Stephen King is the Man!
I’ve been reading Stephen King’s new book, The Cell, which is good but not great. However, it got me thinking of all the incredible books he’s released over the past 30 years.
So I decided to come up with my top 10 list of Stephen King books. My hope is that some nice discussion will follow. Tomorrow I’m going to talk about the WORST Stephen King books.
So here it is:
10.
This is probably going to be a controversial pick. I think King is at his literary best when his novels have deeper themes intertwined with the horror. And that’s where Cujo is brilliant: it’s really a book about Small-town life vs. Big-City, as well as a huge slobbery dog that kills people.
9.
Same goes with Christine, a novel that deals with difficulties of being a teenager, growing up, and finding your own way in life. Genius.
8.
King’s first collection of short stories remains his best. With little to no filler, and alternating from humorous to skin-crawling terror, this is a master storyteller in top form.
7.
I decided to pick just one Dark Tower book to represent the whole series. It was a toss up between this one and Wolves of the Calla, but I decided to choose this one because to me, the ending was just so bizarre and ultimately satisfactory. The Dark Tower series as a whole is a tour de force of fucked-up imagination.
6.
Excellent themes, fantastically executed. Human greed knows no bounds.
5.
From just a pure writing standpoint, this is King’s best novel. A real page turner, with tight, gorgeous prose and a stellar plot.
4.
This collection of Novellas yielded the movies Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption. Nuff said.
3.
Epic, epic stuff. While the ending may be somewhat of a disappointment, the 1,000 pages of symbolic struggle between good and evil is most assuredly not.
2.
When this came out in serialized installments, I was jonesing hard every month for the next one. Remember that Farmer Vincent? This book, perhaps more than any other King book, deserves the mantle of “Literature.”
1.
The best Stephen King Book, hands down, and one of the best books of the 20th Century, horror or otherwise. King brilliantly takes the themes of growing up, losing your innocence, and leaving your childhood behind, and embodies them into a clown that kills children. King will never top this one.
How can you not put The Shining in the list. Just the question of was Jack Torrance driven by supernatural forces to kill his family, or was it his memories of his brutal father who abused him in every way possible is reason enough. The Shining was ten times better than Cujo (I liked it, but not as much as The Shining). To me, the only books on here that deserve to be ranked higher than The Shining is The Stand, The Green Mile (maybe), and… that’s it. Some of the scenes in The Shining were so terrifying that they are still swimming in my mind to this day. Like the scene where Danny walks into the forbidden room of 217. He walks into the room, creeps up to the bathtub, places his hand on the shower curtain, and pulls it back. “The woman in the tub had been dead for a long time. She was bloated and purple, her gas-filled belly rising out of the cold, ice-rimmed water like some fleshy island. Her eyes were fixed on Danny’s, glassy and huge, like marbles. She was grinning, her purple lips pulled back in a grimace… The woman was sitting up.” Pure genius. And utterly frightening.