Stephen King’s scariest novels, ranked

polygon.com:

Over a nearly 50-year career, Stephen King has done plenty to earn his title as the American master of horror — but his 60-plus novels to date also spend a lot of time in the arenas of fantasy, suspense, crime, and drama. Not all Stephen King novels are scary, really, which isn’t at all a complaint: Plenty of them are breathlessly and compulsively readable without being the kind of book that pushes you to sleep with the lights on after you put it down for the night.

King has moved more and more toward suspense as he’s gotten further into his career. His 2023 book Holly is a sort of Columbo-esque murder mystery where the reader sees one of the crimes upfront, and spends the rest of the book waiting to see how the title character (Holly Gibney, of Mr. Mercedes and several other King novels and novellas) will solve the crime and what will happen when she does. It’s compelling, tense, and thrilling, and the details of that crime are memorably grotesque — but it isn’t a scary book.

Some of King’s purer horror novels, on the other hand, are designed to keep readers up at night. So don’t mistake the following for a rundown of the best Stephen King novels — that would be a completely different list. This is just a ranking of his scariest books, the ones that feel most like waking nightmares in the best way possible.

An awful lot of Revival isn’t scary. King fans might even wonder what he’s doing with this book, which seems oddly casual and methodical for most of its run — a series of check-ins between a musician and a significantly older preacher, running from the musician’s childhood to the preacher’s deathbed. But then there’s the ending, which finally pays off what’s mostly seemed like a strange literary exercise throughout.