Stephen King’s career in photos: Look back at the ‘King of Horror’ and his books
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Bestselling author Stephen King, shown in a 1970 file photo.
Joe Hill doesn’t have to go very far to find the scariest book ever. Just up a rung on his family tree.
The bestselling horror author of “King Sorrow” knows he’s biased, but the “correct answer” is still “It” by Hill’s father, Stephen King.
“That’s the gold standard when it comes to scaring the pants off people. No one’s ever going to touch that,” Hill says. “The classics – ‘Dracula,’ ‘Frankenstein,’ ‘Dr. Jekyll and ‘Mr. Hyde’ – I love those books but they were written in a more conservative time. People didn’t go for the throat the way my dad went for the throat in ‘It.’ “
Bill Skarsgård reprises his role as the evil Pennywise in the “It” prequel series “Welcome to Derry,” based on the Stephen King book
Plus, Hill adds, “Pennywise has joined Count Dracula and Frankenstein as one of the great nightmares. People are still going to be scared of Pennywise in a hundred years.”
Horror authors love recommending great reads: For example, both Hill and King shout out the new Keith Rosson book “Coffin Moon” – Hill hails Rosson’s “extraordinary writing” while his dad calls it “the best modern vampire story ever.” With Halloween upon us, Hill, Rosson and other authors with new horror novels give us the rundown on their freaky favorites.
‘Bird Box’ by Josh Malerman
Scarlett Dunmore is the author of “How to Survive a Horror Movie.”
“Although it would be remiss of me not to choose a Stephen King text, given my character’s obsession with him in “How to Survive a Horror Movie,” when it comes to chilling Halloween reads, “Josh Malerman’s ‘”Bird Box” is up there. The movie adaptation was terrifying, but the creepy atmospheric tension in the novel is even scarier. It’s the fear of the unknown, of stepping out into the world, blindfolded, with only instinct and hope to guide you.”
– Scarlett Dunmore, author of “How to Survive a Horror Movie,” a young adult thriller about a young scary film buff enrolled at a girls’ boarding school on a remote island who becomes the prime suspect when someone starts killing off the senior class.
‘The Call’ by Peadar Ó Guilín
A. Rushby is the author of “Slashed Beauties.”
“The book that gave me nightmares for a week is one that I still think about years on. Technically young adult, it’s far more frightening than any adult book I’ve ever read. ‘The Call’ makes ‘The Hunger Games’ look like a picnic in the park. Nothing is crueler than an Irish faerie (well, maybe Peadar Ó Guilín) and these dark, twisted faeries think it’s great sport to hunt teenagers down and tear them to shreds. Plus they look hot while they’re doing it. You have been warned.”
– A. Rushby, author of “Slashed Beauties,” a gothic historical body horror tale of ultrarealistic wax figures used by male medical students in the 1700s, and modeled on beautiful women, coming to life and seeking their vengeance.
‘Geek Love’ by Katherine Dunn
Grace Byron is the author of “Herculine.”
“Unlike almost anything I’ve ever read, it’s a beautiful, stunning, grotesque book about carnies through the lens of one unconventional family. It’s horrifying. The villains are utterly sincere and deranged, vicious and human. Dunn’s ability to scare the hell out of us exists alongside her sharp, musical prose. That makes it all the more terrifying. Horror is not always clowns (although don’t worry, that’s here too), it’s also the rot that oozes within us.”
– Grace Byron, author of “Herculine,” a sci-fi horror story about a young woman who escapes an ancient evil hunting her in New York City, tries to find sanctuary at an all-trans girl commune in rural Indiana, but is followed by her literal demons.
‘The Haunting of Hill House’ by Shirley Jackson
Joe Hill is the author of “King Sorrow.”
“As ghost stories go, that’s the textbook, and if you want to talk about writing, that’s so good. You want to copy it out by hand just to get the feel of it, almost like when you have that first sip of red wine and you want to inhale it and then sort of like hold it in your mouth. Shirley Jackson’s prose is like a really great old whiskey and has that kind of potency to intoxicate. I just think every ghost story since ‘Hill House’ has been chasing ‘Hill House.’ “
– Joe Hill, author of “King Sorrow,” a horror fantasy about six friends who make a deal with a dragon to protect them and consequently cause decades of violence and chaos.
‘Hex’ by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Nick Medina is the author of “The Whistler.”
