Stephen King: Books

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The Bachman Books

Viking (1985)
Now the secret is out - and so are these four spellbinding tales of future shock and suspense, all in one volume.


Christine

Viking (1983)
Christine is no lady, but 17-year-old Arnie Cunningham loves her enough to do _anything_ to possess her. Arnie's best friend Dennis distrusts her at first sight. Arnie's teen-queen girlfriend Leigh fears her the moment she senses her power. Arnie's parents, teachers and enemies soon learn what happens when you cross her. Christine is no lady. She is Stephen King's ultimate, blackly evil vehicle of horror...

Main Characters:

Leigh Cabot
Arnie's girlfriend
Christine
a red 1958 Plymouth Fury, with a taste for death
Arnie Cunningham
the nerd who was seduced and destroyed by Christine
Will Darnell
owned Darnell's Used Auto Parts where Arnie stored and worked on Christine
Dennis Guilder
Arnie's friend
Roland D. LeBay
the man who sold Christine to Arnie


Creepshow

New American Library (1982)

Consists of 5 stories comprising a total of 424 individual comic strip panels.


Cujo

Viking (1981)
A big, friendly dog chases a rabbit into a hidden under- ground cave - and stirs a sleeping evil crueler than death itself. A terrified four-year-old boy sees his bedroom closet door swing open untouched by human eands, and screams at the unholy red eyes gleaming in the darkness. The little Maine town of Castle Rock is about to be invaded by the most hideous menace ever to savage the flesh and devour the mind...

Major Characters:

Joe Chamber
the mechanic who owned Cujo. He owned the garage on the outskirts of Castle Rock where Donna and Tad were trapped.
Cujo
a large St. Bernard who contracted rabies from a bat and attacked the car where Donna and Tad were trapped.
Donna Trenton
Was trapped in a broken down Pinto along with her son by Cujo.
Tad Trenton
Donna's son, who thought that Cujo was the monster from his closet out to get him.
Vic Trenton
Donna's husband.
Notes of Interest:
  1. Frank Dodd, the Castle Rock Strangler from The Dead Zone, was mentioned in the book, along with John Smith.


Cycle of the Werewolf

New American Library (1985)
TERROR BEGAN IN JANUARY - BY THE LIGHT OF THE FULL MOON... The first scream came from the snowbound railwayman who felt the fangs ripping at his throat. The next month there was a scream of ecstatic agony from the woman attacked in her snug bedroom. Now scenes of unbelieving horror come each time the full moon shines on the isolated Maine town of Tarker Mills. No one knows who will be attacked next. But one thing is for sure. When the moon grows fat, a paralyzing fear sweeps through Tarker Mills. For snarls that sound like human words can be heard whining through the wind. And all around are the footprints of a monster whose hunger cannot be sated...


Danse Macabre

Berkeley (1981)
The bestselling horror author of all time, Stephen King, knows better than anyone else in the world what scares you, and why. Now, in his most unusual masterpiece, he takes you on his personal tour of the dark ballroom of horror. Come. Take hs arm. Let the dance begin...


The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three

Donald M. Grant (1987)
The Drawing of the Three continues the epic saga of The Dark Tower , hurling The Gunslinger into the twentieth century. Once again Stephen King masterfully interweaves dark, evocative fantasy and icy realism, as his hero, Roland, The Last Gunslinger, pursues his quest for The Dark Tower. Roaming another world that is a nightmarishly distorted mirror image of our own, he is drawn through a mysterious door that brings him into 1980's America. Here he links forces with the defiant young Eddie Dean and with beautiful, brilliant, and brave Odetta Holmes, in a savage struggle against underworld evil and otherworldly enemies. With a storytelling skill that is sheer magic, and with breathtaking boldness of imagination, Stephen King has risen to the peak of his power to create a compelling epic that is at once enigmatic and familiar... and always compulsively readable.


