PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Master of Horror author Stephen King is the end all and be all for many genre lovers when they feel it’s time to sit back, relax and grab something terrifying to read. However, not all of King’s books are created equal. Believe it or not, some are better than others. So we at PopHorror decided to rank the entire freaking list of over 60 books. To break it down and make it much easier to trudge through, we split the list up into decades. If you’re interested in another decade entirely, they’re all linked at both the top and bottom of every article. And just so you know, books written under King’s pen name, Richard Bachman, and any non-fiction books that King has written, are not included in this list.
So far, Sai King has written 12 books this decade. If he can pump out 3 more before 2020, he’ll tie with his output from the 90s.
Looking for another decade? Look here: 1974-1980… 1981-1990… 1991-2000… 2001-2010
#12 Joyland (2013)
Synopsis:
Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, Joyland tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever.
I really love me some King-flavored creature features. Unfortunately, Joyland was much more about working the carnival than it was about monsters. It was neat to learn a bit about life as a carny, but it wasn’t what I was looking for when picking up a King book.
#11 Finders Keepers (2015)
Synopsis:
“Wake up, genius.”
So announces deranged fan Morris Bellamy to iconic author John Rothstein, who once created the famous character Jimmy Gold and hasn’t released anything since. Morris is livid, not just because his favorite writer has stopped publishing, but because Jimmy Gold ended up as a sellout. Morris kills his idol and empties his safe of cash, but the real haul is a collection of notebooks containing John Rothstein’s unpublished work…including at least one more Jimmy Gold novel. Morris hides everything away before being locked up for another horrific crime. But upon Morris’s release thirty-five years later, he’s about to discover that teenager Pete Saubers has already found the stolen treasure—and no one but former police detective Bill Hodges, along with his trusted associates Holly Gibney and Jerome Robinson, stands in the way of his vengeance….
Bill Hodges and his crew are back. Blah. I just can’t wrap my head around these detective type stories.
#10 End of Watch (2016)
Synopsis:
For nearly six years, in Room 217 of the Lakes Region Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic, Brady Hartsfield has been in a persistent vegetative state. A complete recovery seems unlikely for the insane perpetrator of the “Mercedes Massacre,” in which eight people were killed and many more maimed for life. But behind the vacant stare, Brady is very much awake and aware, having been pumped full of experimental drugs…scheming, biding his time as he trains himself to take full advantage of the deadly new powers that allow him to wreak unimaginable havoc without ever leaving his hospital room. Brady Hartsfield is about to embark on a new reign of terror against thousands of innocents, hell-bent on taking revenge against anyone who crossed his path—with retired police detective Bill Hodges at the very top of that long list….
It was pretty cool to finally stick a pin in the Brady Hartsfield story. This one leaned more toward the supernatural than its predecessors, which was great, but by the time I got to it, I was a bit Bill Hodges-ed out.
#9 Gwendy’s Button Box (2017)
Synopsis:
There are three ways up to Castle View from the town of Castle Rock: Route 117, Pleasant Road, and the Suicide Stairs. Every day in the summer of 1974, twelve-year-old Gwendy Peterson has taken the stairs, which are held by strong—if time-rusted—iron bolts and zig-zag up the precarious cliffside.
Then one day when Gwendy gets to the top of Castle View, after catching her breath and hearing the shouts of kids on the playground below, a stranger calls to her. There on a bench in the shade sits a man in black jeans, a black coat, and a white shirt unbuttoned at the top. On his head is a small, neat black hat. The time will come when Gwendy has nightmares about that hat…
Gwendy’s Button Box had so much potential. There could have been a ton of bloodshed and destruction. Instead, nothing bad ever really happens. Besides her friend’s suicide, everything else that happens to Gwendy is pretty good. Meh.
#8 Mr. Mercedes (2014)
Synopsis:
In the frigid pre-dawn hours, in a distressed Midwestern city, desperate unemployed folks are lined up for a spot at a job fair. Without warning, a lone driver plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, running over the innocent, backing up, and charging again. Eight people are killed; fifteen are wounded. The killer escapes.
In another part of town, months later, a retired cop named Bill Hodges is still haunted by the unsolved crime. When he gets a crazed letter from someone who self-identifies as the “perk” and threatens an even more diabolical attack, Hodges wakes up from his depressed and vacant retirement, hell-bent on preventing another tragedy.
Brady Hartsfield lives with his alcoholic mother in the house where he was born. He loved the feel of death under the wheels of the Mercedes, and he wants that rush again. Only Bill Hodges, with two new, unusual allies, can apprehend the killer before he strikes again. And they have no time to lose, because Brady’s next mission, if it succeeds, will kill or maim thousands.
The first Bill Hodges story. It was pretty cool to break away from the extreme supernatural stuff for awhile, and I did fall for Holly Gibney just a little bit. I’m glad she shows up in other Bill Hodges stories, even if the rest of his tales are not my cup of tea.
#7 The Outsider (2018)
Synopsis:
An eleven-year-old boy’s violated corpse is found in a town park. Eyewitnesses and fingerprints point unmistakably to one of Flint City’s most popular citizens. He is Terry Maitland, Little League coach, English teacher, husband, and father of two girls. Detective Ralph Anderson, whose son Maitland once coached, orders a quick and very public arrest. Maitland has an alibi, but Anderson and the district attorney soon add DNA evidence to go with the fingerprints and witnesses. Their case seems ironclad.
As the investigation expands and horrifying answers begin to emerge, King’s propulsive story kicks into high gear, generating strong tension and almost unbearable suspense. Terry Maitland seems like a nice guy, but is he wearing another face? When the answer comes, it will shock you as only Stephen King can.
The Outsider has a good mix of detective story and the supernatural, plus the monster in this book is terrifying by what it can do. To get a better idea of what I liked and didn’t like about the book, you can read my review here.
