Have you ever wondered why certain individuals take pleasure in spooking themselves silly with popular films, television and literature?
According to Johns Hopkins University, stimulation is one of the driving forces behind the consumption of horror. Cortisol is released as a result of this, which can evoke simultaneous feelings of joy and anxiety – with the former often trumping the latter for horror enthusiasts. There is a strange, almost addictive sensation aroused by fear-inducing media and sublimations.
The adoration for the horror genre has not been diluted over time. It still has a hold on modern society, and our inability to look away has continued to reign supreme centuries after supernatural stories first began to grace bookshelves.
From Henry James and Bram Stoker to Edgar Allen Poe, there’s yet to be an era more obsessed with the ghostly and macabre than the Victorian. H.P. Lovecraft built on this period’s fascination with the supernatural, writing instant classics such as Cthulhu (1926) and The Dunwich Horror (1928).
These tales of pure horror and mayhem gave way to Stephen King’s eye-wateringly expansive oeuvre, written mostly throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. For a full breakdown of the origins of supernatural literature, we’ve written a piece dedicated to the subgenre.
Popularly referred to as the King of Horror, Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947. The legendary storyteller rose to fame following the publication of his first novel in 1974, Carrie. While he certainly didn’t invent the literary genre of horror, he was a driving force for its repopularisation in contemporary society. By 1980, King was the world’s best-selling author.
Let it be known that the reason King became so popular isn’t solely due to his bewildering ability to craft highly accessible and entirely cinematic stories or those distinctly gory and borderline masochistic scenes.
Perhaps it’s due to his small-town upbringing, but what sets King apart is his devotion to crafting marvellously realistic characters; some of which crumble, and others of which stand tall in the face of the distinctly, terrifyingly unreal.
King explores the darkest aspects of human existence through metaphorical monsters and psychological thrills (and sometimes pure realism) while demonstrating how morality always has a chance to prevail.
Alongside novels by the aforementioned, famed Victorian authors, Stephen King’s books were made into some of the most popular horror films of all time, beloved for their accessibility and bizarrely relatable psychological and sociological elements - from The Shining and the clown-focused nightmare that is It to The Shawshank Redemption.
Heeeeere’s…the 10 best Stephen King novels of all time, in our books. Prepare for scares.
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‘Salem’s Lot
There’s something about supernatural fiction taking place within small towns in the United States which affects the soul like no other. Stephen King is the master of such work, and ‘Salem’s Lot might just make you believe in vampires once and for all.
It takes place in a small New England town in which strange occurrences are commonplace. The frame narrative is spearheaded by Ben Mears, who returns to his hometown of Jerusalem’s Lot in Maine to write a novel about the local haunted house which fascinated him from a young age.
Buy now £11.55, Amazon
11/22/63
Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old English teacher residing in Lisbon Falls, Maine in 1963. One week he asks his students to write about an event that impacted their lives, and this encourages the protagonist to take stock of his life after reading one particular essay written by Harry Dunning. Harry details the night that his father came home and murdered his mother, sister, and brother with a sledgehammer.
When friend and owner of the local diner, Al, reveals to Jake that his storeroom is a portal to the past, our English teacher agrees to take on Al’s obsessive time-travel mission – to prevent the Kennedy assassination. Originally published in 2011, King’s 11/22/63 served as a slight departure from his usual horrors but remains equally as terrifying and bizarrely believable.
Buy now £10.99, Amazon
The Stand
An epic, dystopian classic, The Stand takes place between 1980 and 1990 after 99 per cent of the human population has been killed by a deadly virus. The survivors split into factions, one which is spearheaded by an elderly black woman who believes they must journey to Boulder, and the other is led by ‘the dark man’ Randall Flagg, who has set up a command post in Las Vegas. Each represents a human personification of good and evil, between which the survivors must choose.
King calls The Stand his very own fantasy epic inspired by Lord of the Rings, only set in America – with Las Vegas serving as Mordor.
