“People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It’s in a glass jar on my desk.”

— Stephen King

10. Skeleton Crew

Skeleton Crew, published in October of 1985 by Putnam, is a collection of 21 short stories heralded by a terrifying novella, The Mist. The novella, which finds patrons trapped in a supermarket after a mist brewing with prehistoric creatures rolls into Bridgton, Maine, has earned two adaptations; a feature film in 2007 with a divisive ending, and a TV series in 2017 that ran for a single season. King thrives not only in creating conventional Lovecraftian monsters, but human monsters, a recurring theme throughout many works featured in this article. The human monster of this story is Mrs. Carmody, a 76-year-old antique store owner who brainwashes a select group of patrons into worshipping her as a prophet and calls for the sacrifice of any sinners present.

Other notable tales in this collection include “Gramma,” a story about a young boy left alone with his supposedly deceased grandmother, “Word Processor of the Gods”—first published in a 1983 Playboy issue—about a depressed writer who uses a magic word processor to rewrite his reality through the deletion of his wife and son, and “Survivor Type,” which details a heroin smuggler’s desperate attempt to survive on a remote island by systematically eating parts of his body.

“(The Jaunt) is absolutely (one of the) top five scariest stories he’s ever written. Not just the shock of the moment, but weeks afterward, you’re just sitting there thinking of this goddamn thing.”

— Patton Oswalt, Kingcast

The most disturbing story in Skeleton Crew is undeniably “The Jaunt.” In the distant future, a revolutionary technology called “jaunting” allows for instant teleportation, but only if the participants are asleep. Being awake when the jaunt process is initiated results in participants being lost to the unknown terrors of the jaunt for eternity. Mark Oates and his family are set to jaunt to Mars for a two-year colonization venture, but Mark’s son, a daredevil curious about what wonders await in the ether, holds his breath when the anesthesia is administered. When Mark awakes moments later on Mars and glances over at his simultaneously young and ancient son, a mangled product of the jaunt’s horrors, the image King leaves us with is one of his most haunting.

9. Doctor Sleep

“Whatever happened to that little boy from The Shining?” Stephen King’s faithful frequently asked the author. In 2013, he gave us the long-awaited answer with Doctor Sleep, published 36 years after its predecessor.

The novel follows the struggles of Danny “Dan” Torrance after his harrowing escape from the ravenous Overlook Hotel in the winter of 1975. He’s inherited his father’s alcoholism, and he can’t seem to stay in one place for too long. Danny manages to gets sober and find work as an orderly at a hospice facility, using his psychic abilities, or “shine,” to help patients pass peacefully. Just as Danny’s life seems to be reaching some sense of normalcy, he receives psychic pleas from Abra Stone, a young girl who also possesses “the shining.” She’s become aware of a nefarious group of nomads known as the True Knot. The Knot, led by Rose the Hat, maintain eternal life by killing and absorbing people’s shine, which they call “steam.” Naturally, Dan and Abra are prime targets, and they must work together to stop these life-force vampires.

Doctor Sleep is not as frightening as The Shining, but it is still a hellish plunge into the depths of America’s hidden crevices, where evil groups like the True Knot can walk among us, unnoticed. The novel makes you question if the man you smiled at in the grocery store is returning home to a dank basement filled with faces you’ve seen on missing persons flyers.

Rose the Hat is King’s most intimidating female antagonist since Annie Wilkes of 1987’s Misery, which appears later on this list. Don’t let her compassion for her True Knot “family” fool you, when it comes to acquiring steam, she’s a ruthless conqueror. Not only does she not mind siphoning the steam of young children, she revels in it, which leads me to the most frightening scene in both King’s novel and Mike Flanagan’s 2019 film adaptation—the death of the baseball boy. Bradley Trevor, the baseball boy, is kidnapped by the True Knot and taken to an abandoned oilworks factory where they feast on his steam. Bradley’s blood-curdling screams contrasted with the True Knot’s unbridled joy was enough to make my friend skip over that chapter when I lent them the book.

