Revisiting Stephen King’s most underrated novels

In a 2006 interview in The Paris Review, Stephen King revealed that when he began writing, his tendency was to “write in images because that was all I knew at the time”. The voracious reader, who “read everything from Nancy Drew to Psycho”, says his favourite was Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man, which he discovered as an eight-year-old.

Born in Portland, Maine, US, on September 21, 1947, King published his first story, I Was a Teenage Grave Robber (1965) in Comics Review. Soon after, a scholarship led him to the University of Maine, where he met his wife, Tabitha. He sold his first professional short story, The Glass Floor, to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. He continued to write short stories and worked on novels while teaching at a high school. His first novel, Carrie (1974), was about a tormented teenage girl gifted with telekinetic powers. King went on to become one of the world’s most iconic names in horror, selling more than 100 million copies worldwide by the early 1990s.

Over his 50-year career, he has focused on writing haunting stories of horror and the supernatural, and has also explored sci-fi, fantasy, time travel, and Westerns. He has published 77 novels, five nonfiction books, and more than 200 short stories. His latest book, You Like It Darker (May 2024), is a collection of 12 stories that delve into the darker part of life.

King’s body of popular work includes Carrie, The Shining, It, The Dark Tower, Salem’s Lot, The Dead Zone, The Stand, and The Green Mile. Here’s a list of some of his most underrated novels:

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

“The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.” Nine-year-old Trisha McFarland learns this first hand after she strays from a path while hiking along a branch of the Appalachian Trail with brother and their recently divorced mother.

The 1999 psychological horror novel is set in motion when Trisha falls back to avoid listening to her family bicker, and is unable to find them again after she stops for a bathroom break. She falls down a steep embankment while taking what seems like a short cut, and ends up hopelessly lost, heading wandering father and deeper into the heart of the forest.

Lost for days, the girl has only her Walkman - and the voice of Tom Gordon, her favourite baseball player, for company and comfort. After all, “just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.” Her trials and tribulations as she attempts to make her way back pit fear and isolation against her will to survive and the indomitable power of the human spirit.

She tunes in to the gritty performances of Boston Red Sox relief pitcher, and when reception begins to die, she imagines that hero, her protector, is with her. Wracked with pneumonia and near death, and face to face with a bear – the only thing standing between her and the road – she does what her heartthrob, Tom Gordon, would do: takes a pitcher’s stance and throws her Walkman, hitting the bear in the face and forcing it to back away. Clearly, “sometimes when you lose your way, you find yourself”.

Pet Sematary

Published in 1983, the chilling Pet Sematary seems deceptively simple. When Louis Creed, a doctor from Chicago, is appointed director of the University of Maine’s campus health service, he moves to a house near the town of Ludlow. His wife Rachel, their two young children, Ellie and Gage, and Ellie’s cat, Winston ‘Church’ Churchill are settling in when they learn about a busy highway that runs past their house and where speeding trucks have claimed the lives of numerous cats and dogs.

Local children have created a “sematary” to lay the animals to rest. Pet Sematary begins with a visit to a graveyard, and reveals that another burial ground exists beyond it. Creed discovers the sinister nature of the ancient Indian burial ground when Church is killed. “Sometimes dead is better,” King writes, and it couldn’t have been truer.

King has said that Pet Sematary genuinely scared him the most of all the novels he has written. The idea was born after the move to Maine when his daughter’s cat, Smucky, died and was buried in the pet cemetery. “I thought to myself, ‘Well, what if you buried stuff in the pet cemetery, and it came back?’,” he said in 2019, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, ahead of the release of novel’s second movie adaptation.

King, who had “the greatest time” writing the book, remembers thinking it was awful, “all that stuff about the death of kids”. His wife, novelist Tabitha King, described it best: “awful, but too good not to be read.”

Cujo

“Not so long ago, a monster came to the small town of Castle Rock, Maine.” King’s 1981 horror novel about a good-natured Saint Bernard and his rabid turn won the British Fantasy Award in 1982 and was made into a film in 1983.

Cujo, a Saint Bernard in his prime, five years old, nearly two hundred pounds in weight, is chasing rabbits in the nearby wilderness when a bat bites him on the nose. And, on the morning of June 16, 1980, he is “pre-rabid”.

The terror that Donna Trenton and her son Tad feel as they are trapped in their Ford Pinto on a hot summer day, unable to escape, is palpable. Cujo goes on a rampage, amassing a high body count, but one can’t help but feel sympathetic towards the canine. After all, he “had always tried to be a good dog”.

In On Writing, King’s memoir that includes advice for aspiring writers, the author states that he barely remembers writing Cujo. Unsurprising considering the book was written at the peak of King’s struggle with alcohol addiction.

Misery

The psychological horror thriller novel, published in 1987, focuses on the tortuous relationship between two characters – romance novelist Paul Sheldon and his proclaimed number one fan Annie Wilkes.

Paul finds Annie “the perfect audience, a woman who loved stories without having the slightest interest in the mechanics of making them. She was the embodiment of that Victorian archetype, Constant Reader”. Her sudden rage and catatonic episodes make him reassess the situation. “I am in trouble here. This woman is not right,” he thinks. Bed bound in remote Colorado, he must indulge in Annie’s whims and fancies, in a complex and shifting psychological journey.

The plot of Misery came to King in a dream on a trans-Atlantic flight to London. He remembers jotting down the idea on an American Airlines cocktail napkin on waking. His notes on Annie defined the character: “She speaks earnestly but never quite makes eye contact. A big woman and solid all through; she is an absence of hiatus.”

In On Writing, King notes that he changed his life on understanding the parallel between Annie Wilkes and his drug and alcohol habits. “What finally decided me was Annie Wilkes, the psycho nurse in Misery. Annie was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided I was tired of being Annie’s pet writer.”

Gerald’s Game

Years before the terms became commonplace, King’s 1992 psychological horror novel visited issues of consent and marital rape. Jessie Burlingame and her husband Gerald, a successful lawyer, make their way from Portland to their secluded lake house in western Maine near Kashwakamak Lake for a spontaneous romantic getaway. The getaway involves a game but things go terribly wrong when Gerald refuses to release his wife and a kick to his groin results in a coronary. Jessie finds herself naked and handcuffed to a bed in an isolated setting.

On realising that she’s trapped and has no avenue of escape, she lets the voice in her head take over: Punkin, herself as a 10-year-old; Ruth Neary, a college roommate who Jessie cut ties with; Nora, Jessie’s former psychologist who she stopped seeing; and Goody Burlingame, her Puritanical version who insists things will be fine. Jessie cut off Ruth and Nora to stop them from discovering her childhood trauma: abuse at the hand of her father.

Most of the book takes place inside Jessie’s head, with a running internal monologue, and her inner voices changing how she feels. Lying in the dark, visited by the creepy Space Cowboy, she recalls Gerald’s words: “People are almost always safe from ghosts and ghouls and the living dead in daylight, and they’re usually safe from them at night if they’re with others, but when a person is alone in the dark, all bets are off.”

As the unlatched back door bangs agitatedly in the breeze, Jessie’s inner voice spooks her with psychological claustrophobia: “Women alone in the dark are like open doors… and if they cry out for help, who knows what dread things may answer?”

Teja Lele is an independent editor and writes on books, travel and lifestyle.