Buy now £12.99, Waterstones
IT
Inspired by the old story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff, IT is so much more than a terrifying tale of a monster which roams the sewers of Derry, Maine; it’s a treatise on the loss of innocence, and the bridge of no return that is inevitably crossed on the journey to adulthood.
Twenty-eight years prior to the beginning of the story, a promise was made between teenagers after a battle with an evil creature that preyed on the city’s children. Back then, the Losers Club were unsure that they had defeated the creature for good and vowed to return to Derry should IT ever return. Now, children are being murdered again, and the Losers Club must reunite to enter the sewers once more.
Buy now £11.55, Amazon
The Wind Through the Keyhole (The Dark Tower Series)
Think of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series as a contemporary take on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, had they been horror stories. The series comprises eight novels, one novella and a children’s book, each taking on the frame narrative of Roland Deschain, a member of a knightly order known as ‘gunslingers’ and his quest towards a shadowy tower shrouded in mystery.
One of the most beloved stories from this series is The Wind Through the Keyhole, a story told by Roland when he and his kat-tet are forced to shelter from a ferocious storm. He recalls his early days as a gunslinger, where he meets a single surviving witness of a gruesome shapeshifter attack named Bill Streeter. To calm the poor boy, Roland recited a story from the Book of Eld called The Wind Through the Keyhole. You needn’t have read the first four stories of the series to enjoy this horror-fantasy yarn.
Buy now £10.11, Amazon
The Shining
Widely considered to be King’s greatest horror story, The Shining is set in a beautiful, grand hotel overlooking the Rockies. The Overlook Hotel has hired a new caretaker for the winter called Jack Torrance, who moves into the resort with his wife, Wendy, and their five-year-old son, Danny.
While Jack sees the move as a journey away from failure and despair, and Wendy sees it as an opportunity to repair her family, young Danny’s precognitive, psychic gifts allow him to see the horrors which lurk within the walls of the maze-like hotel – horrors which he is too young to comprehend but plague his mind and soul. Danny is a ‘shiner’, and when a ghastly winter the family off from the rest of the world, the supposedly empty hotel develops a life of its own.
Buy now £10.11, Amazon
Misery
Popular novelist Paul Sheldon has made plans to transition from writing historical fiction featuring beloved heroine Misery Chastain to publishing high-brow literary fiction. When Annie Wilkes, Sheldon’s biggest fan, rescues him from the scene of a car accident, the former nurse’s caretaking mission quickly becomes an exercise in captivity – for Wilkes simply can’t let Sheldon leave without bringing Misery back to life.
Buy now £10.99, Waterstones
Pet Sematary
A novel that King himself initially thought too disturbing to print, Pet Sematary is set in a small town in Maine. New to the area is young doctor Louis Creed, who has just moved from Chicago with his family into a seemingly perfect house in and amongst the pastoral, rolling hills of this supposedly safer state.
Behind the house away from the highway lays a clear path up into the woods where generations of children have buried beloved pets. Beyond the Pet Sematary, however, lies another burial ground which lures innocents with horrifying temptations.
Buy now £9.99, Waterstones
Different Seasons
Different Seasons is a collection of four short stories including the ultimate prisonbreak Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, an into-the-woods horror called The Body, a bizarre tale about a woman desperate to give birth called The Breathing Method, and the story of a golden California schoolboy and an old man with a hideous past called Apt Pupil.
A classic collection of horrifying stories, we’re taken through four seasons which represent different universal truths: hope springs eternal, a fall from innocence, a winter’s tale and a summer of corruption
Buy now £10.99, Waterstones
The Green Mile
The Green Mile is how prisoners on death row refer to the last walk down to Cold Mountain Penitentiary's electric chair. The year is 1932, and the newest resident among the condemned is John Coffey – a man convicted of the murder of two little girls. But when it’s discovered that Coffey has miraculous healing abilities, everything might change.
Buy now £9.19, Amazon