The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands

Donald M. Grant (1992)
With The Waste Lands , the third masterful novel in Stephen King's epic saga The Dark Tower , we again enter the realm of the mightiest imagination of our time. King's hero, Roland, the Last Gunslinger, moves ever closer to the Dark Tower of his dreams and nightmares - as he crosses a desert of damnation in a macabre world that is a twisted mirror image of our own. With him are those that he has drawn to this world, street-smart Eddie Dean and courageous wheelchair-bound Susannah. Ahead of him are mind-rending revelations about who he is and what is driving him. Against him is arrayed a swelling legion of fiendish foes both more and less than human. And as the pace of action and adventure, discovery and danger pulse-pounding quickens, the reader is inescapably drawn into a breathtaking drama that is both hauntingly dreamlike... and eerily familiar. The Waste Lands is a triumph of storytelling sorcery - and further testament to Stephen King's novelistic mastery.


Dolan's Cadillac

Lord John Press

Revenge is a dish best eaten cold.
- Spanish proverb

Notes of Interest:

  1. Collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes


The Eyes of the Dragon

Viking (1987)
Once Upon a Time - There Was Terror and dragons and princes... evil wizards and dark dungeons... an enchanted castle and a terrible secret. With this enthralling masterpiece of magical evil and daring adventure, Stephen King takes you in his icy grip and leads you into the most shivery and irresistible kingdom of wickedness...
THE EYES OF THE DRAGON


Four Past Midnight

Viking (1990)
You are strapped in an airline seat on a flight beyond hell. You are forced into a hunt for the most horrifying secret a small town ever hid. You are trapped in the demonic depths of a writer's worst nightmare. You are focusing in on a beast bent on shredding your sanity. You are in the hands of Stephen King at his mind-blowing best with an extraordinary quartet of full-length novellas guaranteed to set your heart-stopwatch at - Four Past Midnight.


Insomnia

Viking (1994)
Ralph Roberts has a problem: he isn't sleeping so well these days. In fact, he's hardly sleeping at all. Each morning, the news conveyed by the bedside clock is a little worse: 3:15... 3.02... 2:45... 2:15. The books call it "premature waking"; Ralph, who is still learning to be a widower, calls it a season in hell. He's begun to notice a strangeness in his familiar surroundings, to experience visual phenomena that he can't quite believe are hallucinations. Soon, Ralph thinks, he won't be sleeping at all, and what then?

A problem, yes - though perhaps not so uncommon, you might say. But Ralph has lived his entire life in Derry, Maine, and Derry isn't like other places, as millions of Stephen King readers will gladly testify. They remember It, also set in Derry, and know there's a mean streak running through this small New England city; underneath its ordinary surface awesome and terrifying forces at work. The dying, natural and otherwise, has been going on in Derry for a long, long time. Now Ralph is a part of it. So are his friends. And so are the strangers they encounter.

You, Gentle Reader, may never sleep again. Welcome to Insomnia.

September 10, 1990 - November 10, 1993


It

Viking (1986)
They were seven teenagers when they first stumbled upon the horror. Now they were grown-up men and women who had gone out into the big world to gain success and happiness. But none of them could withstand the force that drew them back to Derry to face the nightmare without an end and the evil without A NAME...


The Long Walk

New American Library (1979)
Only death can keep you from the finish line - in the ultimate competition of the all-too-near future...


My Pretty Pony

Knopf (1989)
My Pretty Pony is a gentle story of a grandfather and his grandson. The old man, George Banning, is trying to explain the concept of time (and its "relativity") to the young boy, Clivey Banning. Time is a "pretty pony," and Grandpa tried to make the boy understand that "Time ain't got nothing' to do with how fast you can count." He tries to make the boy see that there are two kinds of time: Both were real, but only one was really real. *

Notes of Interest:

  1. Collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes


Nightmares in the Sky

Viking (1988)


Pet Sematary

Doubleday (1983)
The Creeds. An ideal family. Physician father, beautiful wife, charming little daughter, adorable infant son. Close, loving, wonderfully alive. When they found the old house and enchanting grounds in rural Maine, it seemed too good to be true. It was. For the truth was bloodchilling - something more horrifying than death itself, and hideously more powerful...