“Her eyes are sewn shut. Her mouth, too. She appears at will in the homes of the inhabitants of the town she has cursed, standing beside their beds in the dead of night. This witch – this secret that the townsfolk must protect despite the horror she inflicts upon them – ripped me from sleep with one of the worst nightmares I’ve ever had, as the witch whispered words from behind my bedroom curtains that I didn’t want to hear. Few books have scared me as much.”
– Nick Medina, author of “The Whistler,” an Indigenous horror story that centers on a young former ghost hunter recovering from an injury that left him a quadriplegic who’s stalked by a mythological phantom creeping closer to him every night.
‘Let’s Get Invisible!’ by R.L. Stine
Kristen Loesch is the author of “The Hong Kong Widow.”
“R.L. Stine’s ‘Let’s Get Invisible!’ is about a kid who finds a mirror in his attic that can turn you invisible. It’s one of the original ‘Goosebumps’; I first read it at age 9. I reread it last year, thinking it couldn’t be as terrifying as I remembered. Ha! It was somehow even scarier … and by now I am a seasoned horror reader and not easily spooked. What is it about this story that won’t let me go?”
– Kristen Loesch, author of “The Hong Kong Widow,” a historical ghost story centered on a massacre at a haunted Hong Kong mansion in 1953 that goes unsolved by the police – and becomes an urban legend – until the surviving witness returns decades later to uncover the truth.
‘Penpal’ by Dathan Auerbach
Mark Waddell is the author of “Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World.”
“When a young child attaches his name and address to a balloon and launches it as part of a school project, he starts to receive blurry Polaroid photos of … himself. This is the first in a series of mysterious and increasingly frightening events that follow him through his childhood, all of it narrated in ‘Penpal’ by his adult self peering through a distorted lens of shaky, imperfect recall. Auerbach’s book is genuinely horrifying, resurrecting that visceral terror of ‘stranger-danger’ most of us learned as kids.”
– Mark Waddell, author of “Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World,” about a low-level employee at a hellish corporation who strikes a deal with a shadowy figure for a promotion and winds up needing to save New York City from an ancient evil.
‘Rosemary’s Baby’ by Ira Levin
Bill Wood is the author of “Let’s Split Up.”
“(Scariest book ever) is an impossible question, but I often think of ‘Rosemary’s Baby’. For me, the fear doesn’t come from jump scares or conventional horror, but from the way Levin builds unease. The setting is suffocating, and so believable, that it unsettles long after you’ve finished reading. Not to mention, the book feels even more timely in 2025.”
– Bill Wood, author of “Let’s Split Up,” a combo of “Scream” and “Scooby-Doo” that follows a group of high school friends out to solve a mystery involving an abandoned estate and a ghostly presence that’s murdering their classmates.
‘The Ruins’ by Scott Smith
Keith Rosson is the author of “Coffin Moon.”
“Maybe the most pitch-perfect horror novel I’ve ever come across. Smith suffuses the book with a kind of clinical detachment, even as the dread mounts with each page. It’s rare that I burn through a book in a day, but that happened with ‘The Ruins,’ and its story of a group of friends encountering a nameless horror in the Mexican jungle is one that has stuck with me since I first read it.”
– Keith Rosson, author of “Coffin Moon,” a 1970s-set road-trip story about a Vietnam vet and his teenage niece who embark on a bloody, cross-country quest for vengeance on the vampire that killed the soldier’s wife.
‘Salem’s Lot’ by Stephen King
John Hornor Jacobs is the author of “The Night That Finds Us All.”
“I might have been too young when I read Salem’s Lot” – it was 1983 and I was 12 – but during those hours I kept checking that the doors to my house were locked and the windows were latched. Maybe horror finds a better home in a more inexperienced and innocent mind, but that book had me freaked out. I reread it again recently and it didn’t give me the shivers as it did then, in the fertile fields of a tween’s mind, but this time I was amazed as a writer at some of the beauty of the prose, specifically a bit about midway through the book where King does a little almost Faulknerian riff on the changing of the weather and the weight of history on the town of Salem’s Lot.”
– John Hornor Jacobs, author of “The Night That Finds Us All,” a supernatural locked-room horror yarn about a sailor hired to deliver a 100-year-old boat from Seattle to England who finds an old diary that contains the ship’s cursed history.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Scariest books ever, according to horror writers