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Jeremy Urquhart
Published 2 minutes ago
Jeremy has more than 2100 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account.
He is also currently in the process of trying to become a Stephen King expert by reading all 2397 novels written by the author.
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If you’ve read your fair share of Stephen King books, it’s probably not news to you that some of them aren’t great. Just looking at his novels, there’s been an average of more than one published every year, as even if you don’t count the ones he co-wrote, you still get about 60 titles, and his first book was published in 1974. Crunch the math, and yeah, you'll see there’s been a lot of King over the past half-century and a bit. And then there’s even more King when you consider how long some of those books have been (see Under the Dome, Needful Things, and – for better or worse – The Tommyknockers).
Of all those dozens of books, only a handful are pretty much perfect, and they're worth highlighting below. It’s a far from exhaustive kind of ranking, since there are tons of really good novels by Stephen King that have some noticeable flaws, but are still worth reading, as you'll also be well aware if you're one of his Constant Readers. Some of the following are good starting points if you're somehow new to King’s work (say, if you only know about him from movie or TV adaptations of his stories), while a couple of others… maybe not so much. There’s also one potentially divisive pick here, but anything goes in many of King’s best stories, so anything goes for a ranking like this, too. It’s arguably in the spirit of Stephen.
7 'Misery' (1987)
Image via Viking Press
Whatever the book equivalent of a bottle episode is, Misery is that. It really just has two main characters, and one of them is confined to a single location for pretty much the entire novel, and so suspense, dread, and a whole lot of intense discomfort ensue. Well, the confined location isn't solely responsible for that, but more so the reason the main character – and, by extension, the reader – is confined: there’s a deranged fan of a famous author who “rescues” him, but it’s more like kidnapping, and she basically forces him to “recover” from an accident inside her isolated house.
Misery thankfully doesn’t overstay its welcome, even though it’s certainly not short for a book with just two main characters and one central location.
She also discovers that he’s killed off her favorite character from one of his ongoing series, and so Misery becomes about her making him resurrect this character, all the while becoming increasingly more dangerous to both him and herself. Misery is a snappy and continually engaging read, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome, either, even though it’s certainly not short for a book with just two main characters and one central location. Also helping things is the fact that Annie Wilkes, the antagonist, is one of the best villains Stephen King has ever written, and perhaps even the most memorable of all his villains who lack supernatural powers.
6 'Carrie' (1974)
Image via Doubleday
While Carrie isn't quite Stephen King’s best book, it’s certainly up there, and is hugely impressive considering it was his debut (though The Long Walk was written earlier than 1974, even if it wasn’t actually published under King’s Richard Bachman pseudonym until 1979). Carrie is also one of King’s slimmest books, and can probably be finished in an amount of time that’s not too much longer than it takes to watch the 1976 film adaptation. That film, though, did leave out some parts of the novel, and also, the novel has an interesting and uniquely literary way of covering the same events, meaning it’s worth reading even if you're very familiar with the Brian De Palma film.
The central narrative here is simple, being about a bullied teenage girl whose hellish home and school life push her to lash out with violent telekinetic powers, but the epistolary style makes it all a bit more interesting and even suspenseful. The closest thing to a criticism when it comes to Carrie is the idea that it might not be long enough. It’s so well-paced and builds in a remarkably satisfying way, so it’s almost a pity when it ends not abruptly, but in a way that’s more succinct than many later Stephen King novels. Still, Carrie is easy to re-read, and if you're going through King’s body of work chronologically, you're not exactly going to be disappointed when you finish his first of 60+ novels, you know?
5 'The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower' (2004)
Remember that bit in the introduction about there being a divisive pick here (assuming you read the introduction, you alleged introduction skipper, you)? This here’s the divisive pick! It’s The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower. This concludes the overall Dark Tower series, though there was an interquel book called The Wind Through the Keyhole released in 2012, which takes place between books #4 and #5. But with The Dark Tower VII, things conclude both dramatically and confoundingly, with King recognizing how difficult it was to end a series about a man desperate to reach the titular location, and writing about the insecurity of finishing the series while also actually finishing the series.
Of all the Stephen King books, this one probably has some of the wildest swings, to the point where even though this book came out more than 20 years ago, it still feels wrong to elaborate on the plot too much. Also, unless you’ve read the approximately 3000 pages of Dark Tower stuff that came before The Dark Tower VII, a summary won’t make much sense. Some people don’t like certain risks taken here, but one of those people is not the person writing these words right now. Or the person who wrote these words 12, 24, 1000 hours ago or whatever. Still, if you're mad, just consider this entry for the whole Dark Tower series, because all seven books are impressive when taken together and considered as one mammoth epic; a story Stephen King took 20-ish years, 4000+ pages, and seven books to complete.