8. 11/22/63

Another entry from the 2010s, 11/22/63 is not only one of the best King books I’ve ever read, but one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s a complete, beautifully crafted story where everything is earned and no short cuts are taken.

The book follows Jake Epping, an English teacher from Maine, who learns of a portal to the year 1958 from Al Templeton, who discovered the rabbit hole in his diner. Jake is tasked with living in the past for five years and subsequently preventing the assassination of John F. Kennedy, hoping to shift the trajectory of America in a more favorable direction via the butterfly effect. No U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. No RFK assassination. No poverty explosion. Apparently, Jake Epping never heard the phrase: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

“The past is obdurate for the same reason a turtle’s shell is obdurate: because the living flesh inside is tender and defenseless.”

— Stephen King, 11/22/63

Though the book is regularly categorized as “historical fiction” or “thriller,” it still has the master of horror’s fingerprints all over it. Many who’ve only heard the book’s premise may assume the antagonist to be Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, but that’s not the case. The book’s primary antagonist is something far more sinister and unpredictable—time. The phrase “time is obdurate” is repeated throughout the book, meaning that time is unwilling to change and will fight back by any means necessary. The more significant the event being changed, the greater resistance Jim encounters. From sickness to car crashes to a merciless beating by a mob of disgruntled gamblers, Jim never knows where and when time will strike. The combination of having to ward off a ubiquitous antagonist while also trying to maintain relative anonymity in a strange time makes for one of King’s most tense reads.

The conventional touchstones of a Stephen King nightmare are also present. Before trying to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy, Jake does a “test run” where he tries to prevent the deaths of a family at the hands of their drunken patriarch. Jake fails his first attempt, and the brutal sledgehammer rampage of the father, Frank Dunning, has been branded on the folds of my brain since I first read the chapter through parted fingers.

7. The Stand

I read The Stand in February of 2020, so when a mutating super flu reared its head the following month, the fear that usually lives only within the front and back covers of a King book bled into my everyday life. Captain Trips, the virus in the novel, is far worse than Covid-19 with a communicability rate of 99.4% and a death rate of 100%. The symptoms are chilling: delirium, physical agony, bruised, bulging necks resembling the vocal sac of a frog. Perhaps even scarier are the chapters describing the rapid spread of the flu, wiping out entire age groups, communities, and families like the angel of death.

The superflu is only the beginning of The Stand’s horror. The survivors either receive dreams from Mother Abigail, a prophetic old black woman, or the dark man, Randall Flagg, a denim-clad demon walking the earth in human form. Flagg’s followers congregate at the apotheosis of debauchery, Las Vegas, while Mother Abigail’s followers meet in Boulder, Colorado. The remainder of the novel is a battle of biblical proportions between good and evil. Will the meek inherit the earth, or will wickedness reign?

Flagg is a cunning villain, frightening in his nonchalance. Nicknamed “The Walkin’ Dude,” he’s a master manipulator, turning some of the “good” survivors against Mother Abigail. King instills Flagg with such charisma that even us, the readers, are nearly tricked into liking him.

Harold Lauder is an overweight, socially-awkward young man who feels ousted by the “Boulder Free Zone” (Mother Abigail’s safe haven) and succumbs to Randall Flagg’s influence, leading him to betray the protagonists and defect to Las Vegas. It’s the minute details that make Harold such a creepy foe, such as his tendency to write margin to margin in his ledger without a single paragraph break, or his nightly smiling practice in the bathroom mirror.

Other notable antagonists sure to make your skin crawl include The Trash Can Man, a pyromaniac, and—if you have the 1,100+ page Complete and Uncut Edition, with 500 pages of original material that was cut for the original 1978 release—The Kid, a detestable punk who sodomizes the Trash Can Man with a pistol and threatens to overthrow the dark man. The Stand is an elaborate tapestry of humanity, from the righteous to the unspeakably evil, and King leaves no stone unturned. Also, don’t drop the book on your foot. That’d be really scary.

