Stephen King’s Scariest Stories

The king of horror has returned — along with a few old friends. Holly Gibney is back to investigate a terrifying threat and serve as a bodyguard to an activist with a target on her back. Taut, immersive and chilling, this is Stephen King at his best.

An assortment of chilling stories curated by the master of horror himself. With a new introduction from Stephen King, this collection is a must-have for any fan looking for stories that go a little bit darker.

This underrated gem from the 1990s plays a weird trick: initially, the sordid sex game that initiates the plot, wherein a woman named Jessie, caught in a troubled marriage, is stranded in a remote cabin, handcuffed to the bed, after her husband has a fatal heart attack in the middle of a kinky experiment, promises titillation. Soon, the story swerves into what seems like a one of survival and emotional reckoning—and then dives into darker territory involving a seriously frightening encounter with a starving dog and a disturbing entity Jessie calls the Space Cowboy. As Jessie’s mental state deteriorates, King makes her desperation and sense of mounting doom visceral, and her powerlessness makes it almost excruciating.
Most blood-curdling moment: While the moment Jessie degloves herself (which means just what you think it does) to escape the handcuffs is total body horror, we’d have to vote for the much quieter moment when the dog first enters the house and sees Jessie’s husband’s corpse as a potential feast.

The Dark Half regularly shows up in lists of King’s most underrated works. The premise—a famous writer finds an evil character of his own creation comes to life and launch a murder spree—doesn’t seem all that terrifying at first blush, but it’s what King does with it that makes this book scary. Exploring themes of sanity, creativity, and the creeping suspicion that we all have a dark half that might enjoy a little bloodletting, The Dark Half is both a creepy-as-heck horror story and an insightful commentary on how little control we have over our subconsciousness. King cleverly makes the evil dude, George Stark, so over-the-top so as to be comical, obscuring the fact that real horror is coming from inside the main character all along.
Most blood-curdling moment: When author Thad engages in an “automatic writing” experiment and his hand goes rogue and stabs him. The idea of your body being under someone else’s control is terrifying.

1922 is a truly horrifying story of greed, emotional collapse, and the various ways a person can be punished for their crimes. Willfred, a farmer, manipulates his own son into helping murder his wife in order to gain her land and preserve the value of his own—and begins having seriously disturbing premonitions and run-ins with vicious rats almost immediately afterward. Every step Willfred takes on his way to rock-bottom feels inevitable, and that inevitability is part of the scariness. There’s something uniquely terrifying about being trapped in a fate you chose for yourself, and also something very satisfying in watching Willfred pay and pay and pay for his crimes—with his family, with his own body, then with the land he killed for, and finally with his life.
Most blood-curdling moment: Since 1922 is all about the slow boil of fear, naturally it’s the ending, when Willfred gets what’s coming to him. Haunted and ruined, he thinks he has a plan for when the rats come, but nothing is as it seems.

King’s love for old-school horror has never been a secret, and in ‘Salem’s Lot he indulges in a classic authorial “what if” experiment, wondering what would happen if Dracula showed up in a small town in 20th-century America. This is one of King’s most straightforward stories, and it’s scary precisely because King doesn’t try to spice up the vampire myth with new twists. Instead, he mines terror by exploring how the vampiric “infection” would race like fire along familial and friend connections, taking advantage of our closest relationships to turn us into literal monsters.
Most blood-curdling moment: Two words: Infant vampire.

Misery proves King can absolutely terrify you without involving any sort of supernatural element. The key to horror in many ways is control—we all labor under the illusion that we’re in charge of our own lives. Shatter that illusion, and horror follows. Obsessive fan Annie Wilkes is terrifying because she’s so unshakably certain of her righteousness when she takes Paul Sheldon, the author of her favorite novels, prisoner after chancing on him in the wake of a terrible car accident—but also because of how completely she establishes complete control over Paul. Completely at her mercy, Paul soon discovers that the only way to survive is to play along with her insanity.
Most blood-curdling moment: When Paul breaks the rules, Annie decides he has to be punished, so she does something to his body to make sure he can never run away again. Literally.

The Stand is the very definition of literary sprawl, and by the end of the story it’s become a postapocalyptic epic about two groups attempting to rebuild society, one on the side of good and one in thrall to Randall Flagg, a supernatural evil presence. It’s easy to forget that the first part of the mammoth novel, in which the superbug called Captains Trips decimates the world in the most disgusting way possible, is absolutely horrifying. Anyone who can read the first part of The Stand without freaking out every time they hear someone cough in a crowded room has ice water in their veins.
Most blood-curdling moment: Larry Underwood’s trek through a pitch-black Lincoln Tunnel filled with rotting corpses and… other things is terrifying.

Clowns.
Oh, do we need to say more? Clowns are so inherently terrifying it’s difficult to understand how they became linked with children and harmless fun, and King makes serious hay by having his eternal, malignant force of evil in the town of Derry take on the form of Pennywise the Clown in order to lure children into its power. The true horror of the novel is how It turns the innocence and joy of childhood against us, weaponizing the imaginations and goodness of kids. The way It sneaks up on the kids, luring them into situations where they’re isolated and then turning their fears and insecurities against them, just curdles the blood.
Most blood-curdling moment: When the Losers are going through the history of Derry and find Pennywise in all the photos… and then the photos start to move.

Most of Skeleton Crew
If there’s a more terrifying collection of short stories in existence, we haven’t read it. Skeleton Crew is Stephen King at 11 on a scale of least to most terrifying. The standout stories are “The Jaunt,” which takes a deceptively simple sci-fi premise and turns it into a white-haired horror that makes sleep almost impossible, and “Survivor Type,” which imagines a premise that’s terrifying in and of itself (being stranded on a deserted island without food) and cranks up the horror bit by bit—horror that’s twice as effective because you can easily imagine yourself in the same situation, and making the same awful mistakes.
Most blood-curdling moment: “It’s longer than you think, Dad! Longer than you think!”

The Shining
The Shining has been so thoroughly out-shined by Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation the novel’s reputation sometimes suffers as a result—people seem to forget that the original story had a different focus, but one just as scary. King plays with themes of alcoholism, insanity, and the possibility that we all have evil inside us, as well as the idea that all that stands between us and that evil are the restraints placed against us by society. Jack’s descent into madness is frightening because you can see yourself in his enraged, unhappy resentment, and because King does such a good job of making the Overlook Hotel both an evil and an inescapable presence.
Most blood-curdling moment: The scene where Danny is attacked by the topiary animals shouldn’t work, but it does. It’s a white-knuckle sequence that establishes the Overlook’s malevolence beyond any doubt.

Pretty much everyone names Pet Sematary as King’s scariest (including the author himself). Part of it is the primal nature of the scares, centered on loved ones coming back from death wrong. Part of it is the emotional side—the relatable desire of the characters to bring someone back, no matter the cost. And part of it is King’s choices of victims: a beloved cat and a darling little boy, both of whom come back in the same bodies, but with vastly different spirits. Everyone knows loss, and everyone knows what they’d do to reverse the worst of those losses. And everyone knows the price would be terrible. King plugs into all of that expertly, engineering a truly horrifying novel.
Most blood-curdling moment: “A cold hand fell on Louis’ shoulder. Rachel’s voice was grating, full of dirt. ‛Darling,’ it said.” It’s the “darling” that gets you.
What’s on your personal list of King’s scariest books?

Cujo used to be a cute and fluffy dog, but something has gotten into him. This classic supernatural canine tale features both fury and fur.