Stephen King

Stephen King’s debut novel. Carrie White is a fat, pimple-faced, black-haired girl who’s endured nothing but torment from her high-school peers and oppression from her deranged mother. But Carrie harbors a hidden talent. She can move things with her mind.

Cujo follows the Trenton family. They’re recent transplants from New York City to the small town of Castle Rock, Maine. Father Vic is an ad-man who’s forced to travel to New York for a couple of weeks leaving mother Donna and son Tad at home. Donna’s been having car trouble and Vic urges her to take her car to Joe Camber, a mechanic who lives on the outskirts of town. Donna and Tad make the journey not knowing the Camber family have all departed. Donna and Tad arrive only to have the car die, stranding them on the Camber’s driveway where they’re terrorized by the Camber’s 200lb St. Bernard, Cujo, who’s gone rabid.

Stephen King’s sequel to The Shining finds Dan Torrance a middle-aged recovering alcoholic living in New Hampshire and working as a hospice orderly. He uses his unique gifts to comfort residents as they transition to the other side.

The Long Walk is set in a dystopian present. The United States is under the control of a totalitarian government. Once a year, the country’s attention turns to ‘The Long Walk,’ a walking contest composed of one hundred teenaged boys. The competition starts in Main and continues down the eastern seaboard until a single walker remains. No stops, no breaks, and if you drop below a pace of four miles per hour for more than thirty seconds you get a warning. Three warnings and you’re shot dead.

Though most of tales are EC Comics style setups for twist endings, they’re well executed, and the others such as the opening “Jerusalem’s Lot”, which borrows from Bram Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm, and the closing, “The Woman in the Room”, about a man’s struggle to deal with his cancer-ridden mother’s slow death, are outstanding, the latter especially so given that we now know that it’s essentially an autobiographical story.

When writing my review of The Cellar, I remembered something King had written in On Writing about reader-friendliness. Looking for the exact quote hooked me and I decided a reread might prove inspirational.

Rage tells the story of Charlie Decker, a senior at a small Maine high school. Charlie is looking out the window of his algebra class on a sweltering summer day when he’s called in to see the principal. It seems that two months prior Charlie hospitalized one of his teachers by striking him with a pipe wrench. The man was on the operating table for four hours.

Stephen King’s sophomore novel transplants the Dracula story to a remote New England town named Jerusalem’s Lot—`Salem’s Lot to the locals.

Alcoholic writer Jack Torrance uproots his wife Wendy and five-year-old son Danny from New England to Colorado, where they’ll serve as winter caretakers for the Overlook Hotel. The hotel, a premier destination with a shady past, houses a malevolent presence bent on claiming Danny for its own ends.

After a weaponized super flu wipes out 99.4% of the world’s population in a matter of weeks, the survivors find themselves drawn to one of two enigmatic figures. Abagail Freemantle, an elderly, spiritual, woman representing good, or Randall Flagg, a dark, sinister man representing a ageless evil. Those drawn to Freemantle eventually settle in Boulder, Colorado where they set about rebuilding society, but it soon becomes clear that a chosen few of their group will have to travel west to Las Vegas, and make a stand against the dark man.