The Best Stephen King Books

You’ve been reporting on Stephen King’s books and film adaptations on your website Lilja’s Library since 1996. What is it that you find so compelling about King’s work in particular?

The two main reasons I like him so much is that, one, he’s capable of telling a really good story, and, two, he’s also capable of creating really great characters that you can identify with and understand, even the bad ones. You often see where they come from and why they do what they do, even if you don’t agree with them. Those are his main strengths, and together that makes a good book.

He has had a remarkably long career, and a very prolific one. Are there themes in Stephen King’s writing that he returns to again and again in different books?

Yes. He often writes about the relationship between young people and older people. There are often kids in his stories. There is often a character on the outside of a community.

But he writes in every genre there is, so he’s very broad from that perspective.

Right, he is usually discussed as a horror specialist. But that’s not totally accurate.

I actually wrote a book called Stephen King: Not Just Horror. So I really feel he is doing a lot more. Many people don’t know about that, they think he’s just a scary guy who writes about monsters and clowns. But he’s written so much other stuff that isn’t scary.

In the writing world, many people talk about his memoir On Writing with a kind of hushed awe. It mixes biography with straightforward craft talk and is considered a classic.

Yes, he’s written both nonfiction and fiction, and in almost every genre. Maybe not a real love story, but almost everything else. So there’s something for everyone. When I give lectures, I’m often asked: ‘Which Stephen King book should I read first?’ And I tell them that you should think about a genre of book you like, then see what books he has written of that type and start there. Discover how good a writer he is, then move to his other work.

Right. I was quite interested to see which books didn’t make your list of recommended titles: some of his most famous work, like Carrie, The Shining, Salem’s Lot, The Stand. What were your considerations when you compiled the list?

I think all of his books are more or less good. I don’t think he has written a bad one. Maybe the one about baseball, but that’s mostly because I don’t understand baseball. So it’s very hard to pick favourites. Today I like these and tomorrow I will like a few others. He’ll write a new one and I’ll like that the most. But I went with five that I think have a great story with strong characters. Those are my main considerations.

Let’s begin with Stephen King’s 1979 novel The Long Walk. Why do you think it is one of his best books? It’s about a very sinister contest.

It has quite a simple concept. 100 boys—teenagers—start walking together. They have to walk at a set speed. If they go below that speed, they get a warning. After three warnings they are shot. The boy left at the end gets to pick basically whatever he wants as a prize.

Can you write an interesting book about people just walking? Stephen King can. It’s all about the characters and their interactions with one another. There’s not much backstory, you don’t get to read about them growing up on farms and milking cows, anything like that. It’s just them, the walk, and the relationships they build with one another. So that really demonstrates his ability as a writer I think.

It’s quite an early book of King’s.

I think it was his third or fourth. It was one of the books he published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.

Yes—he wrote so much in the early stages of his career that it was decided he should publish under two names rather than exhaust his ‘brand.’ I stumbled on this book as a teenager—it must have been illegally published online, as it was presented as plain text on a simple html site, and at first I thought it was some kind of fanfiction, or maybe a short story. I stayed up all night reading it, just clicking ‘next page,’ ‘next page,’ ‘next page.’

Yes, and for Stephen King, it is almost a short story, as it’s little more than 200 pages and his books are often much longer than that. For him, it’s a very short book.

The next Stephen King book you’d like to recommend is The Talisman, which came out in 1984. Perhaps unusually for him it’s a co-written book.

Yes, he wrote it with the author Peter Straub. It’s about a kid, Jack Sawyer, whose mother is sick. He has to find a ‘talisman’ to save her. He finds a way to transport himself from the real world to the ‘Territories,’ a different world. Everyone in this world has a counterpart person in this territory, they’re called ‘twinners.’ His mother’s twinner is a queen in the Territories, and she’s also sick. So he has to save them both.

That’s the plot, basically. He has some enemies, a werewolf as a friend, stuff like that. So it’s really a fantasy novel. But I like it, and there’s a sequel called Black House which came out in 2001. And he’s writing the third in the series now, although he has to do it alone as Peter Straub passed away a couple of years ago. It was always meant to be a trilogy, so he’s finishing it with ideas that Peter Straub gave him before he passed away. I’m looking forward to that one too.

Is it unusual for King to write ‘high fantasy’ books like these?