6. ’Salem’s Lot

Jerusalem’s Lot, ’Salem’s Lot for short, an unsuspecting idyllic town in Maine, is infested with vampires. It begins when a man named Richard Straker opens an antique store in town with his unseen business partner, Kurt Barlow. The reason for Barlow’s absence is pretty understandable; he’s an ancient vampire who resides in the shadows of a decrepit mansion. Straker is his familiar. After Barlow sinks his fangs into his first victim, his vampiric bloodline sweeps through the town like wildfire.

There’s a scene in the film Rosemary’s Baby in which Minnie, the elderly next door neighbor and (spoiler alert) devil worshipper, is covertly speaking on the phone. The director framed the shot so that only her back is visible, and the rest of her body is hidden behind a wall in the foreground. In the theater, whenever this particular shot came on screen, the audience collectively tilted their heads to the right, momentarily forgetting that they can’t peer around a two-dimensional image, anxious to catch a glimpse of this secret conversation.

“I got ‘Salem’s Lot, and my mother said, ‘You’ve got to clean the pool’ and I said, ‘As soon as I finish this chapter.’ The sun set, my body was completely burned, I had tan marks from my glasses, and I had finished the book.”

— Guillermo Del Toro, The Kingcast

A long-winded analogy to say: That’s how it feels reading ’Salem’s Lot. King lets the action build and build and build, but always cuts away right before the big reveal, leaving the reader desperately trying to peer behind an immovable curtain. When Mike Ryerson feels Danny Glick’s dead eyes watching him through his sealed coffin and takes it upon himself to open it, King ends the scene just as we see Danny Glick’s wide, glittering eyes. When Mark Petrie invites a vampire into his room, we don’t see it. We hear it from Father Callahan’s perspective downstairs, and that simple whispered invitation, coming from the second floor, no less, is chilling. All of these unseen teases make Barlow’s violent, head-bashing first appearance (no, not Metallica-style head-bashing), all the more terrifying.

’Salem’s Lot has spawned a 1979 TV miniseries, a 1987 feature film sequel, a 2004 TV adaptation, and the town has briefly appeared in Castle Rock and Chapelwaite. A feature adaptation starring William Sadler (an actor with many Stephen King projects under his belt including The Shawshank Redemption, The Mist, and The Green Mile as the main antagonist, Kurt Barlow, was set to release in 2023 but has now vanished from New Line Cinema’s upcoming slate.

5. Night Shift

Stephen King’s first short story collection is also his best. Many of the 20 tales were originally published in men’s magazines such as Cavalier and Penthouse in the early 70s. The most recent adaptations from Night Shift are The Boogeyman (2023) based on the story of the same name, first published in Cavalier 50 years ago, and Chapelwaite, based on the story “Jerusalem’s Lot.”

A group of mill workers encounter a horde of mutated rats the size of terriers while cleaning a derelict basement in “Graveyard Shift.” A shady organization will help you quit your addiction by any means necessary in “Quitters, Inc.” A man rapidly turns into a repugnant, grey blob with a craving for human flesh in “Gray Matter.” An astronaut begins sprouting eye balls on his body after being exposed to a space mutagen in “I Am the Doorway.”

These early works are simple but effective. In the other short story collections I’ve read, many of the entries are psychological, metaphoric, or simply a “slice of life,” but Night Shift is pure, unleaded horror. Creatures that squirm and squelch and titter. Things that lurk in the darkness. Released the same year as The Stand, King proves he can conquer both long, expansive horror and short-form, poignant scares.

My favorite yarn in this collection is the aforementioned story “The Boogeyman.” A man’s three children are killed on separate occasions, but each time, the man hears his children invoke the boogeyman’s name before their deaths and finds the closet ajar. Distraught and questioning his sanity, he visits a therapist named Dr. Harper, who listens respectfully and tells him to schedule an appointment with the nurse. Unable to locate the nurse, he returns to Dr. Harper’s office just in time to find the boogeyman stepping out of the closet, discarding his Dr. Harper disguise.

It’s important to note that the main character is a horrible person who gloats about abusing his wife and kids, leading the reader to believe he’s A) suffering from paranoia, or B) an unreliable narrator who is the perpetrator of the murders, so when his story is validated, the final jump-scare (yes, you can still get jump scared from a book) is incredibly effective.

