Vulture ranks every Stephen King novel, from 1-to-62

Read 30 of them, should be a lot more but I just haven't been able to get interested in his post-accident stuff. Have only read a couple, including Dreamcatcher (and the superb Writing one, of course), which is probably one of the worst. I know the ones since '99 have gotten some of his best reviews but for whatever reason they haven't called out to be read. Just reading the description of them turns me off some, others I've started but didn't finish. (I shouldn't judge on the description, I know. If you just read the description of everything before 2000, they probably sound equally bizarre).

For those who have read most since the accident, any recommendations?

 

Several of The Dark Tower books were written after the accident and, as noted earlier, I loved that series.

Cell has been pretty maligned, but I enjoyed it. It's a fast-paced pulpy read. I bought it in an airport and it kept my interest.

 

11/22/63 was phenomenal.

 

I want to read through the whole list, but I'm wary that after all that effort, it will just turn out to be the work of a giant spider.

 

I thought the top 10 of that list was pretty good. The Dark Tower rankings were really screwed up. Other than that I thought Cujo should have been higher and The Stand and It are interchangeable.

 

Really? I thought some clown just put it together.

 

Have yet to read the Dark Tower series, 11/22/63 and many of the others on that list, however...

I feel that The Stand is superior to It. Maybe I need to go back and read It again. Most of the time when his novellas and short stories are as good as if not superior to his novels.
I felt that Christine and Firestarter were ranked way too low.

 

I missed that. I owe you an apology.

Well played.

 

Kinda surprised his short story collections are ranked so low. King, to me, is more enjoyable in this form, since he can't seems to write many novels under 1,000 pages these days.

 

Tend to agree. The Mist, which I first read in Skeleton Crew, is my favorite work of fiction.

 

I've read pretty much everything SK has written except the Red Sox book.

The Stand will always be my favorite, although the TV version is better off forgotten. The Mist is my favorite short story, and Shawshank is my favorite novella.

Really, the Dark Tower series as a whole could be considered at the top of the list, but with all the connections to other stories, that would be cumbersome.

Some of his best writing has come post-accident, too. 11/22/63 was great, probably No. 2 on my list.

 

Like many others here, I find King's short stories to be his best work. I take a collection with me on every vacation my wife and I take (fortunately, we only take a big trip once every two years or so, so there's always something I haven't read yet). It's a tradition of mine going back more than 20 years to high school, when I read Skeleton Crew on a west coast vacation while my parents and sister went to bed at 9 pm.

I read Just After Sunset on our last vacation and loved it, even though "Graduation Afternoon" FUCKED ME UP. I mean it. I can't think of anything I've ever read that fucked me up like that. I remember sitting in our room on the cruise ship, enjoying this short story, and then BOOM the twist ending happens and I was completely shook up for the rest of the day. It felt so real, which is another measure of how great King is b/c he writes in the end notes that he wrote the story off a stunningly vivid bad dream he had while quitting painkillers cold turkey post-accident. I believe it. That was something else.

Anyone else struck by that story? My wife still laughs about how I was walking around in a daze the rest of the day.

I have at least three books (11/22/63, Duma Key and From a Buick 8 ) that I have on the table next to me right now and am hoping to tackle soon. Like now. Unless someone pissed me off on the baseball thread.