Top Ten Tuesday: Childhood Favorite Stephen King Books

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week’s topic is a Halloween-themed freebie. I’m going to list my top ten childhood favorite Stephen King books. Stephen King was pretty much the only author I read when I was a preteen/teen. These are the books that I remember loving the most when I was younger. I wonder how much my opinions would change if I reread them as an adult?

10. The Shining

Danny was only five years old, but in the words of old Mr Halloran, he was a 'shiner,' aglow with psychic voltage. When his father became caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, his visions grew frighteningly out of control. 

As winter closed in and blizzards cut them off, the hotel seemed to develop a life of its own. It was meant to be empty, but who was the lady in Room 217, and who were the masked guests going up and down in the elevator? And why did the hedges shaped like animals seem so alive? 

Somewhere, somehow, there was an evil force in the hotel—and that too had begun to shine . . .

9. The Talisman

On a brisk autumn day, a thirteen-year-old boy stands on the shores of the gray Atlantic, near a silent amusement park and a fading ocean resort called the Alhambra. The past has driven Jack Sawyer here: His father is gone, his mother is dying, and the world no longer makes sense. But for Jack, everything is about to change. For he has been chosen to make a journey across America—and into another realm.

8. Lisey’s Story

Lisey Debusher Landon lost her husband, Scott, two years ago, after a twenty-five-year marriage of the most profound and sometimes frightening intimacy. Scott was an award-winning, bestselling novelist and a very complicated man. Early in their relationship, before they married, Lisey had to learn from him about books and blood and bools. Later, she understood that there was a place Scott went—a place that both terrified and healed him, that could eat him alive or give him the ideas he needed in order to live. Now it's Lisey's turn to face Scott's demons, Lisey's turn to go to Boo'ya Moon. What begins as a widow's effort to sort through the papers of her celebrated husband becomes a nearly fatal journey into the darkness he inhabited. Perhaps King's most personal and powerful novel, Lisey's Story is about the wellsprings of creativity, the temptations of madness, and the secret language of love.

7. Pet Sematary

Sometimes dead is better . . . When the Creeds move into a beautiful old house in rural Maine, it all seems too good to be true: physician father, beautiful wife, charming little daughter, adorable infant son—and now an idyllic home. As a family, they've got it all . . . right down to the friendly cat. But the nearby woods hide a blood-chilling truth—more terrifying than death itself . . . and hideously more powerful.

6. Needful Things

A wonderful new store has opened in the little town of Castle Rock, Maine. Whatever your heart’s secret desire—sexual pleasure, wealth, power, or even more precious things—it’s for sale. And even though every item has a nerve-shattering price, the owner is always ready to make a bargain.

5. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer's craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King's advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported near-fatal accident in 1999—and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery. Brilliantly structured, friendly, and inspiring, On Writing will empower and entertain everyone who reads it—fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great story well told.

4. Different Seasons

From the magical pen of Stephen King, four mesmerizing novellas . . . 

Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption: An unjustly imprisoned convict seeks a strange and startling revenge . . . the basis for the Best Picture Academy Award nominee The Shawshank Redemption. 

Apt Pupil: Todd Bowden is one of the top students in his high school class and a typical American sixteen-year-old—until he becomes obsessed with the dark and deadly past of an older man in town. The inspiration for the film Apt Pupil from Phoenix Pictures. 

The Body: Four rambunctious young boys plunge through the façade of a small town and come face-to-face with life, death, and intimations of their own mortality. The film Stand By Me is based on this novella. 

The Breathing Method: A disgraced woman is determined to triumph over death.

3. The Long Walk

On the first day of May, 100 teenage boys meet for a race known as "The Long Walk." If you break the rules, you get three warnings. If you exceed your limit, what happens is absolutely terrifying . . .

2. The Stand

Imagine America devastated by a vast killer plague that moves from coast to coast. Imagine the countryside destroyed and great cities decimated as the entire population desperately and futilely seeks safety. Imagine then an even greater evil rising to threaten the survivors—and a last embattled group of men and women coming together to make a last stand against it.

1. The Green Mile

At Cold Mountain Penitentiary, along the lonely stretch of cells known as the Green Mile, killers as depraved as the psychopathic "Billy the Kid" Wharton and the possessed Eduard Delacroix await death strapped in "Old Sparky." Here guards as decent as Paul Edgecombe and as sadistic as Percy Wetmore watch over them. But good or evil, innocent or guilty, none have ever seen the brutal likes of the new prisoner, John Coffey, sentenced to death for raping and murdering two young girls. Is Coffey a devil in human form? Or is he a far, far different kind of being?

What is your favorite Stephen King book?