Some of King's recent bestsellers are Fairy Tale, Billy Summers and If It Bleeds.Many of his titles are the basis for major motion pictures, TV series and streamed events, including IT, Stand By Me (adapted from The Body) and The Shawshank Redemption, which is IMDb's top-rated movie of all time.

Biography: STEPHEN KING is the author of more than seventy books, all of them worldwide bestsellers, including the epic thrillers The Institute and Desperation.Together, they form a dark constellation of stories that generations have traced, in wonder and fear and hope.īelow, I've ranked King's books in order from worst to best. That still leaves over sixty novels and more than a dozen collections of tales. Any published stories compiled within a larger collection will not be ranked singularly.

The man has written over seventy books, so some nod to brevity is required. The following list is an attempt to rank King’s published work in all its darkness, weatherworn beauty, and surprising weirdness. Of course, in so long and varied a career, there are exhilarating highs, a few bewildering lows, and many unexpected diversions. 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. 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. But for millions of readers and writers, he is our North Star, our Southern Cross. Such prolificacy has often led to sniffing criticism from those who consider him “merely” a horror writer (as if horror is anything “mere”). Almost everything he has ever written has been optioned or adapted for the screen, in some cases several times. King has regularly published two or three books per year, a stream of words that flows incessantly west towards Hollywood. 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. Since the publication of his first novel Carrie, just shy of fifty years ago, King has held dominion over the landscape of horror. There will probably never be another author like Stephen King.

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