It’s interesting to find out what scares one person, and compare their fears to those of another person, perhaps naturally, but then when you're looking at someone who is usually the person who causes fear, then finding out what scares them (if anything) is even more intriguing. Enter Stephen King (no, wait, not like that!), who probably doesn’t need much of an introduction, not just at this stage, but really any stage in the last several decades. His earliest published novels came out in the 1970s, and so many of his initial classics belonged wholly or in part to the horror genre.
You'd be missing out on great books like 11/22/63, much of The Dark Tower, and most of Different Seasons if you only read King’s works of horror, but sure, horror is the genre he’s most associated with for honestly fair reasons. He’s also read and absorbed a lot of horror made by other people, as the non-fiction book Danse Macabre (1981) demonstrates, but more recently, he gave his top 5 scariest books to USA Today in an interview. It’s subjective, and it’s also not the same as Stephen King saying they're the five “best” scary books ever written, but it’s worth looking at what makes the arguable master of horror himself feel fear (no one is safe from being affected by a scary story, it seems).
In the past, Stephen King has also been asked about which stories of his he views most favorably, and he made some unexpected choices there, and also, he highlighted something recent at the time he was asked: 2021’s Billy Summers. Maybe he likes doing that, and it is interesting to not just go straight back to the classics and/or the heavy-hitters, so he could've been trying to do something like that again when one of his five picks was the (at the time of writing) very recent Trad Wife. It’s a 2026 novel about very contemporary things, as you might guess from the title, because the idea of a “tradwife” is a more online and modern-day thing, but it’s all about wanting women to be traditional wives, as things might've been in older days that some people choose to romanticize.
Trad Wife has divided people to some extent, if you go over the other reviews out there, but Stephen King is clearly a champion of the book.
That’s probably the gentlest and least provocative way to define it without rattling anyone. So, the book’s about a journalist who wants to document someone who appears to be a “tradwife,” and she does that while on the property she lives on with her family, but then things slowly get strange and more horrific, though potentially not in the ways you're expecting. Trad Wife has divided people to some extent, if you go over the other reviews out there (admittedly there aren’t a ton, seeing as it’s still a fairly new release), but Stephen King is clearly a champion of the book, being confident enough to label it the best horror novel of 2026.
More of an established heavy-hitter now, Stephen King is a big fan of The Silence of the Lambs, which was a sequel to Red Dragon. Now, Red Dragon got a movie adaptation in the form of Manhunter, but the film version of The Silence of the Lambs wasn’t really a sequel to that film, and then there was a prequel to The Silence of the Lambs (1991) that was called Red Dragon about a decade later, but that one wasn’t great. Oh, and you get some Red Dragon in the TV show, Hannibal, though chronologically, that one didn’t have enough seasons to get to The Silence of the Lambs material.
Anyway, point is, you can not read all that much, and you still probably know the deal with this series, to some extent, and you likely have some familiarity with Hannibal Lecter and what a great character he is. The Silence of the Lambs was obviously a great movie, but the source material is also remarkable, and it’s one of those great cases where a high-quality book seamlessly became a high-quality movie (something that cannot be said about every Stephen King novel that’s made its way to the big screen, but at least there'll always be Stand by Me, Misery, and The Shawshank Redemption, among others).
It’s fair that some of Stephen King’s supernatural horror books get a lot of attention, but just as skilled is what he often manages to do when he tackles psychological horror (and sure, when he has the two collide, like in The Shining, that can also be phenomenal). He singles out The Other as a psychological horror book that frightened him to a particularly great extent, and with it being published a few years before King’s first published novel, you can probably assume it had some kind of influence on his own work, or at least some of his subsequent books.
At the center of The Other is a pair of twins, with one of them being very troubled and the other being seemingly anything but, and the overall novel does increasingly unsettling things with that premise. It’s a slow-burn without ever running the risk of feeling too slow, and there is also something worth celebrating about a book that can prove frightening while sounding, on paper, a bit ordinary or even too straightforward. The Other just does a lot of stuff right, and going into the things it does right would run the risk of ruining things. Just trust King and the other people who are fans of this one (it was very popular back when released, but is perhaps a little more obscure nowadays than the other older books King’s highlighted as being the most frightening to him).
Oh, and now this one isn't obscure by any metric. The Exorcist was a big deal as a book, for a little while, and then it was a potentially even bigger deal as a movie, with that movie getting made not long after the book came out. A similar thing happened with The Godfather novel being the book equivalent of a blockbuster, and then the movie was made rather fast, and ultimately became even more culturally significant. With The Exorcist, though, the source material here is very much worth reading even if you’ve seen the movie, since there are ideas it explores – and sights it describes – that prove more unsettling when they're placed in your head, versus seeing/experiencing those things on a screen.
And that’s saying a lot, because the movie is still absolutely surprising and effectively horrifying with what it shows and explores. Guess it’s the case that you’ve got a winning work of horror either way, with The Exorcist (1971) being potentially the definitive demonic possession novel, and The Exorcist (1973) almost definitely being the definitive demonic possession movie. Also, there is a blending of more supernatural (or otherworldly) horror with psychologically troubling stuff in The Exorcist and, once more, the interplay just serves to make both those strands of horror hit even harder.
The Exorcist is singled out in polls on Goodreads as being one of the scariest novels of all time, among those voting, and Lord of the Flies is one you'll often see in such polls, too. And hey, it’s relevant here, because it was one of King’s five picks when he was asked about books that scared him. It’s interesting, because Lord of the Flies isn't outwardly a horror book, probably more definable as a survival story, or maybe like a small-scale dystopian novel without real sci-fi elements, but it’s horrifying without necessarily being full-on horror. And of course it is, because it’s about young boys getting stranded on an island and finding themselves clashing over various things, all in increasingly violent ways.
People tend to read Lord of the Flies when they're younger as well, which has an effect on it being more frightening, like if it marks the first time you're forced to confront some really troubling ideas. Stephen King himself has written some pretty great books that are comparable to Lord of the Flies, like The Mist (technically a novella, with it involving people trapped in a supermarket), and Under the Dome (in which a dome does indeed come down over a very small town, trapping people under it). Also, King’s love for Lord of the Flies is apparent in his fiction beyond looking at the stories of his that seem a little similar premise-wise, since Lord of the Flies itself is an important part of the novella “Low Men in Yellow Coats,” mostly in the way it has a strong impact on that story’s young protagonist.
