There’s nothing like getting lost in a great Stephen King book — the edge-of-your-seat suspense, the shocking plot twists, the chilling details. Missing your King fix? End of Watch, the final installment in the Mr. Mercedes trilogy, will be released in June, but if you miss Stephen King’s writing, here are 11 books to read while you wait. Check out the list and their publishers’ descriptions below.
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If you loved It, read Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out — with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes — to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There’s Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan. Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins… albino hunchback Oly… and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious — and dangerous — asset.
As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the US, inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.
Why you’ll love it: This creepy novel keeps you on the edge of your seat, twisting your favorite carnival acts in ways you never wanted to imagine. Katherine Dunn does for carnivals what King did for clowns in It.
If you loved Under the Dome, read Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Richard Mayhew is an unassuming young businessman living in London, with a dull job and a pretty but demanding fiancée. Then one night he stumbles across a girl bleeding on the sidewalk. He stops to help her — and the life he knows vanishes like smoke.
Several hours later, the girl is gone too. And by the following morning Richard Mayhew has been erased from his world. His bank cards no longer work, taxi drivers won’t stop for him, his landlord rents his apartment out to strangers. He has become invisible, inexplicably consigned to a London of shadows and darkness — a city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels — that exists entirely in a subterranean labyrinth of sewer canals and abandoned subway stations. He has fallen through the cracks of reality and has landed somewhere different, somewhere that is Neverwhere.
For this is the home of Door, the mysterious girl whom Richard rescued in the London Above. A personage of great power and nobility in this murky, candlelit realm, she is on a mission to discover the cause of her family’s slaughter, and in doing so preserve this strange underworld kingdom from the malevolence that means to destroy it. And with nowhere else to turn, Richard Mayhew must now join the Lady Door’s entourage in their determined — and possibly fatal — quest.
For the dread journey ever-downward — through bizarre anachronisms and dangerous incongruities, and into dusty corners of stalled time — is Richard’s final hope, his last road back to a “real” world that is growing disturbingly less real by the minute.
Why you’ll love it: Under the Dome is about what would happen if a town were suddenly cut off from the rest of the world — right in plain sight. Neil Gaiman takes the idea even further in Neverwhere, creating an entirely separate world beneath the one we know. It’s as imaginative and page-turning as any King classic!
If you loved The Shining, read The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a “haunting;” Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers — and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.
Why you’ll love it: The terrifying, haunted hotel in The Shining has caused nightmares since its publication. If you can’t get enough of old, haunted buildings, The Haunting of Hill House will be the perfect read for you.
If you loved Bag of Bones, read The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
From the acclaimed author of Knockemstiff — called “powerful, remarkable, exceptional” by the Los Angeles Times — comes a dark and riveting vision of America that delivers literary excitement in the highest degree.
In The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic overtones of Flannery O’Connor at her most haunting.
Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.
Donald Ray Pollock braids his plotlines into a taut narrative that will leave readers astonished and deeply moved. With his first novel, he proves himself a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain.
Why you’ll love it: King weaves scary, captivating stories, but he also writes excellent books about people. Donald Ray Pollock captures that same human element in his writing, and The Devil All the Time is the perfect companion read to Bag of Bones.
If you loved Salem’s Lot, read The Passage by Justin Cronin
An epic and gripping tale of catastrophe and survival, The Passage is the story of Amy — abandoned by her mother at the age of six, pursued and then imprisoned by the shadowy figures behind a government experiment of apocalyptic proportions. But Special Agent Brad Wolgast, the lawman sent to track her down, is disarmed by the curiously quiet girl and risks everything to save her. As the experiment goes nightmarishly wrong, Wolgast secures her escape — but he can’t stop society’s collapse. And as Amy walks alone, across miles and decades, into a future dark with violence and despair, she is filled with the mysterious and terrifying knowledge that only she has the power to save the ruined world.
Why you’ll love it: If you’ve been waiting for a vampire novel to rival King’s, this is it. Plus, it comes recommended by King himself!
If you loved Carrie, read NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
NOS4A2 is a spine-tingling novel of supernatural suspense from master of horror Joe Hill, the New York Times bestselling author of Heart-Shaped Box and Horns.
Victoria McQueen has a secret gift for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to unanswerable questions. On her Raleigh Tuff Burner bike, she makes her way to a rickety covered bridge that, within moments, takes her wherever she needs to go, whether it’s across Massachusetts or across the country.
Charles Talent Manx has a way with children. He likes to take them for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the NOS4A2 vanity plate. With his old car, he can slip right out of the everyday world, and onto the hidden roads that transport them to an astonishing — and terrifying — playground of amusements he calls “Christmasland.”