#6 Doctor Sleep (2013)
Synopsis:
On highways across America, a tribe of people called the True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless—mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and spunky twelve-year-old Abra Stone learns, the True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the steam that children with the shining produce when they are slowly tortured to death.
Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel, where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant shining power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes “Doctor Sleep.”
Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan’s own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra’s soul and survival.
After years of hoping, we finally got to find out what happened to Danny Torrence after the end of The Shining. It was cool (an appropriate) to see that he overcame some issues and come out on the other side, and I loved the Abra Stone storyline and how everything about her affected the world.
#5 The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015)
Synopsis:
There are thrilling connections between stories; themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. In “Afterlife,” a man who died of colon cancer keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature characters at the end of life, revisiting their crimes and misdemeanors. Others address what happens when someone discovers that he has supernatural powers—the columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries in “Obits;” the old judge in “The Dune” who, as a boy, canoed to a deserted island and saw names written in the sand, people who then died in freak accidents. In “Morality,” King looks at how a marriage and two lives fall apart after the wife and husband enter into what seems, at first, a devil’s pact they can win.
King must have been feeling his age and his own mortality when he wrote a lot of these stories. People die of cancer, spouses croak, old men in nursing homes suffer from Alzheimer’s, aging poets get hit by cars, friends die and their obituaries are written. Is there anything scarier than growing old?
#4 11/22/63 (2011)
Synopsis:
Dallas, 11/22/63: Three shots ring out.
President John F. Kennedy is dead.
Life can turn on a dime—or stumble into the extraordinary, as it does for Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in a Maine town. While grading essays by his GED students, Jake reads a gruesome, enthralling piece penned by janitor Harry Dunning: fifty years ago, Harry somehow survived his father’s sledgehammer slaughter of his entire family. Jake is blown away…but an even more bizarre secret comes to light when Jake’s friend Al, owner of the local diner, enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination. How? By stepping through a portal in the diner’s storeroom, and into the era of Ike and Elvis, of big American cars, sock hops, and cigarette smoke… Finding himself in warm-hearted Jodie, Texas, Jake begins a new life. But all turns in the road lead to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald. The course of history is about to be rewritten…and become heart-stoppingly suspenseful.
It took me awhile to finally pick this one up, but once I did, I couldn’t put it down. That James Franco series doesn’t do it justice. Plus, the picture of the diner on page 60-something is less than a mile from my house.
#3 Sleeping Beauties (2018)
Synopsis:
In a future so real and near it might be now, something happens when women go to sleep: they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If they are awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed or violated, the women become feral and spectacularly violent. And while they sleep they go to another place, a better place, where harmony prevails and conflict is rare.
One woman, the mysterious Eve Black, is immune to the blessing or curse of the sleeping disease. Is Eve a medical anomaly to be studied? Or is she a demon who must be slain? Abandoned, left to their increasingly primal urges, the men divide into warring factions, some wanting to kill Eve, some wanting to save her. Others exploit the chaos to wreak their own vengeance on new enemies. All turn to violence in a suddenly all-male world.
I’ve had a story idea floating around in my head about what would happen if the earth was suddenly female-free, so seeing something very similar in print was fantastic… plus it made me feel a little giddy. The Master of Horror and I (and his son, Owen) thought about the same kind of story! How could I not like the end result?
#2 The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012)
Synopsis:
The Wind Through the Keyhole is a sparkling contribution to the series that can be placed between Dark Tower IV and Dark Tower V. This Russian doll of a novel, a story within a story within a story, visits Roland and his ka-tet as a ferocious, frigid storm halts their progress along the Path of the Beam. Roland tells a tale from his early days as a gunslinger, in the guilt-ridden year following his mother’s death. Sent by his father to investigate evidence of a murderous shape-shifter, Roland takes charge of Bill Streeter, a brave but terrified boy who is the sole surviving witness to the beast’s most recent slaughter. Roland, himself only a teenager, calms the boy by reciting a story from the Book of Eld that his mother used to read to him at bedtime, “The Wind through the Keyhole.” “A person’s never too old for stories,” he says to Bill. “Man and boy, girl and woman, we live for them.”
I absolutely love The Dark Tower series, especially the first few books. Hearing about Roland’s childhood is always a dream (especially now that I finally know how his story ends), and it’s so satisfying to find out that he wasn’t always such a hard-nosed bastard.
#1 Revival (2014)
Synopsis:
In a small New England town, over half a century ago, a shadow falls over a small boy playing with his toy soldiers. Jamie Morton looks up to see a striking man, the new minister. Charles Jacobs, along with his beautiful wife, will transform the local church. The men and boys are all a bit in love with Mrs. Jacobs; the women and girls feel the same about Reverend Jacobs—including Jamie’s mother and beloved sister, Claire. With Jamie, the Reverend shares a deeper bond based on a secret obsession. When tragedy strikes the Jacobs family, this charismatic preacher curses God, mocks all religious belief, and is banished from the shocked town.
Jamie has demons of his own. Wed to his guitar from the age of thirteen, he plays in bands across the country, living the nomadic lifestyle of bar-band rock and roll while fleeing from his family’s horrific loss. In his mid-thirties—addicted to heroin, stranded, desperate—Jamie meets Charles Jacobs again, with profound consequences for both men. Their bond becomes a pact beyond even the Devil’s devising, and Jamie discovers that revival has many meanings.
I absolutely loved Revival. There are so many spooky aspects to the story, and there’s so much of King in Jamie Morton and Charles Jacobs, from the obsession with guitars to the denouncement of religion to the addiction to drugs. Plus, there’s the Lovecraftian influences and the similarities to both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan. Of course, now I’m even more terrified to die, so…
