the fear comes from pain, isolation and a captor who seems calm until she isn't. It won the first Bram Stoker Award for best novel. The violence is blunt.

The Stand opens with a lab-made flu that kills almost everyone, then follows the survivors as they drift toward two camps, one around a kind old woman and one around a grinning drifter named Randall Flagg. This is the Complete and Uncut edition, which restores pages cut from the first printing and moves the story to 1990. It reads like a road trip through an empty country. At over 1,100 pages, the middle can drag.

Parents should know what they are signing up for with Pet Sematary. A doctor moves his young family to rural Maine, where an old burial ground in the woods brings back whatever is buried there, but not quite right. It is a book about grief more than monsters, and the dread builds toward choices no reader wants to watch. The first half moves slowly, and the ending offers no comfort at all.

If you don't read horror, 11/22/63 is the King novel to try. A small-town English teacher steps through a door in a diner into 1958 and spends years trying to stop the Kennedy assassination, falling in love along the way. It is part thriller, part romance and part history lesson, and the period details are vivid. Little here is meant to scare you. The long stretch in Texas tests your patience before the payoff.

King's fondness for Dracula shows in 'Salem's Lot, which drops a vampire into a quiet New England town. A writer comes home to face his childhood fears just as a stranger opens an antiques shop and moves into the old house on the hill, and people start to vanish. It is a slow burn that turns frightening once the nights get long. The opening chapters spend a long time on the town before the vampire appears.

Different Seasons collects four novellas, and three became films: The Shawshank Redemption, Stand by Me and Apt Pupil. The prison story about hope and the boyhood walk to find a body show King at his most warm-hearted, with almost nothing supernatural. It suits readers who want his storytelling without the monsters. Apt Pupil, about a teenager drawn to a hidden Nazi war criminal, is disturbing in a quieter way, so it isn't all gentle.

The Green Mile first came out in six thin monthly installments, and it still reads like a serial with a hook at the end of each part. An old prison guard looks back on a 1930s death row and a gentle, giant inmate who seems able to heal. It is more sad than scary, and the ending lands hard. This mass-market copy carries the cover from the Tom Hanks film, and the type is small.

Carrie is where it all began, and it is short enough to finish in a weekend. A bullied teenager with telekinetic powers is pushed too far at her senior prom. King tells it partly through news clippings, book excerpts and testimony, which still feels fresh. His wife pulled the first pages out of the trash and urged him to keep going. This edition adds an introduction by Margaret Atwood. The bullying and abuse at home are rough reading.