My Official Top 10 Stephen King Novels! 2026 Update

Oh my gosh, this deals with the JFK assassination, going back and living and changing the past. There's a great love story, arguably one of King's best endings, and it's one that like was recommended to him by like one of his kids. I love 112263.

I liked Billy Summers because it's it's King not doing horror, per se. This is a hitman story, but he's found a way to take the author element, like making a character an author or a writer, and twist it in such an interesting way, and the love story and the end and just the way that things work out in Billy Summers. I didn't see it coming.

And then I recently read Dr. Sleep. Dr. Sleep was really good.

And I love Dumaki because it's one of the rare books that's not set in Maine or something like that. This one's set in Florida. And we're following a man who has just had a work site injury.

I was mortified and horrified at the villain here. I did not find them cartoonish. I found them compelling and scary as all get out because it's a group of people you just don't think to be scared of.

It does have a problematic scene in it. I'm fully aware. And yet getting to know those kids and how what their lives turned into when they grew up and Pennywise and the kind of analyzation of humans being the real monsters along with Pennywise just oh this book is so incredibly good.

I like Misery a lot. It would easily be in my top 20.

I love Needful Things. Needful Things is the one that I think really brought me back into King.

probably Pet Cemetery as well, but I needed to do a reread on Pet Cemetery. It's been over 20 years since I've read that one. And , yeah, I need to I need to revisit that one before I'm going to include it on the list.

Oh my gosh. This is one of the few ones where I actually watched the movie adaptation immediately after finishing the book and it's just so incredibly good. The death row during the Great Depression and the analyzation of all the inmates on death row and exploring even though they're monsters and they've done terrible things exploring their humanity...

And then the small town elements, like the first, I think two to three chapters, we're following a completely different story that then doesn't wrap back around until about the halfway mark. But that first little bit, that first initial prologue, oh, Chef's Kiss, I absolutely loved this book.

The group of boys who are going on the long walk, this is like truly dystopian. And the way they come together and they become adversarial and then they become friends and then they learn to love each other. And then they're also dealing with the horrors of what the long walk is.

I love The Shining. I read The Shining in college and I just I s it's been over God when was college? It's been about 18 years and I still have vivid memories of sitting down, walking around, reading this book, and experiencing those scenes for the first time.