(This appeared on Tor.com after I finished the first 13 posts. I had planned to stop the re-read there, but would return to it later like a ghost coming back to take care of unfinished business. I can’t find this post on Tor’s new site, so here it is for the completists.)
I published the Carrie re-read essay on Tor.com in October, 2012 and posted Thinner January 31, 2013. I figured I’d be pretty burnt out at that point and ready to move on, but re-reading all those Stephen King books turned out to be a pleasure and a surprise. I was surprised at the way some of the books I never loved turned out to be so ambitious (Cujo), and how some of the books that I clung tightly to as a teenager wound up leaving me empty (‘Salem’s Lot, I’m looking at you). I wanted more.
So I decided to keep going and cover the next ten books King wrote, but I needed a few months to get ahead on my reading, so the re-read wouldn’t restart until September of that year. Before we jump to that point in the next essay, here’s a summary of where my head was on these first 12 Stephen King books, ranked in order of most disappointing to least.
Christine — if King ever wrote a book that felt like a quick cash-in attempt, this is it.
Thinner — it’s King without the things that make me like King. Things like ambition, a love for his own characters, and a determination to take care with his craftsmanship.
‘Salem’s Lot — as much as I loved it as a kid, and as ambitious as it is, I just felt that it didn’t hold up for me over the years. Today, it feels like a collection of influences rather than a living, breathing novel.
“Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” and “Apt Pupil” — there was nothing wrong with either of these but neither jumped off the page the way I remembered them doing the first time I read them.
I’m going to leave The Stand off this list. It’s a book a lot of people feel passionately about, and a book that I read several times in high school, but while I know it speaks to a lot of people, it’s just not for me anymore. During the pandemic I had a burning urge to revisit it and put it down about halfway through because I didn’t feel compelled to keep turning the pages. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad book (unlike Christine, which is objectively bad) but it’s a book I feel I’ve outgrown. Pet Sematary feels the same way to me. As much as I admire what King’s doing, and as successful as I think the book is, it’s not a book I’ll ever come back to, not because of any failings on its part, but simply because it’s no longer for me.
(A brief message from Future Grady: I actually reread Pet Sematary in 2022, and while it still wasn’t a book I loved, I definitely enjoyed it a lot more than the sourpuss who wrote this post back in 2013.)
The happier surprise for me in this re-read was how many books I still loved. Especially during his NAL years, King was pushing hard and trying something new on a regular basis, and it showed. In order of least to greatest, here’s how I felt about the rest of his books:
Carrie — this is one of those books where you understand why people were so excited when it came out. Deeply experimental in form, it also gave us King’s first truly sympathetic monster.
Firestarter — unjustly neglected, King’s most sexual book is also one of his best books about children.
“The Body” and “The Breathing Method”—two stories from Different Seasons that have held up incredibly well. “The Body” remains one of King’s best, and “The Breathing Method” is one of the few times he’s done pastiche so perfectly.
The Dead Zone — it’s sort of breathtaking to me that King was willing to write an entire book about a failed political assassin and still keep the reader on his side all the way through. King calls it his first “real” novel, and he’s not wrong.
The Shining — rarely has an author put his own personal nightmares on the page in this much detail. This is something of a highwire act for King’s own self-loathing, and it works.
Cujo — I was really, really, really surprised I liked this one so much. It’s everything that’s great about King and almost nothing that’s not-so-great. Ultimately it’s just the story of a good dog gone bad, but there’s so much more to it than that that I’ve found myself haunted by it weeks later.
King’s going to go on to write a lot more books (a LOT more), and he will definitely go on to write plenty of iconic books, but these 12 are the ones on which his fame rests. They are the core of the King Canon, and it was a pleasure to see that over half of them still hold up today, almost 40 years later. If you’ve never read King, or if you haven’t read him in a long time, you could find plenty of worse ways to spend a weekend than by picking up Cujo or The Shining again.
King kept on writing, and I kept on re-reading, however, so let’s dive into the next chunk of his career, picking back up in 1985 with one of this most iconic short story collections….