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| Title | Year | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Carrie | 1974 | The story of misfit high-school girl, Carrie White, who gradually discovers that she has telekinetic powers. Repressed by a domineering, ultra-religious mother and tormented by her peers at school, her efforts to fit in lead to a dramatic confrontation during the senior prom. |
| 'Salem's Lot | 1975 | Author Ben Mears returns to ‘Salem's Lot to write a book about a house that has haunted him since childhood only to find his isolated hometown infested with vampires. While the vampires claim more victims, Mears convinces a small group of believers to combat the undead. |
| The Shining | 1977 | Jack Torrance, his wife Wendy, and their young son Danny move into the Overlook Hotel, where Jack has been hired as the winter caretaker. Cut off from civilization for months, Jack hopes to battle alcoholism and uncontrolled rage while writing a play. Evil forces residing in the Overlook – which has a long and violent history – covet young Danny for his precognitive powers and exploit Jack’s weaknesses to try to claim the boy. |
| The Stand | 1978 | One man escapes from a biological weapon facility after an accident, carrying with him the deadly virus known as Captain Tripps, a rapidly mutating flu that - in the ensuing weeks - wipes out most of the world's population. In the aftermath, survivors choose between following an elderly black woman to Boulder or the dark man, Randall Flagg, who has set up his command post in Las Vegas. The two factions prepare for a confrontation between the forces of good and evil. |
| The Dead Zone | 1979 | Waking up from a five-year coma after a car accident, former schoolteacher Johnny Smith discovers that he can see people's futures and pasts when he touches them. Many consider his talent a gift; Johnny feels cursed. His fiance married another man during his coma and people clamor for him to solve their problems. When Johnny has a disturbing vision after he shakes the hand of an ambitious and amoral politician, he must decide if he should take drastic action to change the future. |
| Firestarter | 1980 | The Department of Scientific Intelligence (aka "The Shop") never anticipated that two participants in their research program would marry and have a child. Charlie McGee inherited pyrokinetic powers from her parents, who had been given a low-grade hallucinogen called "Lot Six" while at college. Now the government is trying to capture young Charlie and harness her powerful firestarting skills as a weapon. |
| Cujo | 1981 | The Cambers' once-friendly St. Bernard turns into a killer after being bitten by a rabid bat. Donna Trenton's husband is in New York trying to contain a disastrous ad campaign. Feeling abandoned by her workaholic husband, who is frequently out of town, Donna Trenton embarks on an affair with a local handyman. Left to fend for herself, she takes her ailing Pinto to Joe Cambers' garage for repairs only to be trapped with her son Tad in the sweltering car by the monstrous dog. |
| The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger | 1982 | He is a haunting figure, a loner on a spellbinding journey into good and evil. In his desolate world, which frighteningly mirrors our own, Roland pursues The Man in Black, encounters an alluring woman named Alice, and begins a friendship with the Kid from Earth called Jake. Both grippingly realistic and eerily dreamlike, The Gunslinger leaves readers eagerly awaiting the next chapter. |
| Christine | 1983 | A love triangle involving 17-year-old misfit Arnie Cunningham, his new girlfriend and a haunted 1958 Plymouth Fury. Dubbed Christine by her previous owner, Arnie's first car is jealous, possessive and deadly. |
| Pet Sematary | 1983 | The road in front of Dr. Louis Creed's rural Maine home frequently claims the lives of neighborhood pets. Louis has recently moved from Chicago to Ludlow with his wife Rachel, their children and pet cat. Near their house, local children have created a cemetery for the dogs and cats killed by the steady stream of transports on the busy highway. Deeper in the woods lies another graveyard, an ancient Indian burial ground whose sinister properties Louis discovers when the family cat is killed. |
| The Talisman | 1984 | Twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer embarks on an epic quest--a walk from the seacoast of New Hampshire to the California coast--to find the talisman that will save his dying mother's life. Jack's journey takes him into the Territories, a parallel medieval universe, where most people from his own universe have analogs called "twinners." The queen of the Territories, Jack's mother's twinner, is also dying. |
| Cycle of the Werewolf | 1985 | A werewolf is stalking Tarker's Mills and only young, wheelchair-bound Marty Coslaw suspects the truth. He enlists the help of his black sheep uncle to identify the shape shifter and destroy him. |
| It | 1986 | A promise made twenty-eight years ago calls seven adults to reunite in Derry, Maine, where as teenagers they battled an evil creature that preyed on the city's children. Unsure that their Losers Club had vanquished the creature all those years ago, the seven had vowed to return to Derry if IT should ever reappear. Now, children are being murdered again and their repressed memories of that summer return as they prepare to do battle with the monster lurking in Derry's sewers once more. |
| The Eyes of the Dragon | 1987 | Once upon a time, in the Kingdom of Delain, King Roland is murdered and his son and heir, Peter, is framed for the crime. Peter and his loyal friends must battle an evil wizard and Peter's usurper brother, Thomas, for the throne. Imprisoned in a tower, Peter conceives an escape plan that will take him years to execute before taking on Flagg, the powerful sorcerer who has masterminded this coup. |
| The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three | 1987 | Part II of an epic saga. Roland, the last gunslinger, encounters three mysterious doorways on the beach. Each one enters into a different person living in New York. Through these doorways, Roland draws the companions who will assist him on his quest to save the Dark Tower. |
| Misery | 1987 | Novelist Paul Sheldon has plans to make the difficult transition from writing historical romances featuring heroine Misery Chastain to publishing literary fiction. Annie Wilkes, Sheldon's number one fan, rescues the author from the scene of a car accident. The former nurse takes care of him in her remote house, but becomes irate when she discovers that the author has killed Misery off in his latest book. Annie keeps Sheldon prisoner while forcing him to write a book that brings Misery back to life. |
| The Tommyknockers | 1987 | Writer Bobbi Anderson becomes obsessed with digging up something she's found buried in the woods near her home. With the help of her friend, Jim Gardener, she uncovers an alien spaceship. Though exposure to the Tommyknockers who piloted the alien craft has detrimental effects on residents' health, the people of Haven develop a talent for creating innovative devices under its increasingly malignant influence. |
| The Dark Half | 1989 | For years, Thad Beaumont has been writing books under the pseudonym George Stark. When a journalist threatens to expose Beaumont's pen name, the author decides to go public first, killing off his pseudonym. Stark isn't content to be dispatched that easily, though. Beaumont's alter ego comes to life and begins to stalk those responsible for his demise. The police suspect Beaumont is responsible for these violent crimes. |
| The Dark Tower: The Waste Lands | 1991 | Part III of an epic saga. Roland and his companions, Eddie and Susannah Dean, find the Path of the Beam that will lead them to the Dark Tower. Along the way, Roland adds two new members to his ka-tet (a group united for a specific purpose). In the decaying city of Lud, they encounter new dangers, including a sentient train that has gone insane. |
| Needful Things | 1991 | Leland Gaunt opens a new shop in Castle Rock called Needful Things. Anyone who enters his store finds the object of his or her lifelong dreams and desires: a prized baseball card, a healing amulet. In addition to a token payment, Gaunt requests that each person perform a little "deed," usually a seemingly innocent prank played on someone else from town. These practical jokes cascade out of control and soon the entire town is doing battle with itself. Only Sheriff Alan Pangborn suspects that Gaunt is behind the population's increasingly violent behavior. |
| Gerald's Game | 1992 | Gerald and Jessie Burlingame have gone to their summer home on a warm weekday in October for a romantic interlude. After being handcuffed to her bedposts, Jessie tires of her husband's games, but when Gerald refuses to stop she lashes out at him with deadly consequences. Still handcuffed, she is trapped and alone. Painful memories from her childhood bedevil her. Her only company is a hungry stray dog and the sundry voices that populate her mind. As night comes, she is unsure whether it is her imagination or if she has another companion: someone watching her from the corner of her dark bedroom. |
| Dolores Claiborne | 1993 | Suspected of killing Vera Donovan, her wealthy employer, Dolores Claiborne tells police the story of her life, harkening back to her disintegrating marriage and the suspicious death of her violent husband, Joe St. George, thirty years earlier. Dolores also tells of Vera's physical and mental decline and of her loyalty to an employer who has become emotionally demanding in recent years. |
| Insomnia | 1994 | Since his wife died, Ralph Roberts has been having trouble sleeping. Each night he awakens a little earlier until he's barely sleeping at all. During his late night vigils and walks, he observes some strange things going on in Derry, Maine. He sees colored ribbons streaming from people's heads. He witnesses two strange little men wandering the city under cover of night. He begins to suspect that these visions are something more than hallucinations brought about by sleep deprivation. Ralph and his friend, widow Lois Chasse, become enmeshed in events of cosmic significance. |
| Rose Madder | 1995 | Rosie Daniels flees from her husband, Norman after fourteen years in an abusive marriage. During one bout of violence, Norman caused Rosie to miscarry their only child. Escaping to a distant city, Rosie establishes a new life and forges new relationships. Norman Daniels, a police officer with a reputation for cruelty, uses his law-enforcement connections to track his wayward wife. |
