All 75 Stephen King Books, Ranked

There will probably never be another author like Stephen King. I’m not sure there ever could be.

Since the publication of his first novel Carrie, just shy of fifty years ago, King has held dominion over the landscape of horror. He arrived during a resurgent interest in all things frightening–following the success of Ira Levin's Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971)—and quickly set about reshaping the genre in his own image. King has regularly published two or three books per year, a stream of words that flows incessantly west towards Hollywood. Almost everything he has ever written has been optioned or adapted for the screen, in some cases several times.

Such prolificacy has often led to sniffing criticism from those who consider him “merely” a horror writer (as if horror is anything “mere”). But for millions of readers and writers, he is our North Star, our Southern Cross. We navigate by him. I have interviewed hundreds of horror writers from all across the genre’s wide spectrum, and when asked for their inspirations and their gateways to fearful fiction, so many leap immediately to King. Nat Cassidy, author of this year’s Mary: An Awakening of Terror, put it best, describing King as his “mother tongue.” He is not just a writer; he is an industry, an aesthetic, a genre of one.

Of course, in so long and varied a career, there are exhilarating highs, a few bewildering lows, and many unexpected diversions. The following list is an attempt to rank King’s published work in all its darkness, weatherworn beauty, and surprising weirdness. The man has written over seventy books, so some nod to brevity is required. Any published stories compiled within a larger collection will not be ranked singularly. That still leaves over sixty novels and more than a dozen collections of tales. Together, they form a dark constellation of stories that generations have traced, in wonder and fear and hope.

Below, I've ranked King's books in order from worst to best. Let’s get started.