Stephen King: the most important thing

Before vampires and haunted hotels, before killer clowns, killer cars and killer dogs, before The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, there was "Carrie."

A teenage girl who discovers she can control things with her mind and uses that power to kill her classmates. By the time Carrie was published in April 1974, Stephen King had already written several unpublished novels. But none of them gave any real indication that he would come to dominate horror fiction, and perhaps all of popular literature for the next half-century. In his review of Carrie in The New York Times Book Review, columnist Newgate Callendar (who was actually the music critic Harold Schoenberg, writing under a pseudonym) marveled, writing, “That this is a first novel is astonishing. King writes with a confidence that usually comes only from veteran writers.” Eight years later, Time magazine would call him “the master of post-literary prose.” Four years later, in the same publication, King would call himself “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and French fries.” In 2003, he received the National Book Awards for Lifetime Achievement. It’s 2024, and he’s set to publish another collection of short fiction.

Classic

Few writers have spoken at such length about the film adaptation of their work.

works, like King's take on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Despite being considered one of the greatest horror films of all time, King seems genuinely offended by the changes that took place from book to screen. That's probably because The Shining (1977) is particularly personal to the author. Jack Torrance is a failed alcoholic writer who finds one last job as the winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, a resort high in the Rocky Mountains. He is accompanied by his wife, Wendy, and young son, Danny, whose psychic abilities make him vulnerable to the evil spirits that haunt the Overlook. For King, Jack was a sliding version of himself, who he might have become if Carrie hadn't been a success—a drug addict and would-be novelist who can't even make it as a high school teacher and resents (sometimes violently) his family. While the film version (starring Jack Nicholson in what remains one of his most memorable roles) is a psycho from the get-go, the Jack in the novel feels human. He loves his wife and child. We want them all to get out alive. The book is scary because, as King said, "You're not afraid of monsters; you're afraid of people."

I'm not really a scaredy cat, okay?

Relax! No one said you were scary.

"Pet Cemetery" -

is probably King's purest horror book, but it's also one of his biggest and most intense, and... the ending has some problems. Call this a "student entrance exam" for the horror fan club. There's something elemental about its simplicity: a young family moves into a new house, and terrible things happen after they discover an ancient burial site deep in the woods. Contrary to what you might think of King's novels, given the mode in which he usually works, many of them end with a sense of hard-won victory and optimism. Not this one. It's as terrifying as ever.

I want a great crime novel.

If you haven't watched the HBO series based on The Outsider (2018) — the show was written by writer Richard Price, and several episodes were written by Dennis Lehane — then you'll be left untouched by the twists and turns of this supernatural detective story. In a small Oklahoma town, a teacher and Little League coach are accused of the brutal murder of a boy. The evidence against him is overwhelming. One of the book's main characters, Holly Gibney, doesn't appear until halfway through; and while she's a character in King's previous series of crime novels (the Mr. Mercedes trilogy), it's not necessary to read them beforehand, although you might want to after finishing this one.

Read also "10 best King adaptations"