| The Green Mile: The Two Dead Girls | 1996 | The story is told by former prison guard, Paul Edgecombe, of events in Cold Mountain penitentiary during 1932 when an unusual inmate by the name of John Coffey is brought to the prison. He and his fellow guards are assigned to watch inmates on death row, known as The Green Mile. John Coffey has been convicted of murdering two young girls and sentenced to death but there's something about him that makes Paul question whether this man could have committed that crime. |
| The Green Mile: The Mouse on the Mile | 1996 | The story continues with the addition of two new characters, one a new death row inmate--William "Wild Bill" Wharton. The other, a mouse, called Steamboat Willy by the guards who first noticed him and later Mr. Jingles by Eduard Delacroix, one of the death row inmates who takes in the mouse and makes him his pet. |
| The Green Mile: Coffey's Hands | 1996 | Paul Edgecombe has been suffering with a bladder infection for some time that hasn't cleared. It is in this book that Paul discovers that John Coffey can heal with his touch. Eduard Delacroix has been teaching Mr. Jingles tricks and is quite attached to the mouse--almost as much as guard Percy Wetmore despises it. |
| The Green Mile: The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix | 1996 | It is time for the execution of Eduard Delacroix and is Percy Wetmore's first opportunity to participate in an execution. In this book we learn to what lengths Percy will go to get revenge on Eduard for having laughed at him. |
| The Green Mile: Night Journey | 1996 | Prison Warden Hal Moores and his wife Melinda have also been Paul and Janice Edgecombe's friends. When Paul learns that Melinda has a brain tumor, he decides to help but knows that the warden would never allow John Coffey to leave the prison and, obviously, Melinda could not go there. He and the other guards from E Block take on a dangerous plan to spirit Coffey out during the night risking their jobs--not something to take lightly in 1932--and possibly their lives. |
| The Green Mile: Coffey on the Mile | 1996 | The final chapter in this six-part novel tells us of John Coffey's fate. The story also brings us to the present day story of Paul Edgecombe and learn of the consequences of his actions during his time on E Block with John Coffey. |
| Desperation | 1996 | Located off a desolate stretch of Interstate 50, Desperation, Nevada has few connections with the rest of the world. It is a place, though, where the seams between worlds are thin. Miners at the China Pit have accidentally broken into another dimension and released a horrific creature known as Tak, who takes human form by hijacking some of the town's residents. The forces of good orchestrate a confrontation between this ancient evil and a group of unsuspecting travelers who are lured to the dying town. This rag-tag band of unwilling champions is led by a young boy who speaks to God. |
| The Dark Tower: Wizard and Glass | 1997 | Part IV of an epic quest. Roland the Gunslinger and his followers have to contend with a sentient monorail intent on killing itself and taking them with it. While seeking to return to the Path of the Beam that will lead them to the Dark Tower, Roland tells his friends a story about the tragic loss of his first love, Susan Delgado. |
| Bag of Bones | 1998 | Several years after his wife's death, novelist Mike Noonan still suffers writer's block. A dream inspires him to return to the couple's summer retreat in western Maine, a lakeside house called Sara Laughs. Shortly after arriving, Noonan is caught in the middle of a custody battle involving the daughter of an attractive young widow and the child's enormously wealthy grandfather. He also discovers that Sara Laughs is haunted and that his late wife, Joanna, still has something to tell him. |
| The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon | 1999 | Nine-year-old Trisha McFarland strays from the path while she and her recently divorced mother and brother take a hike along a branch of the Appalachian Trail. Lost for days, wandering farther and farther astray, Trisha has only her portable radio for comfort. A huge fan of Tom Gordon, a Boston Red Sox relief pitcher, she listens to baseball games and fantasizes that her hero will save her. Nature isn't her only adversary, though - something dangerous may be tracking Trisha through the dark woods. |
| The Green Mile | 2000 | Nine-year-old Trisha McFarland strays from the path while she and her recently divorced mother and brother take a hike along a branch of the Appalachian Trail. Lost for days, wandering farther and farther astray, Trisha has only her portable radio for comfort. A huge fan of Tom Gordon, a Boston Red Sox relief pitcher, she listens to baseball games and fantasizes that her hero will save her. Nature isn't her only adversary, though - something dangerous may be tracking Trisha through the dark woods. |
| Dreamcatcher | 2001 | Four lifelong friends gather in the woods of western Maine for their annual hunting trip. When they were young, they were bound together forever by an act of bravery involving a fifth friend, whose influence has given these men special powers. Their trip is disrupted when a stranger, disoriented and delirious, wanders into camp, muttering about light in the sky. Before long, the friends find themselves pitted against an alien invasion and must draw on their old friend's strength once again to fight for their lives. |
| Black House | 2001 | In this sequel to The Talisman, Jack Sawyer is now in his late thirties and has taken early retirement from the LAPD, retreating to a small town in Wisconsin. He has no memory of his adventures as a twelve-year-old boy, when he traveled into a parallel universe in search of the talisman that would save his mother's life. A series of murders involving young children force him out of retirement. There is more to these cases than murder, though, and Jack must retrieve his childhood memories to rescue the latest victim, who is coveted by the killer's evil overlord, a powerful force from End-World, in Rol |
| Title | Year | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| The Dark Tower: Wolves of the Calla | 2003 | After escaping the perilous wreckage of Blaine the insane Mono and eluding the evil clutches of the vindictive sorcerer Randall Flagg, Roland and his ka-tet find themselves back on the southeasterly path of the Beam. Here, in the borderlands that lie between Mid-World and End-World, Roland and his friends are approached by a frightened band of representatives from the nearby town of Calla Bryn Sturgis. In less than a month, the Calla will be attacked by the Wolves--those masked riders that gallop out of Thunderclap once a generation to steal the town's children. The Calla folken need the kind of help that only gunslingers can give, and if the tet agrees to help, the town's priest--Father Callahan, once of 'Salem's Lot, Maine--promises to give them Black Thirteen, the most potent and treacherous of Maerlyn's magic balls. He used it to enter Mid-World, and now it sleeps fitfully beneath the floorboards of his church. Meanwhile, in the New York of 1977, the Sombra Corporation plots to destroy the lot at Second Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street. How can Roland and his friends both save the rose and fight the Wolves? Only by using the magic of Black Thirteen, but how can anyone trust this sinister and treacherous object which is, in actuality, the eye of the Crimson King himself? Time is running out on all levels of the Tower, but unless our ka-tet can defeat the minions of Thunderclap both in our world and in Mid-World, they will never reach that great lynchpin of the time/space continuum which, even now, begins to totter . . . |
| The Dark Tower: Song of Susannah | 2004 | Susannah, now pregnant, has yet another taking control of her. The demon-mother, Mia, uses Susannah and Black Thirteen to transport to New York City of 1999. Jake, Oy, and Pere Callahan must rescue Susannah while Eddie and Roland transport to the Maine of 1977. A vacant lot in New York is the prize that must be saved and ties these together. |
| The Dark Tower | 2004 | Roland’s ka-tet is reunited, but not without cost. The last episode of the story takes them on the final stretch of their journey to The Dark Tower. Though they have rescued Susannah, there are still enemies who must be dealt with along the way and who could be their ultimate destruction. Constant readers will recognize characters from past books, who like the ka-tet, have found themselves caught in the spider's web spun by the Crimson King? Gan? Questions are answered and others asked. The journey is long and ka is but a wheel. |
| The Colorodo Kid | 2005 | Vince Teague and Dave Bowie are the sole operators of The Weekly Islander, a small Maine newspaper. Stephanie McCann has been working for them as an intern. When Stephanie asks if they've ever come across a real unexplained mystery in the fifty years they'd been publishing the paper, they tell her the story of The Colorado Kid. |
| Cell | 2006 | Artist Clayton Riddell had been in Boston negotiating a successful deal to sell his comic book project. His joy at finally hitting it big is shattered by an event called The Pulse which causes all those who were using their cell phones at the time of The Pulse to become zombies attacking and killing anyone in their way. Fortunately for Clay, he does not own a cell phone. In the panic to get out of Boston and find his way home to his wife and son in Maine, he is joined by Tom McCourt, a man he meets in the meleé immediately following The Pulse and a young girl, Alice, who they rescue from being killed by one of the “crazies.” The story follows their terrifying journey, avoiding capture—and worse—by the “crazies” who are beginning to “flock” and are led by one they call Raggedy Man as they attempt to reach Maine and a place called Kashwak which they hope will be their salvation. |
| Lisey's Story | 2006 | Two years after her husband's death, Lisey Landon decides it's time to go through his office to clear out his papers. Scott Landon was a bestselling novelist and Lisey has been besieged by people wanting to buy any of his unpublished work but she is determined not to let that happen. As she begins the process of cleaning, she is contacted by an unsavory character who claims that if she does not turn over the papers, he will make her suffer the consequences. Finding strength she did not know she had and never used during their marriage, Lisey refuses, and true to his word, "Zack McCool" begins to stalk her. Lisey begins to remember strange events from her marriage that she had suppressed and finds clues that may help save her life. |
