10 Most Disturbing Stephen King Books, Ranked

If you read a typical Stephen King novel and you’re not disturbed by some part of it, you might come away feeling disappointed. He’s got a reputation for writing horror stories, to say the least, but doesn’t exclusively work within that genre, so a lack of scares and terror of the more expected kind in something like 11/22/63, Mr. Mercedes, or The Eyes of the Dragon is ultimately more understandable.

Also, what’s disturbing can be subjective, so if you think there are books missing here, it might come down to that: the subjectivity that comes with this kind of emotional response. This ranking also isn’t claiming these are King’s best horror books, because at least a couple of these are nowhere near as good as Carrie or The Shining, for example, but they are debatably more confronting and/or difficult to read, because of their content.

10

‘Revival’ (2014)

While it didn’t come out during Stephen King’s “classic” period (say, the 1970s through the 1980s, when he seemed most focused on horror stories), Revival is just as unsettling as some of King’s most classic horror-centric novels. It’s about a minister driven mad by the idea of reconnecting with the dead, following a personal tragedy, and what happens when he finds himself able to make seemingly miraculous resurrections.

It’s a bit about the afterlife, and a bit about cheating death, and it does inevitable – yet still shocking – things with that kind of premise. And then Revival has some other more grounded stuff that’s confronting in some comparatively ordinary ways, including addiction and other disruptive/challenging psychological conditions, so whatever unnerves you, you’ll probably find something eerie, disturbing, or saddening in Revival.

9

‘Skeleton Crew’ (1985)

Skeleton Crew - 1985 - book cover - Stephen King

Skeleton Crew starts out with an effectively horrifying novella, The Mist, and then afterward, compiles a host of short stories that are admittedly inconsistent in quality, but mostly horror-focused. Oh, and there is one other story in the bunch that’s technically a novella, but it’s less than half as long as The Mist, so it’s a pretty short one, even by novella standards.

Anyway, there’s enough here that’s consistently confronting, but the highlight as far as horror is concerned would have to be Survivor Type, which does a lot with just a few pages and a simple premise. It’s about a surgeon struggling to survive after a shipwreck leaves him stranded on a tiny island all by himself, though he’s also got a large quantity of heroin with him and a knowledge of how much pain and trauma the human body can stand. It’s one of King’s personal favorite stories he ever wrote, and up there among the most intense and horrifying short stories in his back catalog for sure.

8

‘Four Past Midnight’ (1990)

In Four Past Midnight, you quite appropriately get four novellas in the one collection, with The Langoliers being the first of them, and actually a bit longer than some of his novels, but oh well. It’s moderately disturbing, and then stories #2 and #4 are mostly in line with King’s normal sort of horror. The second, Secret Window, Secret Garden, is honestly quite similar to The Dark Half, and then the fourth, The Sun Dog, is a Castle Rock-set story that feels a bit like a prologue to Needful Things.

It’s really just one sequence in The Library Policeman that makes Four Past Midnight stand out as super upsetting. But that one sequence is enough.

So, why put Four Past Midnight here? The answer is The Library Policeman, the third story of the bunch. Four Past Midnight ranks low overall because technically, only one quarter of it’s absolutely mortifying… and even then, it’s really just one sequence in The Library Policeman that makes it super upsetting. But that one sequence is enough. It’s hard to explain here in detail, given what happens, but if you’re morbidly curious and haven’t read it, then Google’s your friend. Or your enemy. What’s read can’t be unread, after all.

7

‘Under the Dome’ (2009)

Among the beefiest of Stephen King’s books (that’s saying quite a lot), Under the Dome has the length of an epic, but it’s all contained very specifically within one town, and it covers a shorter period of time than you might expect. The titular dome is what keeps all the significant characters within that one town, and said town was already starting to fall apart long before the dome came down, so the descent is just accelerated by this further source of distress.

It gets heavy, to put it mildly, and a great deal of that is because of the power-hungry Big Jim and his even less stable (and arguably more murderous) son. Like a fair few other Stephen King books, the villains here are probably more interesting than the more heroic characters, but the struggle over the town of Chester’s Mill, and the incredibly high stakes throughout, ensure Under the Dome is a read both riveting and distressing.

6

‘The Stand’ (1978)

Speaking of Stephen King epics with high stakes, here’s The Stand, which is very much not restricted in scope the way Under the Dome was. The Stand’s story is told across almost the entire U.S., with the virus originating in the Mojave Desert, characters as far east as New York and Maine being impacted, the majority of the villainous characters gathering in Las Vegas, and then most of the more heroic characters gathering in Colorado.

