Stephen King is a literary institution, having earned the critical respect that mostly eluded him early in his career while routinely topping the bestseller lists with each new novel. His latest, Gwendy’s Final Task, was written with Richard Chizmar and concludes the fascinating trilogy begun with Gwendy’s Button Box in 2017.
Turn back the clock half a century, however, and you’d meet a young father, husband, and teacher who banged out his stories and novels after long days teaching English to high schoolers. While he managed to complement his salary by publishing short stories (a once-profitable market), his career as a novelist finally took off after the publication of Carrie in 1974.
The rest, as has been said all too often, is history. Here’s a ranking of King’s groundbreaking run of novels from the 1970s.
8. Rage
Unstable high school senior Charlie Decker is expelled after assaulting one of his teachers with a pipe wrench. Charlie sets his locker on fire, kills his algebra teacher with a pistol, and takes the class hostage. Over the course of four hours, Charlie plays mind games with his classmates while toying with the police. Finally disarmed, Charlie attempts suicide by cop but survives, ending up in a psychiatric hospital.
Rage (titled Getting It On until just before publication) is the first book King published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym. It is also the one book King has allowed to fall out of print. When Rage was first published, our present ongoing plague of tragic, lethal school shootings was a rarity. Several mass shooters in the decades since the book’s appearance cited Rage as an inspiration, leading King to “let the damned thing go out of print.” Rage is effective and disturbing, ably crawling inside Charlie’s feverish mind, but King’s choice to abandon it was the right thing to do.
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7. Firestarter
After agreeing to take part in experimental drug trials in college, Andy McGee and his late wife developed telepathic powers while their daughter Charlene “Charlie” McGee was born with incredibly powerful pyrokinetic abilities. Firestarter opens with Andy and Charlie on the run from a shadow government organization known only as The Shop. This mysterious agency ran the experiments that produced their powers, and will stop at nothing to reacquire Charlie, who they see as a successful and powerful asset.
Unfairly dismissed by some quarters as a minor retread of Carrie, Firestarter finds King arriving at an interesting intersection of late-’70s tropes and subconscious fears. Elements of the paranoid conspiracy thriller (all the rage in the wake of the Watergate scandal), fear of secretive government agencies (the CIA really did conduct LSD trials on mostly-unwitting civilians), and a deft blend of sci-fi and horror make for a solid B-level work from King. His 2019 novel The Institute updates andexpands on many of these elements.
6. Carrie
Carrie White is a plain, shy, and mercilessly bullied high schooler. On the day she gets her first period, a fearsome telekinetic ability also comes into its full flower. When Carrie panics at the sight of her menstrual blood (her monstrous, devoutly-religious mother never explained any of this to her), her classmates, led by popular girl Chris Ferguson, pelt her with tampons. Chris is barred from attending the prom for this, and goads her greaser boyfriend into a plan to dump pig’s blood on Carrie as she is crowned prom queen. Things go badly for everyone involved.
King’s breakthrough novel is short and very effective, essentially a novella, bulked up here and there by excerpts from fictional news articles and reports. These extraneous elements add dimension and context to Carrie’s abilities, but are not really necessary. Carrie’s outsized pop-cultural status is mainly due to director Brian DePalma’s 1976 film version with Sissy Spacek’s iconic performance in the lead role.
5. The Dead Zone
After a terrible car accident, school teacher Johnny Smith spends five years in a coma. He wakes up with a terrifying ability to see aspects of the future or the past, by touching a physical object or a person. After helping the sheriff of Castle Rock, Maine, catch a horrific serial killer, Johnny shakes hands with congressional candidate Greg Stillson. To Johnny’s horror, he sees that Stillson will one day be president, and will cause a nuclear holocaust. Johnny makes the agonizing decision to stop Stillson, no matter the cost.
In On Writing, King’s nonfiction treatise on his craft, King referred to The Dead Zone as his attempt to make his readers sympathize with a Lee Harvey Oswald-type of assassin. It’s a pretty bold thesis for writing a novel like this, and King really makes it work, thanks to an attention to detail that renders Johnny in three dimensions. From an accurate depiction of the kind of degeneration that someone in a five-year coma would experience to Johnny’s deep melancholy (he was about to get serious with his girlfriend when the accident occurred, and she has since moved on), The Dead Zone’s premise and main character remain engrossing. The side characters lose some dimension, but readers found the book compelling enough to make it King’s first novel to rank among the top 10 bestselling novels of its publication year.