| Duma Key | 2008 | After a construction accident in which he loses his right arm and his divorce, Edgar Freemantle moves from Minnesota to Florida to begin what his psychiatrist described as a "geographic cure." He rediscovers his love of painting and finds that he is good at it but his paintings seem to have something "more" to them. On Duma Key he also finds a new friendship with Wireman, a kindred spirit seeking refuge there as a caretaker for Elizabeth Eastlake. Elizabeth's past also contains painful memories that have been reawakened bringing all of them together to face an evil entity named Perse. |
| Under the Dome | 2009 | On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester’s Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash into it and fall from the sky in flaming wreckage, a gardener’s hand is severed as “the dome” comes down on it, people running errands in the neighboring town are divided from their families, and cars explode on impact. No one can fathom what this barrier is, where it came from, and when—or if—it will go away. Dale Barbara, Iraq vet and now a short-order cook, finds himself teamed with a few intrepid citizens—town newspaper owner Julia Shumway, a physician’s assistant at the hospital, a selectwoman, and three brave kids. Against them stands Big Jim Rennie, a politician who will stop at nothing—even murder—to hold the reins of power, and his son, who is keeping a horrible secret in a dark pantry. But their main adversary is the Dome itself. Because time isn’t just short. It’s running out. |
| 11/22/63 | 2011 | Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk. Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time. |
| The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole | 2012 | We join Roland and his ka-tet as a ferocious storm halts their progress along the Path of the Beam. As they shelter from the screaming wind and snapping trees, Roland tells them not just one strange tale, but two--and in doing so sheds fascinating light on his own troubled past. In his early days as a gunslinger, in the guilt-ridden year following his mother's death, Roland is sent by his father to a ranch to investigate a recent slaughter. Here Roland discovers a bloody churn of bootprints, clawed animal tracks and terrible carnage--evidence that the 'skin-man', a shape-shifter, is at work. There is only one surviving witness: a brave but terrified boy called Bill Streeter. Roland, himself only a teenager, calms the boy by reciting a story from the Book of Eld that his mother used to read to him at bedtime, 'The Wind Through The Keyhole.' 'A person's never too old for stories,' he says to Bill. 'Man and boy, girl and woman, we live for them.' |
| Joyland | 2013 | After realizing his romantic life is not going in the direction he'd hoped, Devin Jones decides to take a summer job at an amusement park. There he makes friends with Tom Kennedy and Erin Cook, also summer hires at Joyland, which years before had been the scene of the murder of a young woman named Linda Gray whose ghost is said to be seen at the Horror House. He also befriends a young boy, named Mike Ross and his mother, Annie. Their lives all become entwined when Devin decides to investigate the mystery of Linda Gray's unsolved murder by the "Carny Killer." |
| Doctor Sleep | 2013 | On highways across America, a tribe of people called The True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless—mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and tween Abra Stone learns, The True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the “steam” that children with the “shining” produce when they are slowly tortured to death. Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant “shining” power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes “Doctor Sleep.” Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan’s own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra’s soul and survival. This is an epic war between good and evil, a gory, glorious story that will thrill the millions of hyper-devoted readers of The Shining and wildly satisfy anyone new to the territory of this icon in the King canon. |
| Mr. Mercedes | 2014 | In the frigid pre-dawn hours, in a distressed Midwestern city, hundreds of desperate unemployed folks are lined up for a spot at a job fair. Without warning, a lone driver plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, running over the innocent, backing up, and charging again. Eight people are killed; fifteen are wounded. The killer escapes. Mr. Mercedes is a war between good and evil, from the master of suspense whose insight into the mind of this obsessed, insane killer is chilling and unforgettable. |
| Revival | 2014 | In a small New England town, over half a century ago, a shadow falls over a small boy playing with his toy soldiers. Jamie Morton looks up to see a striking man, the new minister. Charles Jacobs, along with his beautiful wife, will transform the local church. The men and boys are all a bit in love with Mrs. Jacobs; the women and girls feel the same about Reverend Jacobs—including Jamie’s mother and beloved sister, Claire. With Jamie, the Reverend shares a deeper bond based on a secret obsession. When tragedy strikes the Jacobs family, this charismatic preacher curses God, mocks all religious belief, and is banished from the shocked town. Jamie has demons of his own. Wed to his guitar from the age of 13, he plays in bands across the country, living the nomadic lifestyle of bar-band rock and roll while fleeing from his family’s horrific loss. In his mid-thirties—addicted to heroin, stranded, desperate—Jamie meets Charles Jacobs again, with profound consequences for both men. Their bond becomes a pact beyond even the Devil’s devising, and Jamie discovers that revival has many meanings. |
| Finders Keepers | 2015 | "Wake up genius." So begins King’s instantly riveting story about a vengeful reader. The genius is John Rothstein, an iconic author who created a famous character, Jimmy Gold, but who hasn’t published a book for decades. Morris Bellamy is livid, not just because Rothstein has stopped providing books, but because the nonconformist Jimmy Gold has sold out for a career in advertising. Morris kills Rothstein and empties his safe of cash, yes, but the real treasure is a trove of notebooks containing at least one more Gold novel. Morris hides the money and the notebooks, and then he is locked away for another crime. Decades later, a boy named Pete Saubers finds the treasure, and now it is Pete and his family that Bill Hodges, Holly Gibney, and Jerome Robinson must rescue from the ever-more deranged and vengeful Morris when he’s released from prison after thirty-five years. |
| End of Watch | 2016 | End of Watch is the spectacular finale to the New York Times bestselling trilogy that began with Mr. Mercedes (winner of the Edgar Award) and Finders Keepers—In End of Watch, the diabolical “Mercedes Killer” drives his enemies to suicide, and if Bill Hodges and Holly Gibney don’t figure out a way to stop him, they’ll be victims themselves. |
| Sleeping Beauties | 2017 | In a future so real and near it might be now, something happens when women go to sleep; they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If they are awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed or violated, the women become feral and spectacularly violent; and while they sleep they go to another place...The men of our world are abandoned, left to their increasingly primal devices. One woman, however, the mysterious Evie, is immune to the blessing or curse of the sleeping disease. Is Evie a medical anomaly to be studied? Or is she a demon who must be slain? Set in a small Appalachian town whose primary employer is a women's prison, SLEEPING BEAUTIES is a wildly provocative, gloriously absorbing father/son collaboration between Stephen King and Owen King. |
| The Outsider | 2018 | An eleven-year-old boy's violated corpse is found in a town park. Eyewitnesses and fingerprints point unmistakably to one of Flint City’s most popular citizens. He is Terry Maitland, Little League coach, English teacher, husband, and father of two girls. Detective Ralph Anderson, whose son Maitland once coached, orders a quick and very public arrest. Maitland has an alibi, but Anderson and the district attorney soon add DNA evidence to go with the fingerprints and witnesses. Their case seems ironclad. As the investigation expands and horrifying answers begin to emerge, King’s propulsive story kicks into high gear, generating strong tension and almost unbearable suspense. Terry Maitland seems like a nice guy, but is he wearing another face? When the answer comes, it will shock you as only Stephen King can. |
| The Institute | 2019 | In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents—telekinesis and telepathy—who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery Dixon. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. “You check in, but you don’t check out.” In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute. |
| Later | 2021 | The son of a struggling single mother, Jamie Conklin just wants an ordinary childhood. But Jamie is no ordinary child. Born with an unnatural ability his mom urges him to keep secret, Jamie can see what no one else can see and learn what no one else can learn. But the cost of using this ability is higher than Jamie can imagine—as he discovers when an NYPD detective draws him into the pursuit of a killer who has threatened to strike from beyond the grave. |
| Billy Summers | 2021 | Billy Summers is a man in a room with a gun. He’s a killer for hire and the best in the business. But he’ll do the job only if the target is a truly bad guy. And now Billy wants out. But first there is one last hit. Billy is among the best |
| Title | Year | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Gwendy's Final Task | 2022 | When Gwendy Peterson was twelve, a mysterious stranger named Richard Farris gave her a mysterious box for safekeeping. It offered treats and vintage coins, but it was dangerous. Pushing any of its seven colored buttons promised death and destruction. Years later, the button box entered Gwendy's life again. A successful novelist and a rising political star, she was once again forced to deal with the temptation that box represented. Now, evil forces seek to possess the button box and it is up to Senator Gwendy Peterson to keep it from them. At all costs. But where can you hide something from such powerful entities? |
