All 66 Stephen King Novels, Ranked (original) (raw)

Stephen King wears a checkered shirt in an up-close headshot

Image via Roger Wong/INFphoto.com

Published Dec 26, 2025, 5:00 PM EST

Jeremy has more than 2500 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account.
He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas.

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To keep this intro brief, since the ranking is going to get long, Stephen King has been writing books for more than half a century at this point, and it’s hard to fully communicate just how prolific he is. His first published novel came out in 1974, and he’s written more than one novel a year since, at least on average, with huge numbers of short stories and novellas (usually found in compilations) also being published. And he’s written some non-fiction, too, including the memoir On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. But he's best known for his horror works, though he's also mastered some other genres, too. Also worth noting is the immense number of TV shows and movies that have adapted his works over the decades.

What follows is just focused on his novels, so if you're looking for stories like The Body (which was adapted into Stand by Me) or The Mist (adapted into the movie of the same name), you're not going to find them here. Also, some of his novellas might technically be novel-length, and a few of the “novels” mentioned below are more like novella-length, but if something was published as its own thing, at least initially, then it’s going to be included here. Also, King’s co-written a few novels, and they're also going to be included. And, finally, hopefully nothing else gets published while this is being written, because then it won’t truly be “Every Stephen King Novel, Ranked.” The legendary author is still writing, as of 2025, so maybe such a ranking has to technically be a work-in-progress.

66 'Lisey's Story' (2006)

Image via Charles Scribner's Sons

Things are going to get positive before too long. There are far more good Stephen King novels than bad ones, and of those good ones, some are genuinely masterful, but going from worst to best requires addressing, you know, the worst. And Lisey’s Story is the worst. It’s King’s favorite, though, which might make putting it here seem like a hot take, or something done to stir up controversy, but that’s not the intent.

Lisey’s Story is personal to an agonizing extent, and you can see it plainly. It’s one where the words on the page meant a lot to the author, and there are so many autobiographical elements here that are visible if you're a reader, and likely so many more than only King – and those who know him personally – would pick up on. It’s heartfelt, and good on the writer being happy with it and all, but reading Lisey’s Story is torturous. It’s long, sappy, repetitive, and also filled with some really annoying creative decisions… mostly, the slang. “Babyluv,” “bool,” and “smucking,” oh my. Only tackle this if you don’t mind very sentimental books, or just feel obligated to read everything Stephen King’s ever put out.

65 'The Regulators' (1996)

A person shaped photo of houses on the cover of The Regulators by Stephen King as Richard Bachman.

Image via Dutton/Stephen King

Also included in this ranking are those books Stephen King wrote under the name of Richard Bachman, which was a pseudonym of his originally so he could get more works published (and so he could write books that were a little different genre-wise from his usual thing). Later on, the pseudonym got found out, but even post-outing, there have been a couple more Bachman books, including The Regulators.

This one is messy and hard to even make much sense of, even by the standards of King’s messy works. If you skip to the end of this list, you'll see some messy, sprawling novels of his that are chaotic, but in good ways. The Regulators is just a muddled mess of nothing, though. Other King books start well and end poorly, while The Regulators starts incoherently and then continues to devolve further. You're better off sticking to the still-flawed, but more engaging Desperation, which King wrote under his own name, and which came out the same year as The Regulators (both have the same characters, or at least characters who share names; one novel is intended to oddly mirror/reflect the other).

64 'Bag of Bones' (1998)

Image via Charles Scribner's Sons

Some of the same complaints made about Lisey’s Story also apply to Bag of Bones, since it’s another Stephen King novel that seems to rely a bit too heavily on certain staples of his. The main character is an author, some of the settings are familiar, there are supernatural elements that intensify at predictable points in the story, there’s a thoroughly unconvincing romance that develops, and also, everything takes much longer than it needs to.

If you fall into the familiarity of it all, and find it a bit comforting in some way, then more power to you, but every component of Bag of Bones has been done before, and better, in King’s past works. It’s a repetitive and disappointing read, and though you don’t always see it considered among the worst of King’s work (again, said body of work has much more good stuff than bad), it probably should be a little more often.

63 'Duma Key' (2008)

Image via Charles Scribner's Sons

It was probably a hot take to rank Bag of Bones so low, and it might be an even hotter one to put Duma Key just one spot higher. It starts decently enough, at least, and the setting is a change-up, because King’s main state of Maine ain’t where this one takes place. It’s largely set off the Florida coast, and the main character is a building contractor who paints in his spare time, so not an author, which is another nice change.

King puts all these promising things in Duma Key early on, but then falls back on old and tired tricks as things progress. This novel might well have the most annoying of all of Stephen King’s comedic relief sort of characters, and the inevitable supernatural stuff ends up being underwhelming, too. Duma Key has a few decent chapters early on, and then becomes a slog to finish, being one of those Stephen King novels where you can really feel the sense of him starting a story well before figuring out how to finish it.