Then, one day, Vic goes looking for trouble — and finds Manx. That was a lifetime ago. Now Vic, the only kid to ever escape Manx’s unmitigated evil, is all grown up and desperate to forget. But Charlie Manx never stopped thinking about Victoria McQueen. He’s on the road again and he’s picked up a new passenger: Vic’s own son.
Why you’ll love it: Written by Stephen King’s son, NOS4A2 has all the creepy factors of a classic King novel. If Carrie scared you, this is a definitely must-read.
If you loved The Stand, read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.
One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur’s chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them.
Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten’s arm is a line from Star Trek: “Because survival is insufficient.” But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave.
Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all. A novel of art, memory, and ambition, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.
Why you’ll love it: If you were captivated by the end-of-the-world scenario in The Stand, you are sure to love the apocalyptic world Emily St. John Mandel brings to life in Station Eleven.
If you loved 11/22/63, read The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
Harper Curtis is a killer who stepped out of the past. Kirby Mazrachi is the girl who was never meant to have a future.
Kirby is the last shining girl, one of the bright young women, burning with potential, whose lives Harper is destined to snuff out after he stumbles on a House in Depression-era Chicago that opens on to other times.
At the urging of the House, Harper inserts himself into the lives of the shining girls, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. He’s the ultimate hunter, vanishing into another time after each murder, untraceable — until one of his victims survives.
Determined to bring her would-be killer to justice, Kirby joins the Chicago Sun-Times to work with the ex-homicide reporter, Dan Velasquez, who covered her case. Soon Kirby finds herself closing in on the impossible truth…
The Shining Girls is a masterful twist on the serial killer tale: a violent quantum leap featuring a memorable and appealing heroine in pursuit of a deadly criminal.
Why you’ll love it: If you loved the time-traveling drama in 11/22/63, you will get lost in The Shining Girls, which follows a similar premise — someone traveling through time to stop a killer.
If you loved Misery, read Disclaimer by Renee Knight
What if you realized the terrifying book you were reading was all about you?
A brilliantly conceived, deeply disturbing psychological thriller about a woman haunted by secrets — and the price she will pay for concealing the truth.
When a mysterious novel appears at Catherine Ravenscroft’s bedside, she is curious. She has no idea who might have sent her The Perfect Stranger — or how it ended up on her nightstand. At first, she is intrigued by the suspenseful story that unfolds.
And then she realizes.
This isn’t fiction.
The Perfect Stranger re-creates in vivid, unmistakable detail the day Catherine became hostage to a dark secret, a secret that only one other person knew — and that person is dead.
Now that the past Catherine so desperately wants to forget is catching up with her, her world is falling apart. Plunged into a living nightmare, she knows that her only hope is to confront what really happened on that terrible day… even if the shocking truth may destroy her.
Why you’ll love it: Misery told the story of what would happen if a reader got too involved with a writer, but Disclaimer imagines a different possibility: what if the writer was obsessed with the reader, and used books to get closer to them? This one is a must for King fans.
If you loved The Green Mile, read The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens
College student Joe Talbert has the modest goal of completing a writing assignment for an English class. His task is to interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. With deadlines looming, Joe heads to a nearby nursing home to find a willing subject. There he meets Carl Iverson, and soon nothing in Joe’s life is ever the same.
Carl is a dying Vietnam veteran — and a convicted murderer. With only a few months to live, he has been medically paroled to a nursing home, after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder.
As Joe writes about Carl’s life, especially Carl’s valor in Vietnam, he cannot reconcile the heroism of the soldier with the despicable acts of the convict. Joe, along with his skeptical female neighbor, throws himself into uncovering the truth, but he is hamstrung in his efforts by having to deal with his dangerously dysfunctional mother, the guilt of leaving his autistic brother vulnerable, and a haunting childhood memory.
Thread by thread, Joe unravels the tapestry of Carl’s conviction. But as he and Lila dig deeper into the circumstances of the crime, the stakes grow higher. Will Joe discover the truth before it’s too late to escape the fallout?
Why you’ll love it: Both of these stories feature war vets convicted of crimes they might not have committed. If you loved The Green Mile, The Life We Bury is the novel you’ve been waiting for ever since!
If you loved Pet Sematary, read Ghost Story by Peter Straub
What was the worst thing you’ve ever done?
In the sleepy town of Milburn, New York, four old men gather to tell each other stories — some true, some made-up, all of them frightening. A simple pastime to divert themselves from their quiet lives.
But one story is coming back to haunt them and their small town. A tale of something they did long ago. A wicked mistake. A horrifying accident. And they are about to learn that no one can bury the past forever…
Why you’ll love it: You knew after Pet Sematary that “sometimes dead is better,” but maybe it’s been a while, and you need a reminder. Ghost Story is that reminder!
Which of these have you read?