| Fairy Tale | 2022 | Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. Then, when Charlie is 17, he meets a dog named Radar and his aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. Sometimes strange sounds emerge from it. Charlie starts doing jobs for Mr. Bowditch and loses his heart to Radar. Then, when Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe. What Bowditch knows, and has kept secret all his long life, is that inside the shed is a portal to another world. |
| Holly | 2023 | Stephen King’s Holly marks the triumphant return of beloved King character Holly Gibney. Readers have witnessed Holly’s gradual transformation from a shy (but also brave and ethical) recluse in Mr. Mercedes to Bill Hodges’s partner in Finders Keepers to a full-fledged, smart, and occasionally tough private detective in The Outsider. In King’s new novel, Holly is on her own, and up against a pair of unimaginably depraved and brilliantly disguised adversaries. When Penny Dahl calls the Finders Keepers detective agency hoping for help locating her missing daughter, Holly is reluctant to accept the case. Her partner, Pete, has Covid. Her (very complicated) mother has just died. And Holly is meant to be on leave. But something in Penny Dahl’s desperate voice makes it impossible for Holly to turn her down. Mere blocks from where Bonnie Dahl disappeared live Professors Rodney and Emily Harris. They are the picture of bourgeois respectability: married octogenarians, devoted to each other, and semi-retired lifelong academics. But they are harboring an unholy secret in the basement of their well-kept, book-lined home, one that may be related to Bonnie’s disappearance. And it will prove nearly impossible to discover what they are up to: they are savvy, they are patient, and they are ruthless. Holly must summon all her formidable talents to outthink and outmaneuver the shockingly twisted professors in this chilling new masterwork from Stephen King. |
| Never Flinch | 2025 | When the Buckeye City Police Department receives a disturbing letter from a person threatening to “kill thirteen innocents and one guilty” in “an act of atonement for the needless death of an innocent man,” Detective Izzy Jaynes has no idea what to think. Are fourteen citizens about to be slaughtered in an unhinged act of retribution? As the investigation unfolds, Izzy realizes that the letter writer is deadly serious, and she turns to her friend Holly Gibney for help. Meanwhile, controversial and outspoken women’s rights activist Kate McKay is embarking on a multi-state lecture tour, drawing packed venues of both fans and detractors. Someone who vehemently opposes Kate’s message of female empowerment is targeting her and disrupting her events. At first, no one is hurt, but the stalker is growing bolder, and Holly is hired to be Kate’s bodyguard—a challenging task with a headstrong employer and a determined adversary driven by wrath and his belief in his own righteousness. Featuring a riveting cast of characters both old and new, including world-famous gospel singer Sista Bessie and an unforgettable villain addicted to murder, these twinned narratives converge in a chilling and spectacular conclusion |
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| Jersualem's Lot | in 1850, Charles Boone moves to his ancestral home, Chapelwaite, only to find locals shun him and strange noises plague the house, leading him and his manservant, Calvin, to investigate a mysterious, abandoned village nearby where they uncover a dark, ancient evil tied to his family's past and a forbidden book called De Vermis Mysteriis, hinting at cosmic horror and a cursed bloodline. |
| Graveyard Shift | A drifter, John Hall, takes a job at a rundown Maine textile mill and is assigned to clean out the rat-infested basement during the night shift; he and other workers discover the massive infestation hides something far more monstrous and evolved than mere vermin, leading to a fight for survival against a giant, deadly creature lurking in the dark tunnels. |
| Night Surf | A short, post-apocalyptic story about a small group of teenagers surviving on a desolate New Hampshire beach after a devastating virus, "Captain Trips" (A6), wiped out most of humanity, focusing on their bleak existence, fragile hope, and grim rituals. |
| I Am the Doorway | A paralyzed ex-astronaut, Arthur, who, after a Venus mission, develops strange, tiny eyeballs on his fingertips, serving as portals for terrifying aliens who see humanity as monstrous and want to use him to interact with Earth. |
| The Mangler | A machine develops a taste for human blood after a series of gruesome workplace "accidents" at the Blue Ribbon Laundry plant. A local police detective, John Hunton, is called in to investigate the escalating and bizarre deaths that defy simple explanation, as all the machine's safety features appear to be in working order. |
| The Boogeyman | A man, Lester Billings, visits a psychiatrist to confess that a monstrous, closet-dwelling creature—the legendary Boogeyman—has systematically murdered all three of his young children, with each death appearing as an accident, leaving him terrified for his own life and sanity as the entity seems to stalk him relentlessly. |
| Grey Matter | The story begins in a local convenience store, where a young boy named Timmy arrives in a terrified state. The men at the store recognize him as the son of Richie Grenadine, an injured recluse who rarely leaves his apartment, relying on his son to buy him cheap, warm beer. The boy tells a disturbing story about his father's condition, hinting at a grotesque physical transformation that began after Richie drank a can of spoiled beer... |
| Battleground | A professional hit man find himself the subject of an attack in retaliation for his recent murder of a toymaker. |
| Trucks | The narrator and a handful of strangers find themselves trapped together in a freeway truck stop diner after semi-trailers and other large vehicles are suddenly brought to independent life by an unknown force and proceed to gruesomely kill every human in sight. |
| Sometimes They Come Back | Jim Norman is a teacher haunted by his brother's murder by greaser teens years ago; when he returns to his hometown to teach, those same thugs, now dead themselves, mysteriously reappear as new, menacing students, terrorizing Jim and his family as they seemingly return for revenge, forcing him to confront his past trauma and supernatural threats. |
| Strawberry Spring | A college student in 1976 recalls a series of grisly murders, dubbed "Springheel Jack," that terrorized his New England college campus eight years earlier during a strange, foggy "strawberry spring" season. |
| The Ledge | A suspenseful tale about Stan Norris, a tennis pro caught having an affair with a mobster's wife, who faces a deadly choice from the crime boss: walk around the five-inch ledge of a skyscraper or be framed and lose everything. |
| The Lawnmower Man | Harold Parkette hires an oddly primitive gardener to mow his lawn, only for the gardener to reveal himself as a supernatural entity working for the pagan god Pan, turning the lawnmower into a murderous, autonomous killing machine that attacks animals and people in gruesome, ritualistic ways, fulfilling the titular role literally and terrifyingly. |
| Quitters Inc. | Richard Morrison is a desperate smoker who seeks help from a strange, high-success-rate company to quit smoking, but finds their extreme methods, which involve threatening his family to enforce abstinence, create a terrifying, pragmatic "prison" of enforced sobriety, exploring the brutal lengths people go to break free from addiction and the horrors of "too good to be true" solutions. |
| I Know What You Need | A about popular college student Elizabeth Rogan meets the nerdy, outcast Ed Hamner, who seems to magically know and provide exactly what she needs, like help with exams or a comforting strawberry ice cream cone, but his perfect assistance, especially after her boyfriend's tragic death, leads her and her roommate to suspect his uncanny ability hides a darker, obsessive, almost supernatural agenda. |
| Children of the Corn | Burt and Vicky are traveling through Nebraska on their way to California on a vacation meant to save their failing marriage. After being involved in an accident in which they run over a young boy who ran into the road, they take the body to Gaitlin, a small isolated community nearby. The story centers on their encounters with the strange citizens of Gaitlin and the entity they call “He Who Walks Behind the Rows”. |
| The Last Rung on the Ladder | A man reflects on his estranged sister's suicide, recalling a childhood game where he saved her from a fall, only to realize too late that she had trusted him completely and needed him again as an adult. |
| The Man Who Loved Flowers | A young man joyfully buying flowers for his beloved, Norma, on a beautiful spring evening in New York City, but the story slowly reveals his deep obsession and descent into madness after losing her, turning his romantic quest into a disturbing search that masks a brutal reality, with the lovely blossoms becoming a chilling symbol of his broken psyche. |
| One For the Road | An outsider, Gerard Lumley, gets stranded in a blizzard near the cursed town and seeks help from a local bar, leading narrator Booth and his friend Tookey to reluctantly try and save Lumley's family, only to confront the lingering, deadly vampire evil that still haunts "Jerusalem's Lot." |
| The Woman in the Room | A man, John, grapples with the agonizing ethical decision of how to end his terminally ill mother's intense suffering from cancer. |
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| The Mist | David Drayton, his son Billy, and their neighbor Brent Norton head to the local grocery store to replenish supplies following a freak storm. Once there, they and other local citizens are trapped by a strange mist that has enveloped the town and in which strange creatures are lurking. As the mist takes its toll on the nerves of those trapped in the store, a religious zealot, Mrs. Carmody begins to play on their fears to convince them that this is God’s vengeance for their sins and that a sacrifice must be made and two groups—those for and those against—are aligned. When it is realized that staying in the store may prove fatal, a small group including the Draytons, store employee Ollie Weeks, Amanda Dumfries, Irene Reppler, and Dan Miller attempt to make their escape. They find that what’s “out there” may be worse than what they left behind. |
