Stephen King Books in Order

A bestselling novelist wakes after a crash in the house of the nurse who pulled him out of the car, and finds she has read everything he has written. Two characters, one room, and almost no slack in it — published in 1987, and the best demonstration that the horror is usually a person.

One caveat: The violence, when it arrives, is the thing people remember years later.

A family takes a winter caretaking job at a Colorado hotel that closes to the world once the road goes, and the isolation does the work. Published in 1977, and considerably sadder than the film — it is a book about a man running out of other people.

One caveat: Alcoholism and child endangerment throughout. The film and the novel disagree about almost everything.

A writer returns to the Maine town of his childhood in 1975 in the same month a new owner moves into the house on the hill, and the town starts to empty. The template for the small-town books: dozens of ordinary people, patiently drawn, then taken apart.

One caveat: Slow for a hundred pages while the town is assembled. That build is the point and some readers stall in it.

Seven children in a Maine town face what takes children there in 1958, and are called back as adults twenty-seven years later. Published in 1986 and over a thousand pages, half of which is about being eleven rather than about the monster.

One caveat: Very long, and one late scene involving the children is widely regarded as indefensible. Readers should know it is coming.

A weaponized flu escapes a military base in 1978, kills almost everyone, and the survivors are drawn across a hollowed-out America toward two opposed camps. More post-apocalyptic epic than horror, and the first two hundred pages are the best thing in it.

One caveat: Two editions exist and the later one is substantially longer. The second half divides readers sharply.

A doctor moves his family to rural Maine, learns what the burial ground past their property is said to do, and uses it. Published in 1983, and the one King himself is said to have been reluctant to release — there is no comfort anywhere in it.

One caveat: The death of a child is the engine of the plot. Do not give this to a new parent.

A schoolteacher finds a door into 1958 and sets out to stop the Kennedy assassination, which means living in the past for five years first. A time-travel novel with a love story in it and barely a monster in sight — the one most often given to people who have refused him for decades.

One caveat: Eight hundred pages, and the middle section is a quiet novel about small-town Texas rather than a thriller.

A gunslinger crosses a desert in pursuit of the man in black, in a world that has moved on. Published as a book in 1982, it opens the one sequence in the catalog that has to be read in order — and it reads nothing like the rest of his work.

One caveat: Widely regarded as the hardest of his books to get through, and a poor advertisement for the seven that follow it. A bad place to meet the author.

Half memoir, half instruction manual, written partly after the accident that nearly killed him. The practical section is as good as anything in the genre and the memoir half explains where the small-town books come from.

One caveat: The advice is prescriptive and some of it is contested. Taken as one working writer's method, it is excellent.