Long Live The King!!!

• Carrie-It's known as a book about a girl with telekinesis that kills people, but it's mostly about a gifted outcast of high school fighting back.
• The Shining-Jack Nicholson aided Stanley Kubrick in making this tale infamous for being about a psycho in a haunted hotel who tries to murder his family, while the novel by Stephen King is about a family torn apart by problems involving alcoholism and abuse. The father of the family, Jack Torrance (who is one of my favorite characters) is finally driven over the edge of insanity, as many of us often are, by his obsession with the hotel and its history which still lingers within.
• Different Seasons-4 tales dealing with hope in spite of wrongful imprisonment (Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption), anger through manipulation (Apt Pupil), childhood curiosity towards the inevitable death (The Body), and a mother's dedication to preserve her child's life beyond her own (The Breathing Method).
• Dolores Claiborne-One of his two novels dealing with the most horrific thing of all: spousal abuse. A woman discovers her abusive husband had been molesting their teenaged daughter and decides to put an end to it. And while she is guilty of that murder, she now finds herself charged with one of which she is innocent.
• Rose Madder-The second of the aforementioned abuse novels, Rose Daniels decides after her miscarriage at the hands of her brutal cop husband Norman that it's time for her to move on. She escapes, but he follows. Eventually, the supernatural events of the book take care of the problem permanently, leaving Rose free.
• Gerald's Game- An all-too-likely horror story. During a kinky sexual game in which wife Jessie is handcuffed to the bed, her husband Gerald has a fatal heart attack, leaving her chained down in their secluded cabin, all alone. She's forced to deal with her frightening memories as well as her struggle to survive her situation.
• The Green Mile- Probably his most famous 'non-horror' novel, this book deals with innocent giant John Coffey, who has the ability to heal with his hands. But somehow this miracle man ends up on death row, and prison guard Paul Edgecomb is determined to find out why. A truly inspiring book, and the fact that it was released in monthly installments added to the thrill!
• The Dead Zone- By the title, one would assume that this is one of his 'creatures back from the dead' books, but that assumption would be wrong. This was one of his first novels released that wasn't a true horror story. Johnny Smith has the gift of precognition, but it doesn't clearly come through until after a car accident. When he wakes up from a coma years later, he finds that everything around his life had changed. He'd lost the woman he loved to another man and his job was gone. The title refers to 2 different things: a part of his brain in which these visions occur (it also means that he's dying of a slow tumor), and, as the doctor more plainly explains in the movie, the dead zone that Johnny FEELS is there because the future he sees when he touches someone is not definite, meaning he can change the future. And when he sees a very dark future, he risks everything including his own life to change it.
• Christine- I know what you're thinking, haunted car story. Well... pretty much. I do believe in ghosts and hauntings. But the main reason I include this title in this list is because of the characters. Poor nerdy Arnie Cunningham has been pushed around all his life, and then he sees something that makes it all seem trivial: a red 1958 Plymouth Fury that its owner had named Christine. That owner, Roland LeBay, was a very bitter man. And after purchasing the car from him, Arnie also begins exhibiting such traits. Not long after, LeBay dies. I did an analysis on this book in Senior Lit, and concluded that the spirit of an embittered man had passed on to his car; in other words, his fury lived on through his Fury. =) Just in case you're wondering, I got an A on that report. hehehe
• The Stand- The world is going to end sometime, and when it does, I strongly believe that the case King lays out for us here is likely. The government releasing biological warfare on the world, wiping out 99.9% of the population. And of course, the survivors band together to re-start society. Do I believe about the dreams separating the good from evil? No. But it makes for great storytelling, and every King story has to have some supernatural twist to it. hehehe
• Misery- 'I'm your number one fan.' This scary tale about an obsessed fan holding her favorite writer prisoner is indeed terrifying, and it needs no gore. King himself experienced something like this (along with an idea that goes into one of Four Past Midnight's tales): a fan claiming that King had stolen a story idea from him broke into their house and threatened his wife with a box that supposedly held a bomb. Between that and being hit by a van last year, I think King's bio alone would be a horror story.
• Bag of Bones- Another ghost story, but a unique one. This was not among my favorite books by King, but only because of the style in which it was written. I didn't find the narrator to be very likeable. He included too many outside details. The actual ghost story that involves his ancestors and the house that he currently makes his home is very eerie, and good. The woman that had once lived there had watched four men drown her son as she was raped before they killed her. Her ghost brings about an interesting curse of sorts throughout the years in the families of the men who had taken her life.
• Desperation- What seems to start out as a novel about a psychotic cop killing or imprisoning anyone who passes through his town and a young boy using his faith to get the survivors through it soon turns into a book about a demon. Despite the 'monster' aspect (this is the same opinion I have about IT), it's still a great realistic horror story.
• The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon- As I mentioned before, a story about a little girl lost in the woods. However, I also mentioned that every Stephen King book has at least some supernatural twist to it, and that holds true here. The little girl's fear and imagination is what stirs up the monsters, but the real monster for her is hunger, dehydration, and other flaws of the human body.
• Hearts in Atlantis- Five interlaced stories all dealing with the effects of the Vietnam War and its era. The novella of the same title reminded me very much of John Knowles' A Separate Peace, the only book on the High School reading cirriculum that I actually liked. Strike that. That I actually LOVED. I own a work out paperback copy of a Separate Peace, and will read it whenever I'm out of other stories. But anyway, the story of the young men in school fearing being sent off to war is wonderful.
• Roadwork (as Richard Bachman)- The simple story of a sad working-class man that has lost everything else in his life and isn't afraid to go a little further, just for his pride. The city has informed him that they are tearing down his house, but he is not going to leave the house in which he'd played with his small son who had died of a brain tumor. It may have looked like just a house to anyone else, but to Barton Dawes, it was everything. It was his memory. And he wasn't going to let anyone take that from him. Not while he's alive, anyway.
• Rage (as Richard Bachman)- Saving the best for last. King has said that out of all of his books, this is the one he regrets publishing. Especially in the days we live in, the story of high school student Charlie Decker killing his teacher and taking his class hostage is all too real and a terror for anyone who felt pain in reading about the Columbine shootings. So you see, the most frightening of all monsters, literary or no, is mankind itself.

More Madness

My Favorite Stephen King Characters
The Official Stephen King Web Presence
Fangoria, America's Favorite Horror Magazine
More Pure Terror
Queenie's web site
Roy Hudson's Literary Feast