| Here There Be Tygers | Third-grader Charles desperately needs to use the school bathroom but is terrified of his strict teacher, Miss Bird, and the forbidden basement where it's located; when forced to go, he finds a huge, menacing tiger in the bathroom. |
| The Monkey | Twin brothers find a creepy, cymbal-clapping toy monkey that brings death to those near it, forcing them to deal with its curse as children and then again as estranged adults when it resurfaces to continue its deadly spree. |
| Cain Rose Up | Suffering from depression, college student, Curt Garrish, goes on a murderous sniper rampage from his dormitory room. |
| Mrs. Todd's Shortcut | A woman obsessed with finding impossibly short routes between places, leading her to discover warped realities and otherworldly shortcuts that defy normal physics, much to the fascination and fear of her friend Homer, who eventually joins her on these magical, time-bending, and sometimes monstrous journeys to a different world. |
| The Jaunt | A sci-fi horror story about instantaneous teleportation, known as "the Jaunt," where travelers must be sedated because conscious minds experience an eternity in a terrifying void. |
| The Wedding Gig | A small-time mobster hires the narrator's band to perform at the wedding of his sister to her fiance. |
| Paranoid: A Chant | First-person narrative from the diary of someone with schizophrenia. |
| The Raft | Four teenagers find themselves trapped on a raft in the middle of a lake by a mysterious, predatory, oily black substance that emerges from the water. |
| Word Processor of the Gods | A writer receives a custom word processor from his nephew, only to discover it can alter reality. |
| The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands | An old man, George Gregson, tells of a poker game where he met Henry Brower, a man terrified of physical touch due to a curse from an Indian holy man after a traumatic event in Bombay. |
| Beachworld | The two surviving members of a spacecraft’s crash find themselves on an uncharted planet made up entirely of sand which they remark as being similar to a beach. The planet’s mystery is revealed when a second spacecraft arrives to rescue them. |
| The Reaper's Image | An antique mirror haunted by the visage of the Grim Reaper, who appears to those who gaze into it. |
| Nona | A man in prison is writing an account of the events that led to his incarceration. |
| For Owen | A poem concerning King walking his son Owen to school. |
| Survivor Type | A surgeon who, while attempting to smuggle a large amount of heroin on a cruise ship, finds himself marooned on a tiny island in the Pacific with very limited supplies and no food. |
| Uncle Otto's Truck | A man reflecting on his wealthy, eccentric Uncle Otto, who becomes consumed by paranoia and guilt over a derelict truck, convinced it's moving and planning to kill him after a deadly incident involving his business partner years ago. |
| Morning Deliveries (Milkman #1) | A milkman on his delivery route who secretly leaves sinister "surprises" like spiders or poison in milk bottles for unsuspecting suburban customers. |
| Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game (Milkman #2) | Following a night of heavy drinking, laundry workers Rocky and Leo are on their way home when they see a vehicle--possibly a milk truck--ominously following them on a long, dark stretch of road. |
| Gramma | Ten-year-old George Bruckner is left alone to care for his elderly, blind, and senile grandmother while his mother goes to the hospital to check on his injured brother. |
| The Ballad of a Flexible Bullet | A magazine editor, Henry, discovers a brilliant, strange story by a new writer, Reg Thorpe, leading Henry to become entangled in Thorpe's paranoid world, especially the belief that tiny creatures called "fornits" live in typewriters and grant creativity, all while the narrator recounts how Thorpe's sanity—and his own—spirals downward in a tale of artistic obsession and madness. |
| The Reach | An elderly woman who has lived her entire life on a small, close-knit Maine community called Goat Island, never once crossing the body of water (the "Reach") to the mainland. |
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| Dolan's Cadillac | Wealthy crime-boss Jimmy Dolan brutally murders a woman who is scheduled to testify against him, and her husband spends the next seven years plotting his revenge. Haunted by the voice of his dead wife, he will stop at nothing to exact his vengeance and allow his wife to rest in peace. |
| The End of the Whole Mess | Howard Forney’s journal recounts the intense promise and disastrous effects of his younger brother Bobby’s genius. When Bobby discovers an unknown chemical that diminishes anger and hostility, he believes he’s found the path to world peace. Only after utilizing an erupting volcano to spread the chemical throughout the world does Bobby learn that the chemical also causes dementia and eventually death. |
| Suffer the Little Children | An elderly teacher at the Summer Street School, Miss Sidley is disturbed when one of her students tells her that, “Tomorrow a bad thing will happen.” When she probes further into the matter, she discovers that aliens are slowly taking over the bodies of her students. Is her attempt to save them an amazing act of courage, or a fatal trick of the mind? |
| The Night Flier | A cynical tabloid reporter chases a mysterious killer, dubbed the "Night Flier," who travels by private plane to murder people at small airports, draining their blood in vampiric style. |
| Popsy | A desperate gambler deep in debt kidnaps children for a criminal figure to pay off his mobster boss. |
| It Grows on You | A haunted house in Castle Rock, Maine physically expands with each death or tragedy connected to its reclusive owners. |
| Chattery Teeth | Salesman Bill Hogan notices an unusual pair of metal teeth in a convenience store and the store’s clerk claims they are broken and gives them to him. Little does Hogan know that not only do the teeth work, but they will save his life when a hitchhiker tries to kill him. |
| Dedication | “Dedication” is the story of a maid working in a hotel who uses a black magic spell in the hopes of harnessing the talent of one of the hotel’s frequent guests—an eccentric writer—and passing it on to her unborn son. |
| The Moving Finger | Howard Mitla is stunned at the sudden appearance of a solitary human finger poking out of the drain in his apartment’s bathroom sink. Afraid that the finger may attack him, Howard tries everything imaginable to get rid of it, from heavy-duty drain-cleaner to chopping it off. But what plagues Howard most is the thought of what, or whom, that finger is attached to. |
| Sneakers | Music exec John Tell doesn’t realize what he’s getting into when he begins working at Tabori Studios with famous producer Paul Jannings. When Tell notices an old pair of dirty sneakers in the studio’s bathroom day after day, his curiosity leads him to investigate their origins. What he finds leads him down a dark road of ghosts, drugs, and the realization that the famous Paul Janning may be a murderer. |
| You Know They Got a Hell of a Band | A couple gets lost on a scenic drive in Oregon and stumble upon the eerily perfect, nostalgic town of Rock and Roll Heaven, where deceased music legends reside, but soon realize they're trapped in a sinister, eternal concert for lost souls in this bizarre afterlife. |
| Home Delivery | Maddie Pace is a young, pregnant widow whose husband recently died in a fishing boat accident. When reanimated dead bodies start attacking the living, the only defense is to destroy the dead and burn the pieces. It isn’t long before Maddie must confront the zombie of her dead husband and decide if she is strong enough to watch him die all over again. |
| Rainy Season | A husband and wife come to Willow, Maine and will stay, despite protests from the locals, to become sacrifices during the rainy season. When the “rain” starts, the couple must win the ultimate battle of Man vs. Nature if they have any hope of making it out alive. |
| My Pretty Pony | An elderly man on his deathbed gives his young grandson a pocketwatch and warns the boy against the dangers of letting time slip away. |
| Sorry, Right Number | Katie Wiederman receives an unsettling phone call from somebody seemingly trying to plead for help or warn her about something. |
| The Ten O'Clock People | A man trying to quit smoking suddenly sees that authority figures (cops, politicians) are actually monstrous, bat-like creatures in disguise, a vision triggered by nicotine withdrawal. |
| Crouch End | Police officers Farnham and Vetter are working the night shift and are discussing the case of Doris Freeman, a young woman who came in to report the disappearance of her husband. Nearly hysterical, Doris’s story involves monsters and other supernatural incidents. Farnham dismisses the story as rubbish, but Vetter, who has worked in Crouch End for years, is not so sure. |
| The House on Maple Street | The four Bradbury children discover a mysterious entity slowly replacing the wood and plaster of their home with metal and machinery. Realizing that a cataclysmic event is on the horizon, they plan their own escape while using the opportunity to trap their hated and feared stepfather and be rid of him forever. |
| The Fifth Quarter | An ex-con, Jerry Tarkanian, seeks revenge and riches after his friend Barney is killed by accomplices in a heist. |
| The Doctor's Case | A crotchety old British Lord is murdered. Lord Hull’s wife and three sons are all suspects, and it is up to Holmes and Watson to find out the truth. |
| Umney's Last Case | It’s just another ordinary day in 1930s Los Angeles for private investigator Clyde Umney, until a new client walks into his office. Umney soon learns that his client is the crime-fiction writer who not only created him, but now needs to switch places with him. An unknown power forces Umney to take on the writer’s identity in the year 1994. Now, Clyde needs to figure out how to get back to his own universe and then take revenge on his creator. |
| Head Down | A nonfiction essay that chronicles the 1989 season of his son Owen’s little league baseball team and all the triumphs and tribulations the team experiences on the road to the Maine State Championships. |
| Brooklyn August | A nostalgic look back on the glory days of professional baseball. |
