The Most Frightening Book Stephen King Has Ever Written

This is reposted from William Malmborg's websit (williammalmborg.com) with permission.

William Malmborg is the author of Text Message, Dark Harvest, Nikkis Secret and several other horror novels.

So, I was standing at my bookshelf the other day looking at some early printings of Stephen King paperbacks when I noticed the back cover pictured to the left. As you can see, rather than having a book description or author photo, the designers of this edition decided upon a statement from Publishers Weekly, one that boldly shouted, “The most frightening book Stephen King has ever written.” Naturally, this got me wondering which books fans found frightening, and whether or not there is any agreement from everyone upon a single title that stands above the rest. Personally, I’ve never really been frightened by anything Stephen King has written. This isn’t due to any fault with his writing; I just came upon his fiction at a point in my life when reading no longer had the ability to frighten me. Of course, this wasn’t always the case. 

As a pre and young teen, stories had the ability to produce sleepless nights, my mom and grandmother often putting this to the test with stories they found scary and wanted to share -- or wrote themselves. Even at fifteen, I was once startled by the opening of a Dean Koontz novel titled Tick Tock, but that was the last time this has really happened, and by the time I started reading Stephen King at the age of seventeen, my mind was completely desensitized to fear. 

 Ironically, I can remember a time as a young kid when just the idea or plot behind a Stephen King novel would terrify me. The Shining was a perfect example of this. I don’t remember how old I was, but at some point during my grade school years my Mom told me about the The Shining and how, as a young girl, while reading it during a train ride to Kansas, suddenly began to smell oranges. Anyone who has read The Shining will understand the significance of this and why the moment would startle a young teen reader. As it turns out, the lady next to my Mom was peeling an orange. Another story element that chilled me to the core as a kid was the idea of a clown in the sewer, which a friend told me about after he saw the movie IT on TV. That was spooky, and, for a while, after hearing about that, I made sure to keep a good distance between curbside sewers and my walking paths. I also found the idea of a secret graveyard where pets came back to life mean and angry terrifying, and hoped to god things like that didn’t really exist because I would have hated to see my dog Leo return from the grave at some point only to be a darker version of his former self. The hardcover image of Desperation startled me as well. I saw that one sitting on the bookshelf at a friend house right after its release -- his parents were Stephen King fans -- and thought to myself that I would never be brave enough to start reading such a book. How funny is that?

Now, if I had to pick a book that I considered the most frightening even though it didn’t really scare me, that book would have to be Misery simply because finding oneself in such a situation would be horrible. It’s also plausible. This isn’t to say I discount the possibility of supernatural story-lines -- I may be a skeptic, but only in the sense that I don’t blindly believe everything I hear, and always let the facts and evidence of each situation determine what is really occurring -- but with Misery, this is the type of story that can easily move from being a tale of fiction to one of non-fiction without blinking an eye. Crazy people are out there.  We read about them every day in the paper (well, online news sources), and hear about them on the news (when they aren’t focusing on some stupid political or sport sex scandal. Another tale that has frightening elements would have to be The Stand. The idea of a virus leaving our current civilization in ruins has almost become a touchstone experience thanks to Hollywood, but that doesn’t mean it isn't a plausible scenario, one that has occurred time and time again throughout history. Such events are just a fact of life, though, thankfully, one that isn’t experienced by every generation.

With those two titles established as the Stephen King tales that I find the most frightening what are some of yours? Are their any titles that completely stand above the rest in your mind? Feel free to comment here about it, or, if you want, send me a guest post that I can share with readers (email me at wlmalmborg@gmail.com with the subject matter being GUEST POST STEPHEN KING). Also, anyone want to venture a guess as to what book the picture above was taken from?