There’s also The Eyes of the Dragon, which is fantasy adventure. And The Dark Tower, which mixes all kinds of genres: Western, fantasy, action, horror. It’s a mix of everything he knows, I think.

Your third Stephen King book recommendation is the second in the ‘Dark Tower’ fantasy series, The Drawing of the Three. It follows The Gunslinger. Can it be read as a standalone, or always as part of the sequence?

I guess all the books could function as standalone books if you wanted, but I wouldn’t recommend it because you get so much more if you read them all. The base story is in The Gunslinger, then there’s this one, then five more books. I’d recommend you read them all, books one to seven. Plus there’s a bonus book as well. But that’s perhaps 4000 pages all in, so I wouldn’t read them back to back.

What should we expect of the ‘Dark Tower’ series?

Oh, everything. At base, it’s a very simple story. You have ‘The Gunslinger’ who is trying to save the world by saving the Dark Tower. Around the tower are different worlds; you open a door and enter a different world. So he travels between our world and other worlds, but also around the Dark Tower.

Many of the worlds are similar, but not exactly the same. In one world, it’s basically the same as our world, but instead of Coca-Cola they have Nozz-A-La, small tweaks like that. He meets other people and a ‘billy bumbler,’ which is like a mix between a dog, a fox, and a raccoon. They travel through worlds trying to save the tower.

It’s a long story, but it’s worth reading.

And the second book in that series is a highlight for you?

Yes, it’s really the best one, I think. That’s when the group comes together and you get to meet all the characters.

Next on your list of the best Stephen King books is 11/22/63, a ‘time slip’ story that was released in 2011.

This is an interesting one and quite different. It’s about the John F. Kennedy assassination. The twist is that you have a history teacher from today who finds a portal that allows him to go back to a date in 1958. If he stays there, even for a long time, when he returns only a couple of minutes has passed in our time. Every time he goes back, he resets what he’s done in the 1950s and he always comes back out at the same time, on the same date.

Once he’s convinced that it’s working, he gets the idea that he’s going to live there for a few years and save Kennedy from being assassinated. So he follows Lee Harvey Oswald; all the things that happened in real life happens there as well. So this high school teacher is trying to piece the puzzle together to see who is actually the assassin. It’s a very special book.

I think he began writing it early in his career, then abandoned it due to the amount of research it necessitated. Then returned to it many years later.

Yes, it’s almost like reading a nonfiction book about the assassination, but you have this character sneaking around and trying to solve the puzzle of who did it and how to stop it.

The last book on your list of recommended Stephen King novels is Later, a relatively recent book that was published in 2021. It’s about a young boy with an unusual skill. Tell us more.

Yes, he can see dead people. And they can’t lie to him, they have to tell him the truth. His mother knows about this. She’s a literary agent whose client is an author with a very successful book series. Before he’s finished the last book, he dies. So she brings his son to his place to find his spirit. The dead man tells the boy the plot of the new book. He tells his mother, and she writes the book, claims she’s found a finished manuscript she can publish, and saves her agency from going bankrupt.

There’s also a killer, who dies before the last bomb he has planted has exploded. The boy finds this dead killer and makes him tell him where the bomb is. It’s quite scary, but this is not a horror book. It’s also very short, and very character-driven. It’s a great read.

As discussed earlier, King is extremely prolific. He has written more than 60 books. Do you see his career as having unfolded in phases?

Maybe somewhat. But the main thing is that he is writing about what’s happening in the US at that moment. So each book is almost a testament to the time in which it was written. If you know American history, you could read any of his books and pinpoint it to the time—at least to the decade—when it was written. His style of writing has changed with the times.

That is good and bad. Sometimes the books can feel dated, because reflect what happened in the 1970s, and so on. But it’s not always such a bad thing. In Holly, he wrote about Covid and about Trump, to a lot of people’s anger. So often the people he writes about are placed in the ‘now,’ when he writes a new book. They live in his time.

Is there anything else you want to add?

I say to everyone: just try one book. He doesn’t just write horror. If you like Westerns, or sci-fi, or action, then you will find a book in those genres. Hopefully that will help new readers realise what a good writer he is, and later broaden out and read more of his books.

There are a lot to choose from. But I envy those who haven’t read any of them, and have all of that ahead of them. I myself have to wait for the next book, and the next book, and the next.