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| Autopsy Room Four | The last thing Howard Cottrell remembers is entering the woods to find his golf ball. He wakes up as he is being rolled into an autopsy room, but is completely paralyzed and unable to let the attendants know he is still alive. |
| The Man in the Black Suit | A haunting recollection of a mysterious boyhood event. |
| All That You Love Will Be Carried Away | A man checks into a Lincoln Nebraska Motel 6 to find the meaning in his life. |
| The Death of Jack Hamilton | The tale of Depression-era outlaws on the run. |
| In the Deathroom | A man named Fletcher is held captive in a South American stronghold. His captors will use any tortuous means necessary to extract the information they want from him. His only hope lies with his last request--one last cigarette. |
| The Little Sisters of Eluria | Roland is a gunslinger in a deserted town when he gets ambushed. He ends up in a strange infirmary attended by the "Little Sisters" and wondering if he'll survive their care. |
| Everything's Eventual | Dinky Earnshaw--a 19-year-old pizza delivery boy--gets hired by a mysterious stranger for a unique and totally "eventual" (awesome) job. |
| L.T.'S Theory of Pets | LT has a theory about pets, particularly his Siamese cat. It had belonged to him and his wife until he came home one day to find a note on the fridge from his wife letting him know she'd left him, but left the cat. |
| The Road Virus Heads North | Richard Kinnell buys a creepy painting at a yard sale which was painted by a metal-head neighbor of the woman running the yard sale just before he committed suicide. |
| Lunch at the Gotham Cafe | Steve Davis is suffering through intense withdrawal--from both nicotine and his wife. His desperation for a cigarette and for his ex are almost too much to bear, but that's nothing compared to the horrors that await him at a trendy Manhattan restaurant. |
| That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French | Presents the ultimate case of deja vu. |
| 1408 | Mike Enslin, bestselling author of "true" ghost stories, decides to spend the night in New York City's most haunted hotel room. But he must live to write about it without the help of his ex best-friends, his trusty smokes. |
| Riding the Bullet | When he gets a call that his mother has suffered a stroke, college student, Alan Parker, has no car to get him from the University of Maine campus to Lewiston where she has been hospitalized. He is able to hitch a ride with a stranger who offers him a no-win choice. |
| Lucky Quarter | Darlene is a single mom struggling to raise two kids on her income as a chambermaid in Reno. When Room 322 leaves her a quarter for a tip, Darlene lets that quarter take her for a ride. |
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| Willa | A group of travelers has found themselves stranded in a railroad station waiting for a train that never seems to come to replace the one they had been traveling in. David Sanderson realizes that his fiance, Willa, is not at the station and follows her to the nearby town. He finds her at a local honky-tonk but when it seems that the other patrons of the establishment are not just ignoring them, an awareness of their situation begins to come over him. |
| The Gingerbread Girl | "The Gingerbread Girl" follows the story of Em, who after suffering a devastating loss, starts running. Soon Em runs from her husband and her home all the way to the airport. Looking for solace, Em's running takes her to the Florida Gulf where she settles into the loneliest stretch of Vermillion Key. Once there Em keeps up her running until one day she makes the mistake of looking into the driveway of a man named Pickering. Pickering also enjoys the privacy of Vermillion Key, but the young women he brings there suffer the consequences. Will Em be next? |
| Harvey's Dream | A unhappily married, middle-aged couple's typical Saturday morning is disrupted by a horrific nightmare. |
| Rest Stop | Author John Dykstra, who writes under the pen name of Rick Hardin, has had too much beer to drink at his mystery writer's group meeting and desperately needs to find a rest stop on his return from Jacksonville to Sarasota. There is only one other car at the rest stop and he hears its occupants in the Ladies' Room. It is a woman's and a man's voice he hears coming from the bathroom and clearly the sounds of domestic abuse. John Dykstra has to decide how, or even if, he will act to stop it. |
| Stationary Bike | After being told by his doctor that his cholesterol level is too high, Richard Sefkitz begins riding a stationary bike in the basement of his apartment building. To help alleviate the boredom, he buys maps and plots a route from New York to Herkimer, a town on the U.S./Canadian border, each day marking the amount of miles he has "ridden" towards his goal. He also paints a scene of a road on the blank wall in front of the bike to help him imagine actually traveling the road. As he nears Herkimer (according to the miles plotted on his map, at least) and has gotten in great shape physically, he begins having strange thoughts that there is someone following him on his daily rides. |
| The Things They Left Behind | Scott Staley survived the collapse of the World Trade Center where he worked for Light and Bell Insurance. Nearly a year later, memorabilia his dead co-workers had kept in their office cubicles mysteriously appears in his apartment. |
| Graduation Afternoon | The story tells of a young woman enjoying her high school graduation party at her wealthy boyfriend's suburban Connecticut home and subsequently witnessing the destruction of Manhattan by an atomic bomb. |
| N. | A psychiatrist treating a patient obsessed with keeping a Lovecraftian, helmet-headed monster from breaking through a stone portal in a field. |
| The Cat from Hell | A hitman is hired by a wealthy old man to kill a sinister-looking black-and-white cat that seems responsible for recent deaths in the family. |
| The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates | A widow receives a mysterious phone call from her husband, James, two days after his death in a plane crash. |
| Mute | A traveling salesman picks up a deaf-mute hitchhiker and unloads his troubles about his unfaithful, embezzling wife. |
| Ayana | A man's father is dying of pancreatic cancer. A strange little girl named Ayana arrives at his hospital room and gives him a kiss--but not a "kiss of death." Instead his father miraculously recovers. The narrator must repay this miracle, though, and over the years is called upon to do so. |
| A Very Tight Place | Thinking that he is meeting for a resolution of an on-going legal dispute, Curtis Johnson is lured to a deserted construction site by his neighbor, Tim Grunwald, whose electric fences caused the death of Johnson’s beloved dog Betsy. The meeting does not go as either Johnson or Grunwald had hoped. |
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| 1922 | The story opens with the confession of Wilfred James to the murder of his wife, Arlette, following their move to Hemingford, Nebraska onto land willed to Arlette by her father. |
| Big Driver | Mystery writer, Tess, has been supplementing her writing income for years by doing speaking engagements with no problems. But following a last-minute invitation to a book club 60 miles away, she takes a shortcut home with dire consequences. |
| Fair Extension | Harry Streeter, who is suffering from cancer, decides to make a deal with the devil but, as always, there is a price to pay. |
| A Good Marriage | Darcy Anderson learns more about her husband of over twenty years than she would have liked to know when she stumbles literally upon a box under a worktable in their garage. |
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| Mile 81 | At Mile 81 on the Maine Turnpike is a boarded up rest stop, a place where high school kids drink and get into the kind of trouble high school kids have always gotten into. It’s the place where Pete Simmons goes when his older brother, who’s supposed to be looking out for him, heads off to the gravel pit to play “paratroopers over the side.” |
| Premium Harmony | Ray and Mary Burkett's marriage is one of near constant bickering. During a trip to buy a present for her niece, Mary goes into the store while Ray and their dog wait in the car. Ray is called into the store when Mary has a heart attack and ultimately dies. When Ray returns to the car, he finds their dog has also died. The story is told in third person and the reader learns about Ray's true character through his thoughts. |
| Batman and Robin Have an Altercation | A middle-aged man named Sanderson brings his Alzheimer's-afflicted father to Applebee's for their weekly lunch, where for three years they have ordered the same food and had the same conversation. Just as Sanderson despairs of finding any shred of the man who raised him, he’s saved from a brutal assault to find his father wielding a weapon procured in a moment of lucidity. |
| The Dune | Retired Florida Supreme Court Judge Harvey Beecher tells his lawyer about a mysterious sand dune on an unnamed island a short distance off the Gulf coastline of his family's property. Harvey first visited the island at the age of ten in 1932, after his grandfather, a scoundrel and land speculator who'd created the family fortune, told him Blackbeard's treasure might be buried there. Traveling to the island became a daily addiction for Harvey...and now his lawyer is about to discover the shocking reason why. |
| Bad Little Kid | The story is about a man, George Hallas, whose life is changed forever when he realizes that a mysterious boy is causing the deaths of people he loves. It is told as he is in prison explaining how he ended up there to his attorney, Leonard Bradley. |
| A Death | “A Death,” is about the murder of a young girl and the man suspected of killing her. Set in the Black Hills of Dakota shortly before the territory enters the United States in 1889, the story opens with Jim Trusdale’s arrest. |
| The Bone Church | A narrative poem about an ill-fated jungle expedition. |
| Morality | Chad, an aspiring writer who is teaching school until he lands a publishing contract, and his wife, Nora, who is working as a home nurse for a retired minister are, like most people these days, struggling financially. Nora is approached by her employer with a proposition that could make their dream of a home in Vermont a reality. But will it be worth the moral consequences? |
| Afterlife | William Andrews, an investment banker with Goldman Sachs, dies on September 23, 2012, and finds himself confronted with his life after death. Afterlife was published in the Summer 2013 issue (#56) of Tin House Magazine. |