4 '11/22/63' (2011)
Image via Charles Scribner's Sons
Stephen King’s name is tied to the horror genre for good reason, but plenty of his novels demonstrate how good he is at tackling non-horror genres, too. Maybe the one that demonstrates that the best is 11/22/63, which has a high-concept time travel-related premise that involves a man going back in time to stop the John F. Kennedy assassination from happening. His logic is that many unfortunate events followed on from that one, and so preventing it could mean a better second half of the 20th century for America (and the world), and beyond.
But things are more complicated than that, and the journey back in time itself is also difficult, since he’s taken to 1958 every time, rather than closer to the titular (and fateful) date. So, much of 11/22/63 is about existing back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and all the while, tension builds because of where the narrative ultimately has to go. It’s done incredibly well, and 11/22/63 has a new chance to jump the shark at pretty much every single new page, but it never does. It’s well-controlled, engrossing, and surprisingly moving at times, as well as being, quite comfortably, the best book Stephen King has written in the last 15 to 20 years.
3 'The Shining' (1977)
Image via Doubleday
The book that might well have led to the best Stephen King movie (albeit one that had some, uh, differences from the source material), The Shining is also legendary and very much worth experiencing in its original form, even if you don’t tend to read much horror. Hell, it’s worth checking out even if you don’t read all that much full-stop, as though there are a couple of Stephen King books ranked ahead of The Shining here, those two works are also gargantuan, and The Shining is of a more digestible length (447 pages in its first edition).
A little like Misery, it’s just perfectly done psychological horror, though there is also supernatural horror here, meaning it scares on more than one front and also makes ambiguity (the line between the two types of horror) frightening in itself. It’s hard to pick what the definitive “haunted house” novel is, but as for the definitive “haunted hotel” book? It’s gotta be The Shining.
2 'The Stand' (1978)
Image via Doubleday
Before The Dark Tower, The Stand was probably the most epic of the Stephen King stories, and maybe even after The Dark Tower, it still is, since it’s all the one book instead of one story told over seven books. There is so much in The Stand, and it’s all surprisingly riveting, even though it would probably take you more than a day to read, even if you could sit down and do nothing but read without sleeping, eating, drinking, etc. It goes on and on, but it’s always going somewhere, being about the end of the world, the restructuring of society in two very different camps, and the inevitable showdown between those two opposing groups battling for the future of humanity.
Sounds ambitious, right? It is. The Stand is just overflowing with ideas, but even the tangents are fun and thrilling, doing so much for world-building. This is especially so early on, with King covering the world-ending event from so many perspectives that you really feel everything shutting down on a truly – and appropriately – massive scale. It’s a surprising book, as well as a frequently unsettling and intense one, but it’s also not just endless misery, either. So, a good balance is achieved, memorable characters come to life and (sometimes) die, and the whole endeavor (close to 1200 pages, if you read the uncut version) ultimately feels undoubtedly worth undertaking.
1 'It' (1986)
Image via Viking
It has really endured, even if there are parts of it that might be written a little differently if Stephen King had published it in 2025, rather than 1986. But also, this feels like the kind of book that an older and more mature writer probably couldn’t put out, and the wildness can be a feature, rather than a bug, from a certain point of view. It was written in a seemingly frenzied state, and reading it is also a frequently mind-bending experience. Nothing’s off-limits here, and though the story isn't as sprawling as the country-spanning The Stand, since the action is mostly contained in Derry, It still finds ways to do unpredictable and exciting things in both the past and the novel’s present.
The structure here is what makes It special, and is something that’s not quite been captured or replicated very well in either the miniseries or film adaptations yet (though both adaptations had their moments for sure). You might check out It for the creepy clown, but you leave with so much more than a mere horror novel, even if it’s also excellent as a horror novel. The fantastical elements are also exciting, it works fantastically as a coming-of-age story, and then it gets cosmic at times in a way that, again, is a bit gonzo, but if it’s a ride you want, it’s the wildest of rides you get here. It is, like The Stand, overflowing with stuff that makes it great, but it’s a different kind of expansive and uncompromising, and though it takes a while to get through, it’s worth experiencing at least once in a lifetime. If you haven't read it, don't let the It-less days go by. Sewer water flowing underground.
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Release Date
September 8, 2017
Runtime
135 minutes
Director
Andy Muschietti
Writers
Cary Joji Fukunaga, Gary Dauberman, Chase Palmer
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Bill Skarsgård
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