It’s a true epic, to put it bluntly. And some of it’s incredibly horrific, with the virus that kills most of the population feeling scary in a more conceivable/realistic way, and then all the supernatural and religious horror being scary in the more expected sorts of Stephen King ways. It’s expansive enough to be more than just a horror novel for sure, and so not all of it’s 100% unsettling, but there’s a lot of that stuff here nonetheless.

5

‘It’ (1986)

Perhaps the best Stephen King book, even if that’s a difficult thing to pick, It simultaneously tells two ambitious stories at once, both of them separated by 27 years. There are a group of kids in the cursed town of Derry who fight back against a demonic entity that often takes the form of a clown, and then those kids regroup as adults over a quarter of a century later to do it again.

All the while, It goes to some wild places, enough to make it one of King’s more controversial books, too. There are few punches pulled here, and the descriptiveness of some of the more horrifying parts can make It a bit much at times, also ensuring it’s kind of surprising how this is one of his more popular novels. At least there are some more uplifting and cathartic parts to balance out all the horror and bleak stuff, but damn is there a lot of horror and bleakness here.

4

‘Misery’ (1987)

Moving away from the epic-length stuff now, Misery is an all-timer of a psychological thriller/horror story, and one of those Stephen King books where it’s very hard to find many problems with it. You get two characters in a confined location: one’s an obsessed fan, and the other’s an injured author, with the former keeping the latter hostage and forcing him to continue a series of his that she loves, but he’s grown to hate.

Misery sums up and condenses what makes King’s horror stories great, with it not really sprawling or feeling very long, yet still mining depth from the simple situation present by really exploring its two main characters and the relationship between a creator and the audience they work to entertain. It’s also home to some of the more nauseating sequences Stephen King has ever written, and it goes further than the (also great) movie adaptation with its violence and overall unpleasantness.

3

‘Gerald’s Game’ (1992)

If you thought there were too many characters in Misery, then Gerald’s Game is the book for you! It’s also about one person trapped in the one location, and pretty much confined to a bed inside that location, at that. But here, the person responsible for the main character being handcuffed to a bed dies almost straight away, from a heart attack, and so the protagonist has to work out how to break free while grappling with various traumas from her past.

The inevitable and desperate escape attempt is uniquely grisly, even if you know (or are almost 100% sure) it’s coming, but then plenty of other parts of Gerald’s Game are also uncomfortable and emotionally intense. Gerald’s Game isn’t as effectively written or engaging as Misery, yet it’s arguably a more difficult read because of its content, and it is indeed another rather uncompromising Stephen King novel.

2

‘Pet Sematary’ (1983)

A bit like Revival, Pet Sematary is about grief, as well as death and a risky attempt to defy it. There’s a cemetery that seems to bring the dead back to life, and a family who’ve recently started living near it finds it “revives” a deceased cat, but with issues, to put it mildly. Still, the whole thing raises questions about whether the cemetery could do the same for human beings, with a slow and effectively creepy march toward finding out.

There’s a lot of sadness in Pet Sematary, with that side of things arguably being more upsetting than the horror. Yet it’s still very full-on when it comes to the horror stuff, too. It’s a whole smorgasbord of difficult emotions here, and it’s one of those Stephen King stories you’re guaranteed to come away from feeling, in one way or another, quite shook up. Mm, ooh. Yeah. Yeah, yay.

1

‘The Long Walk’ (1979)

Best consumed as an audiobook while doing cardio yourself, if you want to feel the maximum amount of horror and unease possible, The Long Walk was one of King’s Richard Bachman books, written under that pseudonym at a point in time before people found out that Bachman = King. Almost the entire thing has a group of young men walking, as they’re taking part in a very high-stakes endurance test where there’s not only going to be one winner, but only one person who survives the whole ordeal.

You can imagine how a psychological horror story filled with death and constant physical and emotional pain might be a grim read, but The Long Walk goes a few steps further than what you might fear. And that’s why King’s one of the best in the business. At his best, he has solid and oftentimes creative ideas, and then he expands upon those ideas and proves willing to do more unexpected things with them. It’s also astounding how suspenseful The Long Walk proves to be, even though it’s all but guaranteed that the ending will be tragic; you just don’t know to what extent the tragedy of it all will hit you until you get there.