| Ur | Following a nasty break-up, lovelorn college English instructor Wesley Smith can't seem to get his ex-girlfriend's parting shot out of his head: "Why can't you just read off the computer like the rest of us?" Egged on by her question and piqued by a student's suggestion, Wesley places an order for Amazon.com's Kindle eReader. The [pink?] device that arrives in a box stamped with the smile logo – via one-day delivery that he hadn't requested – unlocks a literary world that even the most avid of book lovers could never imagine. |
| Herman Wouk is Still Alive | After winning $2,700 on a lottery ticket, long-time friends Brenda and Jasmine rent a Chevy Express for a road trip back to their hometown along with their 7 children. Approaching from the opposite direction are two aging poets and former lovers who are on their way to a paid appearance at the University of Maine. The lives of all the characters soon intersect in a climatic ending. |
| Under the Weather | A advertising executive named Brad Franklin whose wife, Ellen, is seemingly unwell with bronchitis. |
| Blockade Billy | William "Blockade Billy" Blakely may have been the greatest baseball player the game has ever seen, but today no one remembers his name. He was the first--and only--player to have his existence completely removed from the record books. Every effort was made to erase any evidence William Blakely played professional baseball, and with good reason. Blockade Billy had a secret darker than any pill or injection that might cause a scandal in sports today. His secret was much, much worse. |
| Mister Yummy | An elderly gay man, Ollie Franklin, in an assisted living home, sees visions of a handsome young man. |
| Tommy | An elegy for classmate "Tommy" and the Sixties. |
| Little Green God of Agony | Katherine "Kat" MacDonald is an RN hired to care for wealthy client, Andrew Newsome, who has gone from doctor to doctor trying to find a quick cure for his lingering pain to no avail. She is convinced that he would overcome the injuries he sustained in an airplane crash but he is unwilling to endure the pain of physical therapy. In desperation, Newsome has hired a healer, Reverend Rideout, who promises to "expel" his pain. |
| The Bus Is Another World | A man on his way to a potentially career-changing appointment witnesses something that causes a moral dilemma. Should he report what he's seen and risk missing his appointment or ignore it? |
| Obits | A disgruntled man, Michael, writes obituaries for people he dislikes; after his boss dies unexpectedly following him writing her obituary, he realizes he has the power to make them real. |
| Drunken Fireworks | A salt-of-the-earth Maine native recounts how a friendly annual summer fireworks show rivalry with his neighbor across the lake gradually spirals out of control. |
| Summer Thunder | Set in a post-apocalyptic world, the story details the final days of possibly the last two men on earth |
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| Two Talented Bastids | "Two Talented Bastids" explores the long-hidden secret of how the eponymous gentlemen got their skills. |
| The Fifth Step | A retiree attempts to enjoy his morning's peace while reading a newspaper on a park bench, when a strange men sits down beside him. The man explains that he is an alcoholic who recently completed the fourth step of his AA program, and now needs his help to finish the fifth step, which requires him to relate all of his wrongdoings to a complete stranger. |
| Willie the Weirdo | Willie, by most accounts, is a weirdo: the dead birds, the dead bugs, staring into space for hours. Luckily, there's another weirdo in the house: Grampa, sharing with Willie tales of war, blood, volcanoes, and destruction. In this new short story, Willie finds out if the weird inherit the earth—or something much darker. |
| Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream | A brief and unprecedented psychic flash that upends dozens of lives. |
| Finn | In a new short story—characteristically propulsive, wickedly funny, with twists both narrative and literal—FINN points straight at our current struggle to differentiate between farce and experience and asks: can 50,000,000 Elvis fans be wrong? |
| On Slide Inn Road | It was supposed to be a family road trip to visit an aging relative. Then the car got stuck in a muddy rut and, well – these things never turn out well, do they? |
| Red Screen | In this unsettling short story, a city detective interrogates a deranged plumber who just murdered his wife, only to discover something far more insidious. |
| The Turbulence Expert | A man named Dixon works for a mysterious organization that predicts and mitigates dangerous clear-air turbulence. |
| Laurie | Lloyd Sunderland is a 65 year-old retiree living in Caymen Key, Florida who has become depressed and lost weight after his wife Marian died from a glioblastoma six months prior. One September, he is visited by his older sister, Beth, who gifts him a Border Collie-Mudi puppy out of concern for his wellbeing. |
| Rattlesnakes | A sequel to King's 1981 novel Cujo, in which a grieving widower travels to Florida for respite and instead receives an unexpected inheritance — with major strings attached. |
| The Dreamers | A taciturn Vietnam vet answers a job ad and learns that there are some corners of the universe best left unexplored. |
| The Answer Man | "The Answer Man" asks if prescience is good luck or bad and reminds us that a life marked by unbearable tragedy can still be meaningful. |
| Title | Year | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Jumper | 1959 | First written by Stephen at the age of 12 and self-published in Dave's Rag, a community newspaper run by Stephen and his brother David. A police counselor, Jeff Davis, is called to the Chrysler Building to talk down a serial jumper, Robert Steppes, who repeatedly tries to leap from heights but can't. |
| Rush Call | 1960 | First written by Stephen at the age of 12 and self-published in Dave's Rag, a community newspaper run by Stephen and his brother David. |
| The Glass Floor | Originally published in Startling Mystery Stories in 1967 | Charles Wharton wishes to see the place where his sister Janine died. Anthony Reynard, her husband, refuses to allow the room, which has since been sealed, to be re-opened. Eventually, Charles will find a way to enter the room with the glass floor, and he'll quickly discover that not all is as it seems. |
| The Old Dude's Ticker | 1971 | Richard Drogan, a veteran of the Vietnam War, lives with an elderly man referred to only as "The Old Dude". The Old Dude has a cataract in one eye that frightens the narrator, so much so that he plans to murder the old man. After several nights of watching the Old Dude sleep by shining a pen-light through his door, he illuminates the old man's diseased eye, which is open. The Old Dude had been awake for some time, and the narrator speculates that he was very afraid and trying to calm himself down. Seeing the eye, however, drives Drogan into a rage. |
| Man With a Belly | 1978 | A young man driving stops to meet a strange, large-bellied man who offers to answer three questions for cash. |
| The Night of the Tiger | 1978 | A young man, Eddie, is working at a circus where he observes rising tension between the volatile lion tamer, Mr. Indrail, and an unsettling outsider, Mr. Leger, leading to an unusual, tense evening focused on a lion's cage and a sense of impending doom, all leading to a shocking twist that redefines the whole situation. |
| The Crate | 1979 | A janitor discovers a mysterious, locked crate in a university basement, containing a ferocious, hungry creature that attacks mercilessly; when a professor finds out, he and a friend plot to get rid of it, but the creature's deadly potential offers dark temptations, especially to a man with an abusive wife, making it a story of monstrous temptation and hidden horror. |
| Before the Play | 1982 Prequel to The Shining | This story tells of events which occurred before the Torrance family arrived at the Overlook Hotel. |
| Father's Day | 1982 | Patriarch Nathan Grantham was killed on Father’s Day by his long-suffering daughter Bedelia. On her way to the annual Father’s Day dinner with the remaining descendants, Bedelia stops at the cemetery where Nathan is buried accidentally spilling her whiskey bottle on his grave with unexpected consequences. |
| Something to Tide You Over | 1982 | A vengeful husband, Richard Vickers, forces his wife's lover, Harry Wentworth, to bury himself alive in the sand at a private beach, only to reveal he's done the same to Harry's lover, Rebecca, with the rising tide as their deadly timer, enacting a cruel, cinematic revenge for her infidelity. |
| They're Creeping Up on You | 1982 | Upson Pratt, a wealthy and ruthless businessman living in a sterile, hermetically sealed penthouse apartment due to his extreme germophobia |
| The Reploids | 1989 | A writer who receives a custom word processor from his nephew, only to discover it can alter reality. |
| The Revelations of 'Becka Paulson | 1991 | 'Becka Paulson is receiving messages--"revelations"--from a 3-D picture of Jesus which sits atop her television about her husband Joe's infidelity. |
| Throttle | 2009 | A trucker is pitted against a tribe of motorcycle outlaws in the Nevada desert. Co-authored with Joe Hill |
| In the Tall Grass | Originally, Esquire published "In the Tall Grass" as part of "Fiction for Men" series in the summer of 2012. It was published in two parts, the first appeared in the June/July issue and the conclusion in the August issue. | In the Tall Grass begins with a sister and brother who pull off to the side of the road after hearing a young boy crying for help from beyond the tall grass. Within minutes they are disoriented, in deeper than seems possible, and they’ve lost one another. The boy’s cries are more and more desperate. What follows is a terrifying, entertaining, and masterfully told tale, as only Stephen and Joe can deliver. |
| A Face in the Crowd | 2012 | Dean Evers, an elderly widower, sits in front of the television with nothing better to do than waste his leftover evenings watching baseball. It’s Rays/Mariners, and David Price is breezing through the line-up. Suddenly, in a seat a few rows up beyond the batter, Evers sees the face of someone from decades past, someone who shouldn’t be at the ballgame, shouldn’t be on the planet. And so begins a parade of people from Evers’s past, all of them occupying that seat behind home plate. Until one day Dean Evers sees someone even eerier... |
