Stephen King Books for Beginners: 14 Picks, None of Them IT

Paul Sheldon writes romance novels about a character called Misery Chastain, kills her off in the final volume, then crashes his car in a Colorado snowstorm. He wakes in the house of Annie Wilkes, a former nurse who tells him she is his number one fan. She has the only copy of his new manuscript, a typewriter with a missing letter, and firm opinions about what he should write next. That is the entire setup. No ghosts, no ancient evil, nothing supernatural anywhere in it, just a locked room and a woman whose mood turns like weather.

Carrie White is sixteen, raised by a mother whose religion has no warmth in it, and treated at school the way schools treat anyone visibly different. Then she discovers she can move things without touching them. King tells the story sideways, cutting between the events and the paperwork left behind afterwards, court testimony and book extracts and news reports, so you know from page one that something terrible happened and you keep going to find out how. It is his first published novel and it is short, angry, and still the sharpest thing he has written about how cruelty compounds.

A hundred boys set out on a road in Maine and walk. Drop below four miles an hour and you collect a warning, and the third warning is fatal, delivered by soldiers rolling along behind in a halftrack. Whoever is left standing gets anything he wants for life. There is no plot past that, only boys talking while their number falls, and a country watching the whole thing like a Sunday broadcast. King wrote it as a teenager and published it under the name Richard Bachman, and the flatness of the telling is the point of it.

Paul Edgecombe runs the death row block at Cold Mountain prison in Depression era Louisiana, where the last walk happens along a strip of faded green linoleum. John Coffey arrives convicted of killing two girls, an enormous man who is frightened of the dark and cries easily, and it becomes clear quite early that the case against him does not hold together. King published it as a serial, six thin instalments released month by month, and you can feel that shape in the way each part ends on a hook. It is sentimental in places, and it earns most of what it asks for.

Four stories at novella length, one per season. Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is the prison story you know from the film. Apt Pupil is a nasty little book about a teenage boy who identifies a Nazi war criminal hiding in his suburb and blackmails him into telling war stories. The Body follows four boys walking a railway line to look at a dead one, and became the film Stand by Me. The Breathing Method is the only ghost story here and the slightest. Read together, they show his range faster than any single novel manages.

The first half is his life: a poor Maine childhood, rejection slips spiked on a nail in his bedroom wall, teaching English by day and writing in a trailer by night, then the drinking and cocaine years he refuses to prettify, then the van that nearly killed him while he was out walking in 1999. The second half is craft, arranged as tools in a box. Grammar, adverbs, dialogue, the first draft written with the door shut and the second with it open. He also tells you to cut ten percent, which remains the most useful editing advice I have been given.

Jack Torrance loses his teaching post, signs on to mind the Overlook Hotel through a Colorado winter, and moves his family in for five snowed-in months. His son Danny sees things nobody else can, which the hotel finds extremely interesting. What surprises film-first readers is how domestic the book is: a marriage under strain, a man fighting a drink he has already given up, a child who understands far more than the adults credit. The hotel never has to invent anything. It only presses on what is cracked already.

Louis Creed takes a university job, moves his wife and two small children to rural Maine, and meets the old neighbour who walks him up to the animal burial ground in the woods behind the house. Beyond it lies older ground that gives things back, though not in the condition they left. The horror is not the thing in the woods. It is grief, and the arithmetic a parent starts doing at three in the morning. King has said he put the manuscript away for years because it disturbed him, and reading it, I believe him.

A writer comes back to the town he grew up in, planning a book about the empty house on the hill. Somebody else has just bought that house. From there it runs as a vampire novel told through the town rather than the vampire: the bus driver, the estate agent, the priest with a drink problem, the boy who reads horror comics and therefore works out what is happening well before any adult does. King has said openly that it is Dracula transplanted into 1970s America, and the transplant is the whole trick. The town is the protagonist and the town is what dies.

Luke Ellis is twelve, clever enough for two universities at once, and mildly telekinetic. A team kills his parents in the night and takes him to a place called the Institute, where children are tested, injected, and eventually moved from Front Half to Back Half, which nobody comes out of. It reads like a thriller rather than a horror novel: escape logistics, adults who insist they are only doing a job, and a small town policeman whose story runs alongside until the two meet. Nearly five hundred pages that behave like three hundred.

Billy is an ex-Marine sniper turned contract killer who only accepts targets he considers bad men. The last job needs him to sit in a rented office for months while the mark grinds through a court case, so he builds a cover identity as a writer at work on a book. Then he genuinely starts writing it, and what comes out is his own life. Around the midpoint the novel changes shape entirely and becomes something slower and sadder. There is also one late detour that quietly ties back to another book on this list.

The boy from The Shining is a man now, carrying both the talent and the alcoholism. He drifts, hits bottom, finds Alcoholics Anonymous and a job in a hospice where his gift lets him sit with people as they go, which is where the nickname in the title comes from. Then a girl with a far larger talent starts contacting him, and a travelling group who live off children like her come hunting. It is a road novel and a recovery novel wearing a horror coat, and the recovery half is the honest one.

Jake Epping is handed a portal that always opens on the same day in 1958, plus a dying friend's project: live in the past for five years and stop Lee Harvey Oswald. The book is enormous and only about a third of it concerns the mission. The rest is Jake living in small town Texas, teaching, directing school plays and falling in love with a librarian called Sadie, while the past shoves back at anybody trying to alter it. It is the best love story he has written and it happens to be shelved under horror.

Charlie Reade is seventeen, his mother is dead and his father is a recovering alcoholic, and he takes on the care of a neighbour called Howard Bowditch along with an old German Shepherd named Radar. Bowditch has a shed with a deep shaft in it and a spiral stair going down. The first third is a plain story about a boy, an old man and a dog, and it is the best part of the book. Then Charlie goes down the stairs into a grey kingdom with a sundial that can make an old dog young, and it turns into a quest with borrowed furniture.