8 best Stephen King Books that will have you gripped

King’s later work, while no less ingenious than his horror, focuses more on thrillers and the detective genre, and this 2011 novel (which, surprise surprise, has also spawned a TV adaptation) is utterly electrifying – and a massive task. He had the idea of a time traveller who has the chance to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy before he’d even written 1974’s Carrie, but decided he needed more experience and talent to take on the scope he had envisaged for the book.

The immaculate period detail of the late 1950s and 1960s, and the brilliant idea that each time you travel back to the present time from 1958, any changes you made to that timeline are wiped clean – make this more than worth the wait and a delightful read.

King famously disliked Stanley Kubrick’s iconic adaption of his book, finding the depiction of Wendy Torrance shrill and ridiculous, and her husband Jack – a recovering alcoholic struggling to overcome writer’s block in an isolated mountain hotel while descending into madness – reduced to a monster.

But the novel itself features horror on multiple levels. Their son, Danny, possesses psychic powers, a theme that features throughout King’s work, which allow him to see ghosts of the “Overlook Hotel”, who then unleash terror on the Torrance family. We also found the claustrophobic quality and nod to family relationships and the impact of alcoholism (which King knew first-hand from his own addictions) made this read all the more compelling.

While King’s physical depictions of his female characters have endured criticism from readers over the years, Misery brings us one of his best-drawn women – and easily the most terrifying. Annie Wilkes is all-too human, but her obsession with author Paul Sheldon, and specifically the romance novels that he is trying to move away from, has horrific consequences when she captures him and keeps him prisoner.

King drew inspiration from his own life for Wilkes; being similarly hobbled by the cocaine addiction he was trying to wean himself off from, and having been widely criticised by fans for trying to move away from horror with one of his fantasy novels. One dreads to think what further chaos Wilkes might have wrought with access to social media, but this claustrophobic and utterly terrifying thriller will easily have you ignoring your apps until you’ve reached the last page.

One of King’s most notorious books, IT taps into a fear arguably every adult had as a child: clowns. An otherworldly being settles in a town in Maine, and using fear to feed on children, sets out on a murder spree every 27 years.

While the ghastly image of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, teeth and all, rather sticks in the brain, the enormous novel has some nasty extra tricks up its sleeve. Be glad that the screen adaptations didn’t bother with trying to get the screen rights to Jaws to replicate one of the more terrifying encounters written here. In 2017, King told Vulture drily: “It’s fascinating to me that there has been so much comment about that single sex scene and so little about the multiple child murders. That must mean something, but I’m not sure what.”

Vanity Fair described King’s second novel as “Our Town with razor-sharp teeth and claws”, which is spot-on. King’s perfectly simple idea was this; what if Dracula came back to modern America? The answer is a nastier version of Lost Boys, and a creepy bit of magic that holds its own as one of literature’s foremost vampire novels.

While vampire fiction has been overtaken by the sexy (True Blood) and the sparkly (Twilight), Salem’s Lot is so compelling because it puts all that aside and goes straight for pure evil. If Buffy had gone to high school in Salem, it would have made for very depressing television, but for horror lovers looking for something altogether nastier in their vampires, this is just the sort of delicious read to appeal.

We’re recommending the eight-book box set here, as we’ve found that once you start the series, it becomes extremely moreish, though you can start out with book one, Gunslinger. But be warned: this epic fantasy is not user-friendly to the King beginner. The Dark Tower is where King makes it clear exactly how much of his work co-exists in the same universe, as he weaves characters and events from his other books into a central plot inspired by spaghetti Westerns and epic poetry.

As well as telling a compelling new story, King brings back old favourites for unofficial sequels (Salem’s Lot fans will find a lot to enjoy). The Shining might be our pick for the King book of note, but as a series, The Dark Tower has his fans’ heart.

King’s 1978 post-apocalyptic novel almost serves as a precursor toThe Dark Tower, with a shared villain and a similarly roaming style, inspired by King’s desire to write a contemporary American take on Lord of the Rings. Four hundred new pages were added into a new 1990 edition, and King went on to adapt his own book for the 1994 miniseries.

He’s reappraised it again for this year’s new television adaptation and has reworked the ending. While you might not be in the mood for a story about a pandemic that wipes out almost the entire world’s population right now, this utterly absorbing novel is rightly hailed as one of King’s finest novels, and, the villainous character of “Dark Man” aside, it ends on a note of hope.

Fans of The Green Mile film adaptation are often surprised to learn that King wrote its source material, which was originally published in six monthly volumes. It’s not horror in the traditional sense – there is no otherworldly being to blame for what tragedy happens at a Louisiana prison during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Instead, the horror comes from people.

John Coffey is a gentle man, tall, powerful, and gifted with remarkable powers of healing. He is on death row in prison for the rapes and murders of two young girls, and he is doomed because it is 1932, and he is a black man – a detail King added to ensure his innocence wouldn’t affect the outcome.