| The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill/Weeds | 2014 | When a meteorite lands on his property, Jordy Verrill envisions an easy payday. Unfortunately for Jordy, this is no ordinary rock—and the uncompromising force inside has found its first target. |
| Cookie Jar | 2016 | Barrett (Rhett) Alderson’s thirteen year old great-grandson, Dale, has come to visit him at the Good Life Retirement Home where Rhett lives to interview him for a school project. Instead of telling Dale what life was like when Rhett was thirteen—the topic for the interview—Rhett tells him about his mother who had committed suicide after suffering with mental illness for many years when he was eleven and her cookie jar which he inherited. After her death, Rhett and his brother Jack discover it is no ordinary cookie jar. This was first published Spring 2016 in VQR Online. |
| The Music Room | 2016 | In the days of the Great Depression the Enderbys had work, which was a blessing in a year when men were still standing in breadlines. |
| Thin Scenery | 2017 | A psychiatrist tries to help a patient who is convinced his life is a scripted play, only for the session to descend into a surreal breakdown of reality itself. |
| The Extra Hour | Published in Cemetery Dance Issue #79, Spring 2024 | "Soames thought Jim Danton had looked bad two months ago; he looked worse now. Twenty pounds had fallen off him, maybe more. The dark bags under his eyes were darker than ever. The eyes themselves were bloodshot. His graying hair had thinned appreciably..." |
| The Blue Air Compressor | 2018 | Author Gerald Nately writes a short story about his friend's morbidly obese wife, Mrs. Leighton, when she finds the story. |
| Title | Year | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Rage | 1977 | A disturbed high-school student with authority problems kills one of his teachers and takes the rest of his class hostage. Over the course of one long, tense and unbearable hot afternoon, Charlie Decker explains what led him to this drastic sequence of events, while at the same time deconstructing the personalities of his classmates, forcing each one to justify his or her existence. |
| The Long Walk | 1978 | In the near future, where America has become a police state, one hundred boys are selected to enter an annual contest where the winner will be awarded whatever he wants for the rest of his life. The game is simple - maintain a steady walking pace of four miles per hour without stopping. Three warnings, and you're out - permanently. |
| The Running Man | 1982 | It is 2025 and reality TV has progressed to the point where people are willing to wager their lives in exchange for a chance at enormous wealth. Ben Richards is desperate - he needs money to treat his daughter's illness. His last chance is entering a game show called The Running Man where the objective is to elude police and specially trained trackers for a month. The reward is a cool billion dollars. The catch is that everyone else on the planet is watching and willing to turn him in for a reward. |
| Thinner | 1984 | Billy Halleck commits vehicular homicide when his lack of attention to driving results in the death of an old lady on the street. Overweight Halleck is a lawyer with connections, though, and gets off with a slap on the wrist. After his trial, a gypsy curses him with a single word, "Thinner." Halleck begins to lose weight uncontrollably and must pursue the band of gypsies who are responsible for his dwindling condition. |
| The Regulators | 1995 | The peaceful suburban life on Poplar Street in Wentworth, Ohio is shattered one fine day when four vans containing shotgun-wielding "regulators" terrorize the street's residents, cold-bloodedly killing anyone foolish enough to venture outdoors. Houses mysteriously transform into log cabins and the street now ends in what looks like a child's hand-drawn western landscape. Masterminding this sudden onslaught is the evil creature Tak, who has taken over the body of an autistic boy whose parents were killed in a drive-by shooting several months earlier. |
| Blaze | 2007 | Clayton Blaisdell, Jr., a/k/a Blaze, has had a hard life which led him to petty criminal activities. Even though his partner, George Rackley, died three months before, Blaze is still hearing his instructions for pulling off one more scheme--the kidnapping of an infant whose parents are millionaires. The story tells of the attachment Blaze forms for baby Joe as he remembers his own childhood--one that was much different than the one baby Joe will have. |
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| Apt Pupil | A golden California schoolboy and an old man whose hideous past he uncovers enter into a fateful and chilling mutual parasitism. |
| Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption | The most satisfying tale of unjust imprisonment and offbeat escape. |
| The Body | Four rambunctious young boys venture into the Maine woods and in sunlight and thunder find life, death, and intimations of their own mortality. |
| The Breathing Method | A tale told in a strange club about a woman determined to give birth. No matter what. |
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| Secret Window, Secret Garden | A man accuses author Mort Rainey of stealing one of his story ideas. Rainey, who is going through an ugly divorce, attempts to prove to his accuser that his own story was published first, but all evidence to support his argument begins to disappear, along with the people who might confirm his case. |
| The Langoliers | A group of travelers on a red-eye flight from California to Maine wake up to discover that most of their fellow passengers have vanished mid-flight, along with the pilots and flight attendants. |
| The Library Policeman | When a man forgets to return some books he borrowed from the library while writing a speech, and later accidentally destroys them, the phantom librarian who lent him the books sends the library policemen to terrorize him |
| The Sun Dog | A young boy receives a Polaroid camera for his birthday. There's something wrong with his gift, though. Every picture features a menacing dog that approaches the foreground in each subsequent photograph. |
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| Blind Willie | This story tells of a man who pretends to be blind and makes his living panhandling on the streets of New York. In the past, bribing the police has kept him from being arrested but he has finally met one who may not take money for an answer. |
| Hearts in Atlantis | It's 1966 and the height of the Vietnam War when Pete Riley first comes to the University of Maine. Uppermost on the minds of many young men at that time is the draft. and maintaining their grade point average so that they would not be called by Selective Service. Despite this threat, a group becomes obsessed by a game called Hearts which puts them in danger of losing their deferred status as they neglect their studies. The story follows them during their first year and tells of how Pete Riley meets and falls in love with Carol Gerber who first appeared in "Low Men in Yellow Coats." |
| Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling | The conclusion to Hearts in Atlantis brings Bobby Garfield back to the house on Broad Street where he first met Ted Brautigan. It's been a hard life for Bobby since he left nearly 40 years before. The mystery is how circumstances conspired to bring him back to meet someone he thought he would never see again. |
| Low Men in Yellow Coats | Bobby Garfield befriends an elderly gentleman, Ted Brautigan, who moves into the boarding house where he and his mother have lived since his father's death. During the summer that follows, his friendship with Ted grows as he spends time reading the newspaper to him and is hired to be on the lookout for any signs for lost animals or strange cars that may be in the neighborhood. Although he and his best friends, Carol Gerber and John "Sully" Sullivan begin to see these strange signs, Bobby neglects to tell Ted with dire consequences. |
| Why We're in Vietnam | It's 1999 and we are reunited with John "Sully" Sullivan from "Low Men in Yellow Coats" who is remembering events and people from his past as he attends the funeral of one of his comrades from his troop in Vietnam. |
| Title | Summary |
|---|---|
| Mr. Harrigan's Phone | Craig is a youngster in a small Maine town hired by a rich old businessman to read and do the odd chore after he retires. After winning some cash off a lottery scratcher gifted by Mr. Harrigan, the kid buys his friend an iPhone. The device gets buried with Mr. Harrigan when he dies, though communication continues beyond the grave in chilling fashion. |
| The Life of Chuck | The Life of Chuck is three separate stories linked to tell the biography of Charles Krantz in reverse, beginning with his death from a brain tumour at 39 and ending with his childhood in a supposedly haunted house. |
| Rat | Drew Larson, a writer of an acclaimed short story, has given himself over to academia because every time he tries to turn a good idea into a novel, things go seriously bad – mentally, physically or both. But his latest concept, a Western thriller, is gangbusters, and he goes out to an old family cabin in the woods to get the novel done. When storms, insecurities and sickness hit, Drew strikes a sinister bargain with a rodent. |
| If It Bleeds | Holly Gibney investigates a horrific school bombing in Pennsylvania and a TV newsman who has an uncanny knack for covering major tragedies. |
| Title | Year | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Elevation | 2018 | Although Scott Carey doesn’t look any different, he’s been steadily losing weight. There are a couple of other odd things, too. He weighs the same in his clothes and out of them, no matter how heavy they are. Scott doesn’t want to be poked and prodded. He mostly just wants someone else to know, and he trusts Doctor Bob Ellis. In the small town of Castle Rock, the setting of many of King’s most iconic stories, Scott is engaged in a low grade—but escalating—battle with the lesbians next door whose dog regularly drops his business on Scott’s lawn. One of the women is friendly; the other, cold as ice. Both are trying to launch a new restaurant, but the people of Castle Rock want no part of a gay married couple, and the place is in trouble. When Scott finally understands the prejudices they face – including his own -- he tries to help. Unlikely alliances, the annual foot race, and the mystery of Scott’s affliction bring out the best in people who have indulged the worst in themselves and others. |