4. The Long Walk
In the near-future, the United States is run by a militaristic dictator. Every year, 100 teenage boys are chosen for The Long Walk, a marathon walk to the death. If any of the walkers fall below a pace of four miles per hour, they are killed by the soldiers following along in a half-track. Ray Garraty of Maine enters the contest and befriends several walkers, including the amiable McVries and the enigmatic Stebbins. The Walk proves to be as grueling mentally and emotionally as it is physically, and as Garraty becomes one of the last few Walkers, his body and mind deteriorate to perhaps the point of no return.
The basic premise of The Long Walk —a group of adolescents in a near-future dystopia must engage in a contest to the death — predates both Battle Royale and The Hunger Games by several decades. Published under King’s Richard Bachman pseudonym, The Long Walk remains a harrowing journey into the minds of adolescents willing to put their endurance to the ultimate test. The psychological layers of these boys are stripped away one by one. Garraty may make it through by the end, but he may not be left with his sanity. It is possibly the most affecting metaphor for the American high school experience ever written.
3. ‘Salem’s Lot
A mildly successful writer named Ben Mears moves to the small Maine town of Jerusalem’s Lot to write a new book based on the dark history of the so-called Marsten House. Very recently, a rich and mysterious out-of-towner called Barlow bought the huge, rambling place via an intermediary. As Ben strikes up a friendship with local teacher Matt Burke and starts a romance with the young Susan Norton, the townsfolk begin to disappear. They reappear to their loved ones a few nights later, decidedly different and very thirsty.
King would trim his prose considerably in later books, but his expansive early style brings a depth and dimension to ‘Salem’s Lot which resonates today. His second published novel still stands as one of the finest treatments of the traditional vampire tale since Bram Stoker invented it in 1897’s Dracula. A great many talented people would go on to reinvent the vampire mythos for later generations, from Anne Rice’s Lestat novels to Alan Ball’s True Blood series on HBO. King’s take on the story still continues to fascinate.
2. The Stand
A weaponized “Super Flu” escapes from a military installation in the middle of the Nevada desert and spreads rapidly throughout the globe. Also called “Captain Trips,” the Super Flu kills nearly everyone on the planet in a matter of months, leaving a handful of seemingly immune survivors. Among them are the tough, close-mouthed Texan Stu Redman, the young, pregnant Frannie Goldsmith, the arrogant rock star Larry Underwood, and the gifted deaf-mute Nick Andros. They become ensnared in an epic battle between the forces of good, led by the ancient Mother Abigail, and the forces of evil, dominated by a powerful, evil creature calling itself Randall Flagg.
Reading The Stand in a post-pandemic world is a disquieting experience. King’s sharp, rich prose remains some of his best work as he uses all of North America as his canvas. The Stand also features one of King’s classic villains in Randall Flagg, a creature who might have originated somewhere outside of space and time, and who appears in different guises throughout King’s fiction. Beneath its sprawling settings and cast of characters, The Stand is essentially a classic duel of good versus evil, and King’s exploration of evil’s allure and the struggle to remain righteous
1. The Shining
Alcoholic writer and teacher Jack Torrance takes the very last job he’ll find after years of letting his burned bridges light his way: winter caretaker of the isolated Overlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains. With his wife Wendy and young son Danny in tow, Jack moves into the Overlook and is almost immediately beset by the supernatural forces which live in the haunted hotel. As they work on Jack, they greedily reach out for Danny, whose powerful telepathic abilities (the “shining” of the title) act as an amplifier for the hotel’s depraved, ghostly multitude. As the hotel turns Jack against his family, Wendy and Danny must fight for their lives.
In On Writing, King acknowledges that he wrote The Shining without consciously realizing he was writing about himself. If we write what we know, then the alcoholic teacher and writer Jack Torrance may still be the character closest to who King was at the time of his creation. King’s famous disdain for Stanley Kubrick’s celebrated film version stems from how much Kubrick changed, and indeed despite its iconic visuals, Kubrick’s The Shining skimps on the buildup and backstory that makes the tragedy of the Torrances resonate all these years later.