4. Pet Sematary

Many Constant Readers, and King himself, consider Pet Sematary his most gruesome work. So gruesome, in fact, that King never intended it to hit shelves. The book was published out of necessity in 1983 to settle a contract dispute with Doubleday.

The book is based on two real-life inspirations. The first was a spit of land labeled “Pet Sematary” near his house in Orrington, Maine, where he had to bury his daughter’s cat, Smucky, after it was hit by a truck. The second inspiration was King’s 2-year-old son running toward the same road outside their home while a large truck was barreling through, the boy tripping just short of the pavement.

In the novel, the boy (Gage Creed) is struck by the Orono truck, and Louis, his father, takes it upon himself to bury his son beyond the Pet Sematary in a Native American burial ground capable of resurrection, but the Gage that returns is a shell of his former self, physically gnarled and capable of violence.

“Usually I give my drafts to my wife Tabby to read, but I didn’t give it to her. When I finished I put it in the desk and just left it there.”

— Stephen King, The Paris Review

The only reason the novel is not higher on the list is because I don’t believe I have the complete perspective required. Once I’m a parent, I have no doubt I’ll feel the full weight of Louis Creed’s dread, and Pet Sematary will earn bronze or silver.

That being said, the book is still damn terrifying, and one of King’s most well-paced, cohesive reads. The sense of emptiness he’s able to convey in both the re-animated Church (the family cat) and the re-animated Gage creates a sense of unpredictability. The scenes walking through the forest are some of the best descriptions in any work published by the master of horror. You’re not simply reading about Louis Creed’s trek, you’re stepping across damp leaves with him, you’re smelling the dank must of the forest, you’re hearing unknown creatures stirring all around you.

For anyone seeking more goosebumps, be sure to listen to the audiobook of Pet Sematary narrated by Michael C. Hall, the titular character of Dexter.

3. The Shining

I’ve read The Shining three times, and each time I check into the Overlook Hotel, I’m more scared than the last. Jack Torrance, a struggling alcoholic, is at his wit’s end after being fired from his teaching position at Stovington Prep and is hungry for a fresh start as the winter caretaker of a secluded resort. Unfortunately, the sentient hotel—with a rich history of murder, mafia dealings, and debauchery—is just as hungry for Jack. During the winter of ’75, the only guests are Jack, his wife, Wendy, and his son, Danny. The five-year-old Danny Torrance possesses a psychic ability referred to as “shining” that allows him to communicate telepathically and achieve glimpses into the rustic hotel’s storied past. The Overlook will stop at nothing to acquire Danny’s gift, using Jack as a conduit for their wicked agenda.

The iconography of The Shining has become famous in popular culture, though fans who’ve only seen the 1980 Stanley Kubrick adaptation may be surprised to learn that many of the recognizable motifs, such as the twins, the hedge maze, and “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy” do not appear in the novel. King famously didn’t care for the Jack Nicholson-led film, citing the actor’s eccentric portrayal of Jack Torrance from his first appearance on screen. “In the book,” King told Deadline, “he’s a guy who’s struggling with his sanity and finally loses it. To me, that’s a tragedy.”

Though I’m a fan of the book and the movie, they are vastly different, and character-wise, King’s telling edges out the film. True fear can only be invoked if the reader genuinely cares about the characters, and the more time I spend with Jack Torrance, a genuinely good man desperately attempting to ward off his personal demons for the sake of his family, the more I hope the pages have magically revised themselves into a happier-ever-after.

The 1977 novel has no shortage of heart-pounding scares, from the decaying Mrs. Massey in Room 217, to a disturbing “Dog Man” that chases Danny through the halls uttering obscenities, to sentient topiary animals—those goddamned topiary animals—that move when you’re not looking. Anyone brave enough to open this genre-defining work will understand why Joey Tribbiani of Friends had to put it in the freezer.

