The title character is the widow of a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, and the story was partly inspired by King’s own near-death in 1999 when he was struck by a van and severely wounded while walking on a country road. During his recovery, he imagined his wife, Tabitha, dealing with his overflowing office, wondering what she would do with the detritus and what would be left after it is all gone.
There’s a crazed stalker. There’s an alternate dimension. But above all, there is deep and abiding love for the woman who helped give shape and form to the life story of a storyteller. This is his gift back, and he kindly shared it with readers too.
6. ’Salem’s Lot
King’s second novel is Our Town with razor-sharp teeth and claws, reimagining a gothic vampire tale in the setting of Anywhere, USA. Oh, how the citizens of Jerusalem’s Lot fit the archetypes of everyday life. It is packed with people we know, and that heightens the creep factor as they are literally consumed by an unspeakable evil. King is playing the hits here, giving us a floating vampire child scritch-scratching on a window at night, an ominous haunted house that is the Castle Dracula home base for the bloodsucking predators, and the Igor-like hunchback who kills rats at the town dump and is monstrous even before being bitten.
Yet one of the most traumatizing moments in the story doesn’t even involve death. It’s when the town priest realizes his own faith and conviction simply isn’t strong enough against the devils who have come to his town, and he retreats in shame. There is evil in ’Salem’s Lot, but one reason it spreads so rapidly is that few have the courage to confront it when it appears.
5. The Shining
This is the power of Stephen King. He gives us escape, while also cleverly redirecting us to confront the things we dread. Almost no one knows what it’s like to be menaced by ghosts inside a haunted hotel, but many understand all too well what it’s like to be a helpless kid trapped with an out-of-control parent. And parents all know what it’s like to have our own tempers erupt in troubling ways, even if it clashes with everything we cherish.
Consider when Jack Torrance sabotages their snowmobile, thus making the decision that the family will remain trapped within the deepening malevolence of the Overlook Hotel, fully committing himself to the deaths of those he loves most. He walks back to the hotel, and King hits us with this aside: “On the way, he stopped and had a snowball fight with Danny.”
Everyone has their favorite creepy moment in The Shining, but King manages to wring a chill even out of a moment of warmth.
4. The Dead Zone
King absorbs a lot of trash talk for his endings, but this 1979 novel about a tragic young man with psychic abilities has one that is surprising in its perfection. Johnny Smith (no points for character names, there) awakens from a coma with the ability to read people’s past, present, and futures through touch. He deals with a serial killer, a catastrophic accident, and the heartbreak of a lost love who moved on without him as his story entwines with that of a tyrannical politician who is on an unstoppable rise to power. This man, Greg Stillson, will one day be president, and after shaking his hand at a rally, Johnny knows he will also provoke a global nuclear war.
Johnny decides he must end him, even if it means the end of his own life and being reviled by history. Either he will succeed or he won’t. The world will live, or it will die. These are the stakes, but King finds an elegant third solution that provides an even more cathartic finale. The Dead Zone is one of King’s most heartbreaking books. Against all odds, it’s also one of his most hopeful.
3. It
King’s epic. You know the story. A group of “loser” kids. A shape-shifting killer clown. A town where bad things nourish themselves on fear and suffering, plagued by an unspoken, perhaps unspeakable, history of strife, bullying, and bigotry. King wraps it all in a Freudian jamboree about growing up, and the wobbly bridge between childhood and adulthood. It’s a sprawling, relentless story. Fuel for a thousand nightmares, one for almost every page.
2. The Stand
As I’ve noted elsewhere, King didn’t call this book The Plague. It’s much more about what rises within the survivors in the aftermath of the world-killing pandemic that serves as its inciting incident. This 1978 novel (republished in expanded form in 1990) explores what happens when strictures of society vanish forever. No laws, no order, no nothing. Do we still try to behave with decency, seeking unity as a society, caring for each other in the face of hardship? Or do we indulge our selfish, animalistic side? In the ashes of civilization, some glint of hope remains. So does the prospect of further destruction.