My Stephen King Favorites
I love reading. I devour books so fast that it’s getting harder and harder to find my next “victim”.
In the audiovisual world, with platforms like Netflix, we’ve witnessed a revolution where the amount and variety of content at our fingertips is overwhelming, and simply choosing the next film or series can become a tough job.
With books, although in a different way, something similar is happening. The amount of information, reviews, opinions, and affordable e-books you can buy with one click is huge.
As with a film or a series, choosing wrong can mean spending quite a few hours on a book that never really hooks you. That’s why I love looking for “sagas”: if you get it right, you’re guaranteed a few more books that will probably hook you too. Besides sagas, I also have a few “wildcard” authors, like Terry Pratchett, Mario Puzo, or the star of this article: Stephen King.
You’ll surely find hundreds of rankings of Stephen King’s books online. I’m not trying to build a list of this author’s books here; that already exists. What I want to do, with all due respect to the rest of his work, is name two books that I think deserve a special mention, and that for me are exceptional. I’m talking about “Misery” and “The Stand”.
If you’re new to the Stephen King universe, or if you only read now and then, in my opinion these two would be the masterpieces everyone should read (again, my apologies to fans of his other creations).
Misery is spectacular from start to finish. Stephen King’s books have always been seen as focusing on the darkest side of human psychology. In this particular novel, the relationship between the two main characters, who are also the only two characters present in practically the whole text, has an extraordinary sensitivity and depth. It’s also worth mentioning that it’s one of the few books by this author with no supernatural or science fiction elements. I don’t want to give any spoilers either, so simply: read Misery, you won’t regret it.
The Stand, on the other hand, especially after living through something like the COVID pandemic, plunges you into a situation where you identify with more than one character and that makes you ask yourself the famous “what would I do?”. It sets up a good-versus-evil duality that seems clearly defined but blurs as the novel goes on, and it contains more than one reflection on life, including the final moral, that can’t possibly leave you indifferent.
It’s hard for me to tell you more about these two books without giving away details of the plot. I’d simply like as few people as possible to have the bad luck of missing out on these two gems.
If you already know them and disagree, or if you have your own recommendations, please leave a comment on this post! I’d love to hear new ideas and find out whether anyone else shares this opinion.