Main Characters:

Stanley (Stanny) Bouchard
the man who told about the secret Micmac burial ground.
Church
the Creed's 5 year-old cat. Louis buries him in the secret burial ground and he comes back.
Gage Creed
Louis's son, who is killed by a truck, Louis eventually buries him in the secret burial ground
Louis Creed
the man who can't resist the secret behind the Pet Sematary.
Rachel Creed
Louis's wife and another visitor to the secret burial ground
Notes of Interest:
  1. King wrote Pet Sematary while living in a rental home in Orrington, Maine which had a pet cemetary behind the house.
  2. Cujo was mentioned in the book as the St. Bernard who went rabid downstate


The Plant

Philtrum (1982, 1983, 1985)
John Kenton, a beleagured editor at failing Zenith House publishers, receives a query letter from a "writer" named Carlos Detweiller. Carlos has written a book called True Tales of Demon Infestations , and wishes to have it published by Zenith House (since they did such a good job with Bloody Houses , he tells them). Kenton decides on a whim to look at a proposal but instead Carlos sends him the entire manuscript, which includes photos of what appears to be an actual human sacrifice. Kenton calls the police, Carlos is brought in for questioning, and when the photos turn out to be fakes, he is released, but vowing revenge on Kenton. Kenton begins to receive letters from a "Roberta Solrac" ("Carlos" spelled backwards), and one day a mysterious plant appears in the mail for Kenton. *


Rage

New American Library (1977)
A high-school show-and-tell session explodes into a nightmare of evil...


Roadwork

New American Library (1981)
What happens when one good-and-angry man fights back is murder - and then some...


The Running Man

New American Library (1982)
In the year 2025, the best men don't run for president, they run for their lives...


'Salem's Lot

Doubleday (1975)
The town knew darkness... but no one dared talk about the high, sweet, evil laughter of a child... and the sucking sounds...

Main Characters:

Kurt Barlow
Antiques expert. Vampire.
Danny Glick
one of the kids turned into a vampire
Hubie Marsten
owner of the Marsten House that Kurt Barlow eventually bought
Ben Mears
the writer who discovered the truth about Jerusalem's Lot
Susan Norton
Love interest of Ben Mears
Mark Petrie
young boy who helps Ben Mears destroy the Vampires
Notes of Interest:
  1. One of the characters in the book was Judy Overlook


The Talisman

Viking (1984)
You are about to take a journey... a terrifying trip across a nightmare America filled with monsters beyond anything ever imagined before... a journey into the dark heart of horror...


Thinner

New American Library (1984)
Billy Halleck, good husband, loving father, is both beneficiary and victim of the American Good Life: he has an expensive home, a nice family, and a rewarding career as a lawyer... but he is also fifty pounds overweight and, as his doctor keeps reminding him, edging into heart attack country. Then, in a moment of carelessness, Billy sideswipes an old gypsy woman as she is crossing the street - and her ancient father passes a bizarre and terrible judgment on him. "Thinner," the old gypsy man whispers, and caresses his cheek, like a lover. Just one word... but six weeks later and ninety-three pounds lighter, Billy Halleck is more than worried. He's terrified. And desperate enough for one last gamble... that will lead him to a nightmare showdown with the forces of evil melting his flesh away. And away. And away...


The Tommyknockers

Putnam (1987)
Something was happening in Bobbi Anderson's idyllic small town of Haven, Maine. Something that gave every man, woman, and child in town powers far beyond ordinary mortals. Something that turned the town into a death trap for al outsiders. Something that came from a metal object, buried for millennia, that Bobbi accidentally stumbled across. It wasn't that Bobbi and the other good people of Haven had sold their souls to reap the rewards of the most deadly evil this side of hell. It was more like a diabolical takeover... an invasion of body and soul - and mind...

[barbed wire]

Descriptions mostly come from back covers of the paperback editions or dust jackets of the hardback editions except
* - from The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia by Stephen Spignesi
Special thanks to Barb Crooks for detailed information from her FAQ.

[Stephen 
	King page]

Ed Nomura

Last updated: Apr 29, 1996