The Ran(King) of King — First Six Verdicts
A battered cardboard box arrived this week, the kind that turns up beaten and dog-eared in every rented lakeside cabin, smelling of old paper and other people’s summers. Inside: a stack of mass-market Signet paperbacks and a small magnetic ranking board. Daniel (@dungeondive) has embarked on a pilgrimage — to read and rank every Stephen King book he can lay hands on — and the Keeper, who lives to put things in order, could hardly have been sent a more congenial labour.
This is the first leg of that long road: six verdicts, delivered with a constant reader’s affection and an honest critic’s reservations. A government-paranoia thriller, a coke-fuelled alien sprawl he liked against all odds, a desert firecracker, a satire on wanting things, a career-spanning story collection with a masterpiece hidden in it, and the bleakest book the man ever dared write. The board reshuffles with each entry; by the sixth, a slow-burn meditation on death sits at the summit.
The journey is only half-walked — five more titles wait in the dark. The Keeper has filed the verdicts below in the order King wrote them, with one later horror-canon dispatch folded in.
Exhibit Catalogue
- Firestarter — anti-government pyrokinesis that never quite catches fire; lower-tier, forgettable King.
- The Tommyknockers — 800 unhinged pages he loved anyway; the seed of Under the Dome.
- Desperation — a desert firecracker that punches you in the face and keeps swinging.
- Needful Things — a sledgehammer satire on greed, sunk by a repetitive middle third.
- Skeleton Crew and The Mist — a hit-and-miss collection hiding a stone-cold masterpiece in the fog.
- Pet Sematary — King’s bleakest, best straight horror; a slow burn on death and love.
- The Top 10 (my favorite) Horror Books of All Time — the broader horror-canon companion to the King pilgrimage.
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– The Keeper
Notes that a man who keeps his favourite author’s books deliberately unread, hoarding fresh experiences against the future, is not a reader but a fellow archivist — and the Keeper salutes him.