Rather, she feels like an homage to King’s own mother: a tough, hardworking, no-nonsense woman with zero time to brook anyone’s bullshit. Despite Dolores’ Maine vernacular (lots of “gorry” and “ayuh”), she is never a caricature. It’s the most ambitious, the most heartfelt, and the most authentic. Remember those ‘90s King novels that focused on women? Well, Dolores Claiborne is the best of them. Perhaps Tabitha King put it best when she described Pet Sematary as “awful, but too good not to be read.”
Reading it as a teen, I was awakened to the potential for true horror in the most mundane of human experiences. Amongst all the “Monkey’s Paw” imagery of death and decay, it’s a funeral scene in the middle of the novel that evokes the greatest discomfort. The un-death offered by the burial ground is one form of hell, but Louis Creed’s grief and loneliness are equally torturous. “Sometimes dead is better,” says one character, and Pet Sematary makes it hard to argue. More insidious is the clearing in the wood behind their home where generations of children have interred their pets, though not all stay buried. A busy road is the obvious danger, and it strikes their life with stunning tragedy. Considering its reputation as the book that King was reluctant to publish, Pet Sematary seems a rather small story about a young family who move to rural Maine. All these comparisons should tell you how highly I consider King’s stories.įrom darkly comic to just plain dark. King describes it as Kafka-esque, but in truth, it feels closer to the queasy tones of Roberto Bolaño. The former is a two-hander set in the torture chamber of an unspecified South American regime. Less lauded, but no less impactful are “The Death Room” and “1408.” The latter, a story about a cursed hotel room, sounds derivative of The Shining but is actually terrifying on its own terms. A folktale in the tradition of Hawthorne, it was published in The New Yorker and won multiple awards. “The Man in the Black Suit” is often considered one of King’s finest stories. It’s a fun toe-dip back into Roland’s world, but it’s not the only meat in a collection that shows off King’s great range. “The Little Sisters of Eluria” is a chapter from Roland’s youth that reads like an especially grisly episode of The Twilight Zone crossed with that weird Clint Eastwood movie, The Beguiled. There are more links to The Dark Tower in this collection. Together, they form a dark constellation of stories that generations have traced, in wonder and fear and hope.īelow, I've ranked King's books in order from worst to best. That still leaves over sixty novels and more than a dozen collections of tales. Any published stories compiled within a larger collection will not be ranked singularly. The man has written over seventy books, so some nod to brevity is required. The following list is an attempt to rank King’s published work in all its darkness, weatherworn beauty, and surprising weirdness. Of course, in so long and varied a career, there are exhilarating highs, a few bewildering lows, and many unexpected diversions. Nat Cassidy, author of this year’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. 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. But for millions of readers and writers, he is our North Star, our Southern Cross. Such prolificacy has often led to sniffing criticism from those who consider him “merely” a horror writer (as if horror is anything “mere”). Almost everything he has ever written has been optioned or adapted for the screen, in some cases several times. King has regularly published two or three books per year, a stream of words that flows incessantly west towards Hollywood. 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. Since the publication of his first novel Carrie, just shy of fifty years ago, King has held dominion over the landscape of horror. There will probably never be another author like Stephen King.
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