The Shelf, Ranked - Pam's Stephen King Shelf

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The Shelf, Ranked
from Pam's Stephen King Shelf

Thirty-seven books, which is every one of his I own. It's not quite everything he's written. I've never bought the Bachman collection, I only ever borrowed it, and there are a few odds and ends I've never laid eyes on. Hearts in Atlantis isn't on here yet because I'm still reading it.

They're ranked the way they sit on my actual shelf in the den, which has three boards. Top shelf is the ones I'd grab in a fire. Bottom shelf is the ones I'd let go, though I'd feel bad about it. No endings given away.

The top shelf

1.	*The Stand* (1978; the long version, 1990). The end of the world, and the best people I've ever met in a book. I've read it four times and I'd start it again tonight.
2.	It (1986). Seven kids in Derry in 1958, and the grown-ups they turn into, called home twenty-seven years later. Derry is about as close to Bangor as you can get without a map. Long, and every page earns it.
3.	*'Salem's Lot* (1975). Vampires come to a small Maine town, and the town is so real you could find the diner. Still the scariest of them all to me.
4.	*The Shining* (1977). A family snowed in at a hotel in the Colorado mountains for the winter. The book is about a father who loves his boy and can't stop drinking, and that's what makes it so frightening. The movie isn't the book.
5.	*Different Seasons* (1982). Four long stories and hardly a monster in it. Three have been made into movies, including Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption. Give this to anybody who says they don't read horror.
6.	*The Green Mile* (1996). Death row in a Louisiana prison in 1932, and a gentle giant of a man. Six skinny paperbacks, one a month. Tissues.
7.	*Misery* (1987). A writer, a wreck on a snowy road, and the woman who finds him, a former nurse who has read every one of his books. Kathy Bates won the Oscar for the movie and deserved it. I think about this book differently since June.
8.	*Bag of Bones* (1998). A widowed writer goes back to his lake house in western Maine. A ghost story and a love story both, and the most grown-up thing he's written.
9.	*Pet Sematary* (1983). A young family, a busy road, and grief. It frightened me more than any of the others, because there's no monster in it worse than missing somebody.
10.	*The Dead Zone* (1979). A schoolteacher wakes up from a coma of almost five years able to see things he'd rather not, and has to decide what to do about a politician. Sad and good.
11.	*Dolores Claiborne* (1992). One Maine island woman talking to the police, the whole book in her voice. I'd swear I've met her at the post office.
12.	*Carrie* (1974). The first, and the one that started all this for me. It's short and raw, and a lot of it is told in newspaper clippings and reports, which as a records clerk I appreciate.

The middle shelf

13.	*Night Shift* (1978). His first collection of stories, and still his best. "Children of the Corn" is in here, and "The Lawnmower Man," which you will think about the next time you mow.
14.	*Skeleton Crew* (1985). More stories. "The Mist," set in a grocery store in western Maine, made me nervous in the IGA for a year.
15.	*The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon* (1999). A nine-year-old lost in the woods with nothing but her Walkman and the Red Sox games. Short and tense, and if you've ever lost sight of a child for even a minute it will get you.
16.	*Firestarter* (1980). A little girl who can start fires with her mind, and a father trying to keep her away from the government men. I rooted for her the whole way.
17.	*Four Past Midnight* (1990). Four long stories. "The Library Policeman" is the one people at work borrow it for.
18.	*Wizard and Glass* (1997). The fourth Dark Tower book, mostly a long story of the gunslinger's youth. The best of that series so far, and I'm not even a Dark Tower person.
19.	*Needful Things* (1991). A new shop opens in Castle Rock that sells everybody exactly what they want most. Was billed as the last Castle Rock story. We'll see.
20.	*The Talisman* (1984). Written with Peter Straub. A boy walks across the country, and across another country next to ours, to save his mother. More fairy tale than fright.
21.	*The Eyes of the Dragon* (1987). A fairy tale with kings and a castle, written for his daughter. My nephew loved it at eleven.
22.	*Insomnia* (1994). An old widower in Derry who can't sleep starts seeing things. I liked spending time with someone his age for a change.
23.	*Christine* (1983). A boy and his 1958 Plymouth Fury, and the car is the jealous type. I never look at an old car the same way.
24.	*The Dark Half* (1989). A writer whose pen name won't stay dead. He wrote it after people found out he was Richard Bachman, and you can tell he had feelings about that.
25.	*Cujo* (1981). A big friendly dog gets bitten by a bat. A mother and son in a broken-down car in the heat. I can't watch it and I can't stop reading it.

The bottom shelf

26.	*The Drawing of the Three* (1987). Second Dark Tower book. Better than the first.
27.	*The Waste Lands* (1991). Third Dark Tower book. It ends right in the middle of things, on a train, and we waited six years to find out what happened. I've only just forgiven him.
28.	*The Gunslinger* (1982). The first Dark Tower book, a man crossing a desert. Short and strange. You either go along with it or you don't. I mostly did.
29.	*Nightmares & Dreamscapes* (1993). A big grab bag of stories. Some great, some not, all of them worth the price.
30.	*Desperation* (1996). A lonely mining town in Nevada and a very bad police officer. Came out the same day as The Regulators, and they go together like a pair of mittens that don't match.
31.	*The Regulators* (1996). The other mitten, as Richard Bachman, with a lot of the same names in an entirely different story. Clever. I had to keep a list.
32.	*Thinner* (1984). Written as Richard Bachman. A lawyer under a curse who keeps losing weight. Mean, quick, and I read it in a night.
33.	*Rose Madder* (1995). A woman gets away from a dangerous husband and starts over in a new city. The real-life part is stronger than the strange part.
34.	*Gerald's Game* (1992). A woman alone in a lake cottage in a terrible fix. Brave book. Not one I lend out.
35.	*Danse Macabre* (1981). Not a novel. A long, chatty book about horror movies and books, and why we like being scared. Like sitting up late with him talking.
36.	*Cycle of the Werewolf* (1983). A short one with pictures, one chapter for each month of the year. Les bought it for me at a yard sale.
37.	*The Tommyknockers* (1987). Something buried in the woods in a little Maine town, and everybody starts changing. I've tried three times. It's on the shelf because it's his.

So that's the shelf. Write and tell me where I went wrong. Les thinks Christine should be in the top twelve. Les is wrong, but I love him.

Back to the front of the shelf

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Last updated Tuesday, September 21, 1999