Start with The Shining. It is the book where King stopped being a promising horror writer and became the one everyone reads: a haunted hotel that is also a study of a father's alcoholism, tightly plotted, under 500 pages, and frightening in a way that does not depend on the supernatural machinery at all.
The alternatives people suggest are Carrie, because it is first, and the clown novel, because it is the one everybody names. Neither is right for a first book. Carrie is a thin debut told partly through fake documents, interesting mainly as an origin; the 1986 novel It runs to 1,100 pages with a structure that alternates between two timelines and a late scene that a great many readers find indefensible. If you want something shorter and want to know whether you like King's people rather than his monsters, Misery is the better small door — two characters, one room, no ghosts.
The early run
- Carrie (1974)
- 'Salem’s Lot (1975) — vampires in a Maine town, and the best case that King's real subject is small communities rather than monsters.
- The Shining (1977)
The Stand, from 1978, is the other major early novel and is not in our catalogue. It is the one to read next if you want the doorstop experience before taking on It.
The doorstops
The novel It is the one to attempt once you know you like him. It is genuinely his most ambitious book, the childhood sections are the best writing he has done, and it is very long. Misery is its opposite in every way and is probably his most controlled novel.
The Dark Tower, and its problem
This is where reading order actually matters, and where the series loses most of the people it loses.
- The Gunslinger
- The Drawing of the Three
- The Waste Lands — held here inside the omnibus The Dark Tower (Gunslinger / Drawing of the Three / Waste Lands)
- Wizard and Glass
- Wolves of the Calla
- Song of Susannah — not currently in our catalogue
- The dark tower
The problem is book one. The Gunslinger was written across twelve years starting when King was nineteen, it is cold and elliptical and deliberately obscure, and it reads nothing like anything else he has written. Readers who love King routinely bail on it. The honest advice is to treat it as a 200-page prologue you have to get through, because The Drawing of the Three is where the series actually begins and it is superb.
Do not make the Dark Tower your introduction to King. Read three or four of the novels first; the series is dense with connections to them, and much of its late-stage payoff assumes you have met Randall Flagg and the town of Derry elsewhere.
Honest warnings
Wizard and Glass is a 700-page flashback that stops the main plot dead for an entire volume. Some readers name it the best book in the series; others find it the wall they hit. Both reactions are common and both are reasonable.
King's endings are the standing criticism of his career and the last three Dark Tower books are where that criticism is loudest — he writes himself into the story as a character, which divides readers sharply. Knowing this in advance helps.
And the books are long. Very few King novels are the length they need to be. Reading him means accepting a certain amount of drift.
Where to stop
For the standalone novels there is no stopping point, because there is no sequence — pick by premise and stop when you are bored.
For the Dark Tower, stopping after Wizard and Glass is a defensible choice that a fair number of readers make and do not regret. If you carry on to The dark tower, know that the ending is the most argued-about in modern popular fiction, and that King himself puts a note in front of it advising you not to read it. Take that as you like. Then find your next author in Discover.
Follow the full ordered path here: Stephen King Reading Order: Where to Start.
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