2. Misery

Published by Viking Press in June of 1987, a decade after The Shining, Misery saw a triumphant return to King’s brand of snowbound isolation horror. Author Paul Sheldon falls victim to debilitating leg injuries following a car accident, but rest assured, his self-proclaimed #1 fan, Annie Wilkes, is there to mend him back to health. After Annie reads Paul’s latest installment of his Misery series and discovers the main character, Misery Chastain, has been killed off, she becomes irate, and Paul receives a glimpse of the malignant evil lurking beneath the matronly facade of Annie Wilkes.

Annie forces Paul to write a new novel reviving her favorite character in a believable way, but he must tread carefully, because every word, every action, could be the spark that ignites Annie’s temper.

As mentioned earlier, King excels when crafting human monsters, and the seemingly docile Annie Wilkes is without a doubt his most formidable. The dread Annie inspires lies in her truculent temper and incongruous attitudes toward wrongdoing, adamantly against the use of profanity, only venturing as far as “dirty bird” and “cockadoodie brat,” but willing to inflict diabolical pain onto Paul with complete stoicism.

The novel is a masterclass in percolating tension, and the whole time, I was reading the book at an arm’s length, never sure when Annie would snap and leap through the page. When the action explodes, it delivers in the form of King’s most violent, creative death scenes ever put to page. I’m never going near another riding lawn mower.

1. IT

A sprawling, 1,153 page masterpiece, IT is undeniably King’s scariest story. In the mid-80s, King had been deemed the “master of modern horror.” Though he didn’t seek out the title, claiming he never intended to be a genre author and only wrote whatever he found interesting, he leaned into the public’s perception and set out to create a horror magnum opus.

How could IT not be #1 on the list when It, whose preferred appearance is Pennywise the Dancing Clown, can take the form of our worst fears? The Creature from the Black Lagoon, a mummy, a leper, a bird of prey, the werewolf from I Was a Teenage Werewolf, the shark from Jaws, and a giant oleaginous spider, to name a few.

In the town of Derry, Maine, Pennywise plagues the Loser’s Club (Bill Denbrough, Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak, Ben Hanscom, Mike Hanlon, Stanley Uris, and Beverly Marsh) as 11-year-olds in 1958 and again in 1985, 27 years later. As mentioned earlier, the scares are only powerful if the reader cares for the characters, and the seven members of the Loser’s Club are the most well-written and relatable characters he’s ever conceived. I’ve read the book three times, and each time, I relate to different characters based on my own new life experiences. I relate to Bill because he’s a writer. I relate to Richie because he masks fear with comedy. I relate to Eddie’s hypochondriac tendencies. I relate to Ben’s social anxiety. As I get older, I start to sympathize more with the issues of the adult versions of the Loser’s Club, too. Fear of loss. Fear of love. King forces you to see yourself in these characters and then thrusts us into the dark subterranean underworld of It, literally and figuratively.

“The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years—if it ever did end—began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”

— Stephen King, IT

There’s been two adaptations of IT, a TV miniseries in 1990 starring Tim Curry as Pennywise, and two feature films in 2017 and 2019, divided into two chapters. King makes a cameo in the second film as a stingy shopkeeper and pokes fun at a common opinion among readers: his endings are lackluster. The ending of this 1986 jewel, however, does not fall into that category. He manages to turn the town of Derry into a character, and as the final war rages between It and the Losers in the sewer system, a maelstrom rages on the surface as well, tearing the city apart and tightening the knots in our stomachs.

The most vile human antagonists of this Viking publication are Patrick Hockstetter and Henry Bowers, teenage bullies of the Losers Club. Patrick Hockstetter’s psychopathic hobbies include suffocating house pets in lockers and killing his baby brother, Avery. Henry Bowers is just as violent and terrorizes the Losers in the summer of ’58 and again in ’85 after It helps him escape a psychiatric facility.

I won’t spoil too much, but a few moments of notable terror include Georgie’s meeting with Pennywise at the corner of Jackson and Witcham, Beverly’s escape from the witch from Hansel and Gretel, and the werewolf fight while exploring the house on Neibolt Street. The benefit of such a long journey is that no matter how many times you read IT, scares you forgot about will creep up on you.

Stephen King’s Most Spine-Chilling Reads