10 Amazing Books Stephen King Calls His Favorite of All Time
The master of horror calls these 10 novels his all-time favorites, but guess how many of these novels deal with fear?
10. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
The first novel in Philip Roth’s American Trilogy, American Pastoral is a recollection of the life of one Seymour “Swede” Levov, a picture-perfect citizen. Levov’s peaceful upper-middle-class life in the post-war prosperity years was disrupted by the turmoil of the 1960s, with his daughter’s going terrorist delivering the biggest blow to him.
9. 1984 by George Orwell
The one dystopia to rule them all, 1984 was George Orwell’s final novel. It’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of personality cults, police states, and total surveillance; a story about a little man living in a world where truth and facts are manipulated to the point where these words don’t carry any meaning anymore.
8. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, Cormac McCarthy’s fifth novel, is stuck between being an anti-Western and the Great American Novel. Following “the kid,” a teenager who was part of the notorious Glanton gang, Blood Meridian explores the ruthless nature of humans who take pleasure in killing others.
7. The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams
The Hair of Harold Roux, Thomas Williams’ award-winning novel, tells two stories at once: one, of a depressed literature professor writing a novel of the same name, and another, inside his book, of a young man trying to find himself at the times of the Great Depression. It explores the craft of storytelling and its relation to real life.
6. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man made Ralph Ellison the first-ever African-American writer to win the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. This novel is a life story of an African-American man in the 20th-century United States: sitting in his underground room in a small Southern town, he shares what it’s like to live as an “invisible man.”
5. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is widely regarded as one of the best allegorical novels concerning society. It follows a group of British kids in wartime whose evacuation plane crashed, leaving them stranded on an island, and their disastrous attempts at governing themselves that devolve into violence, chaos, and a regime.
4. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Perhaps, the least introduction in this list is needed for J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The father of the high fantasy genre, Tolkien inspired millions of people with this epic trilogy following the ultimate battle between the good and the evil, for which he created several languages and thousands of years of fictional history.
3. The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson
Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Orphan Master’s Son explores life in North Korea through the two stories it tells. In the first story, we follow the titular orphan master’s son on his journey of “simply following orders,” and the second story is an investigation into the life of a captured North Korean hero and its leader’s rival.
2. Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter
The one big novel by the novella master Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools is an allegory tracing the rise of Nazism of Europe. It explores human nature and prejudice through a cast of disparate characters sailing from Mexico to Europe, each of them hoping to find happiness in the Old World, leaving their previous troubles behind.
1. Watership Down by Richard Adams
Richard Adams’ debut novel, Watership Down follows a small group of rabbits who, after the destruction of their warren, are searching for a new place to call home. They have their own culture, language, and traditions, and they have a long journey ahead before they can establish their new warren in a place called Watership Down.