62 'Holly' (2023)

Image via Charles Scribner's Sons

Debuting in a 2014 book that’s much better (so it’ll be talked about a while from now), Holly Gibney is a character Stephen King clearly has a lot of love for, and his readers… well, they're not always as enthusiastic. But Holly’s been a supporting character in a few pretty good crime-focused (with a little horror) books of King’s, while Holly – which is one, obviously, all about her – is quite far off from pretty good.

It's not that Holly doesn’t work as a protagonist. She might be better in a supporting role, sure, but it’s also the story around her here that lets everything down. _Holly_’s a story with silly villains, repetitive writing, and generally weak dialogue. There are things here, concerning the characters and the world they're trying to get by in (the early 2020s; lockdown times) that are reiterated so many times it becomes agonizing. Holly feels stretched out, like a novella painfully extended to the length of a novel, and very little about it feels interesting or gripping, which really isn't what you want when you're trying to get through a crime/thriller book.

61 'Thinner' (1984)

Image via New American Library

Thinner was the last book Stephen King wrote under the Richard Bachman pseudonym without everyone knowing King was also Bachman. This was the one where, not long after publication, the secret got exposed. Bachman had a good run in the dark, though it sort of came to a stop quality-wise with Thinner, too, since this is a fairly plodding read.

Basically, Thinner is about a man who gets cursed, and that curse involves him losing weight at a dangerous speed. The progression seems like it would be compelling at first, especially the whole exploration of the curse feeling like a blessing at first, but it grinds to a halt at a point. You can feel the desperation here, of having an idea and then forcing it to an ending, and it results in a read that gets disappointing, at a point. There’s a tiredness to King’s writing here that you thankfully don’t often feel with his other books (especially those he wrote when he was still in his 20s/30s).

60 'The Tommyknockers' (1987)

Image via G. P. Putnam's Sons

Ah, The Tommyknockers. If you're including the Richard Bachman books, you could probably call Thinner the author’s first real misfire, but if you're talking just those under Stephen King’s name, then this was his biggest writing misstep of the 1970s and 1980s. It’s a story about… um… well. How do you summarize this? There’s a strange object with potentially extra-terrestrial origins, and when it’s discovered near a small town in Maine (oh Maine, you’re so crazy), people start behaving strangely.

The Tommyknockers is an absolute behemoth of a novel, with a page count of almost 1000 in some editions; depending on the formatting and all. Of all the Stephen King novels around this length, The Tommyknockers probably has the least reason to be so long. There are sequences that are readable and a little interesting, but there is just too much here, to the point where, while reading it, one might wonder if it even had an editor at all.

59 'The Colorado Kid' (2005)

Image via Hard Case Crime

The Colorado Kid was an almost admirable attempt on Stephen King’s part to write a full-on mystery/crime novel, and one without any real supernatural, fantastical, or sci-fi elements. There’s this sense of King being out of his element throughout, and therein lies the “almost admirable” part. He tries to make a mystery book all about the mystery, and intentionally without any real answers, but it’s done in a frustrating way.

You can get to the end of a chaotic and paranoia-inducing book like Don DeLillo's Libra and not feel like you know what happened, or who’s to blame, and that unsettling feeling seems intentional and visceral. Here, with The Colorado Kid, you can almost feel King pausing during the writing process, every few sentences, and shrugging at no one in particular. It goes nowhere, and was never really supposed to go anywhere, but still… why? Anyway, King’s since written two other books for Hard Case Crime, and they're both better than this one.

58 'Dreamcatcher' (2001)

Image via Scribner

If you read The Tommyknockers and Dreamcatcher back-to-back, your mind will probably melt, and even if it doesn’t, you'll come away from the whole experience not really sure where one ended and the other began. At the risk of oversimplifying things, both represent King doing extra-terrestrial-related sci-fi stuff, all across an overwhelming number of pages, though in _Dreamcatcher_’s defense, it is a little shorter.

It's still a mess, though. You can see how messy the story is by watching the also infamous film adaptation instead, which won’t take you as long, so that’s a plus. It’s not a very good film, but it’s also adapting a novel that’s not very good. It’s a more interesting kind of messiness, rather than a continuously frustrating messiness (it’s even sort of fun for about 100 pages or so), though it isn't really worth reading in full unless you're a Stephen King completionist.

57 'From a Buick 8' (2002)

A warped image of a vintage car on the book cover art for From a Buick 8 by Stephen King.

Image via Charles Scribner's Sons/Stephen King

Nearly 20 years after writing a book centered around a strange vehicle, Stephen King kind of did so again by writing From a Buick 8, though the incomprehensibility here makes it feel more in line with Dreamcatcher, or maybe even The Tommyknockers. Actually, it could also feel a little reminiscent of The Regulators in the sense that it’s so hard to succinctly express what the damn premise is.

The car is weird, and people talk about the weird car, and what it might be able to do, and everything is told from different points of view and not strictly in chronological order. So, From a Buick 8 takes a weird story about something hard to understand and further muddies it up through some stylistic/narrative choices. Points for trying or ambition, maybe, and From a Buick 8 doesn’t drag on as long as some other lesser Stephen King books, but it remains a somewhat tough read (and, one would imagine, a difficult one to adapt) for various reasons.