King: Where to start?
You may have seen the film versions of It, Carrie, and The Shining, but have you read the books? This guide to the masterful horror writer might just convince you to give them a try.
Stephen King, the true king of science fiction and horror, has been terrifying readers for over half a century. With over 60 novels and 200 short stories to his name, the author of It and The Shining is something of a literary machine, and he shows no signs of stopping anytime soon: his highly anticipated latest novels, The Tale (2022 ) and Holly (2023) , have been met with huge fanfare around the world. With a prolific author like King, it can be hard to know which title to pick first. Here, writer and King fan Neal McRobert offers a few good ones to try.
Entry point
The quintessential King elements—author-protagonist, Maine setting, small-town reality torn apart by the otherworldly—are all found in Salem's Lair (1975), his second novel. It is the most representative of the author's early work, where he first demonstrates his gift for breaking muscular American realism into Gothic mush. For those who might be wary of the strangeness of King's later monsters, there is something comforting about the familiarity of Barlow's vampire (even if he does wreak havoc on many, many of the characters who inhabit the Lot).
Epicness
In 1978, "Confrontation" was already a big book. But in 1990
King has restored over 400 pages that were cut from the original manuscript and changed the setting from 1980 to 1990. The result is a complete and uncut edition of The Stand, a 1,200-page brick that transforms the continental United States into a chessboard for the forces of good and evil. The story of plague and post-apocalyptic tribalism is one that many have turned to – somewhat masochistically – during the Covid-19 pandemic. But the deadly disease described in the book, Captain Trips, is only half the story, a way of clearing space for the titanic struggle to come. It’s a truly gripping journey, filled with some of King’s most enduring characters, especially Randall Flagg, the “Dark Man,” who returns as an agent of chaos in many of King’s fictional worlds.
If horror isn't for you
Not everything King writes is horror. He has the ability to capture both the beauty and the cruelty of the human condition. Nowhere is this more evident than in 11/22/63 . What sounds like a tired idea—a man travels back in time to prevent the death of John F. Kennedy—is actually a plea for lost American innocence. It's a science fiction thriller, and it has moments of extreme violence, but at its core, it's a love story between a man out of time and a woman searching for her place. It also has the best ending King has ever written. If you're looking to try reading King but don't want to wrestle with ghosts, world-ending plagues, or demonic clowns, this book will warm (and break) your heart.
Masterpiece
King put everything he learned about his craft into his 1986 treatise
year about the nature of fear. At over 1,100 pages, it's another huge number, but don't be discouraged; this story about kids who fight evil in their small town (and return to fight evil again decades later) is King at the top of his game and at his scariest. Pennywise the Clown, who has been devouring children for centuries, is King's greatest contribution to the pantheon of horror monsters. The novel's size, strangeness, and poignancy make it difficult, but despite its many brutalities, IT is as much an ode to friendship and childhood imagination as it is a horror novel.