8 Scariest Stephen King Novellas

Even if Stephen King doesn’t typically write works of “literature” in the traditional (or maybe even pretentious) sense, he has written some of the best novels of the past 50 years. He’s especially worth diving into if you like reading books in the horror genre, with The Shining, IT, and The Stand (though that one’s a bit more than just horror) being especially worthy of their status as classics.

His novellas and short stories are compelling, too. You can work through his dozens of novels, get through them all and consider yourself a completionist, but then there are all those shorter works, and you’re missing out if you don’t also tackle them, too. His short stories (so, those that can be read in about an hour or less, on average) won’t be mentioned here, since this ranking’s going to focus on his novellas. These occupy the space between short story and novel, being good if you want something that’ll take an hour or two (or maybe three) to get through, but don’t have as much time for something longer. Specifically, these are Stephen King’s scariest novellas to date, so not necessarily his very best… though quite a few of these could probably fit into that category, too.

8

“Riding the Bullet” (2000)

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The thing you’ll usually hear about “Riding the Bullet,” before anyone ever gets to what it’s about, is the fact that it was the first mass-market eBook, which is a very big deal (to be fair), in hindsight. But as for the novella itself, it’s good, and effectively scary/compelling. It’s about a man who has to hitchhike to visit his mother after she has a stroke, and because he exists within a Stephen King story, things don’t exactly go well.

It’s King taking a fairly mundane situation (albeit one that has been milked for horror before; see The Hitcher) and making it creepy and kind of weird in his own distinct way. “Riding the Bullet” doesn’t ever get too complicated or even especially unpredictable, but it delivers a good amount of creepiness and feels very well-paced. And, yes, it being a historical milestone foreshadowing the whole rise of eBooks in the 21st century is cool, too.

7

“The Langoliers” (1990)

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Four Past Midnight kicks off with “The Langoliers,” which is the most well-known of the bunch, and is a novella that probably could’ve been a novel. Hell, it’s longer than Carrie, and that’s considered a novel. Anyway, it’s about people on board a strange flight, and what happens when a bunch of people on the flight realize that other passengers have vanished without a trace.

“The Langoliers” goes into sci-fi territory, and gets pretty weird when the plane eventually lands, but the sci-fi elements here do prove creepy, and the two halves of the story – though quite distinct – are scary in their own ways. The part of the story that’s got the claustrophobic setting, on board the plane, is probably stronger, but the momentum is still maintained when the characters aren’t hurtling through the air, feeling equal parts confounded and confined.

6

“Rattlesnakes” (2024)

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“Rattlesnakes” is a fairly ambitious novella, working as a sequel to Cujo, which was written (and set) about 40 years later. One of the characters from that novel is central here, with the events of that story lingering and proving haunting in more ways than one, with it offering a lot more narratively than just “Cujo, but with rattlesnakes this time, instead of a rabid dog.” Like, King could probably make that work, somehow, but it’d still be at least a little silly.

It’s interesting that he takes Cujo, which was startling as a horror/thriller book without supernatural elements, and then makes “Rattlesnakes” very much a work of supernatural horror, but it mostly works. “Rattlesnakes” is a highlight of You Like It Darker (a collection where the novellas are quite a bit stronger – and overall scarier – than the short stories), and it stands as a more than worthy follow-up to Cujo, too, kind of doing for that story what Doctor Sleep did for The Shining.

5

“1922” (2010)

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“1922” is the first, and probably best, novella in the collection Full Dark, No Stars. Like “The Langoliers,” it was strong and lengthy enough to potentially be its own thing, but hey, it being one of four stories is good value and all. As for the premise, it’s about a man who plots to murder his wife, during the year you’d expect, and he also gets his teenage son to help with the crime, which really complicates things.

There is a psychological unraveling following the deed, as you might expect, and a supernatural element enters into things, too, with “1922” getting a good deal of mileage out of the interplay between what might be in the character’s head, and what might be actually/supernaturally happening. See also The Shining, and why that’s one of King’s scariest novels. And no, “1922” isn’t quite as good as The Shining, but it is compelling as a work of simultaneous psychological and supernatural horror. King is kind of the king when it comes to this kind of thing.

4

“The Answer Man” (2024)

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“The Answer Man” is honestly pretty underrated, as far as Stephen King novellas go. It’s from the same collection as “Rattlesnakes,” You Like It Darker, and makes for a very strong closing story within said collection. It’s about a man encountering the titular Answer Man a few different times over the span of many years, with the Answer Man being someone who, for a price, can accurately answer any question he’s asked, including those about the future.

Sure, it’s not direct horror here, necessarily, but “The Answer Man” does prove creepy and unsettling in a quiet sort of way, and it gets fairly heavy-going at times, too, even with the somewhat outlandish premise. The sadness works well with the general eeriness, and as far as novellas or short stories written by King in the last decade or so are concerned, “The Answer Man” really is one of the very best.

3

“The Mist” (1980)

Scary enough to genuinely rival many of his full-on horror novels, “The Mist” is also helped out by the fact that it’s not too far off being novel-length… at least not far off from being a short novel. It’s got a simple premise that King probably could’ve drawn out for a little longer, and kept interesting, though a “complaint” being “I wouldn’t have minded this being longer” really isn’t too much of a complaint.

“The Mist” is about a group of people who take shelter inside a supermarket when a mist rolls over a small town, bringing with it an assortment of bizarre – and seemingly alien – creatures. There are factions made among the survivors, even in the short time that they’re trapped, and so you get conflict inside as well as near-certain death for anyone who wants to venture outside. “The Mist” proves scary on two fronts, as a result, and is also worth shouting out as a novella that got a pretty great movie adaptation, in 2007, which captures the original story (and then some) very well.

2

“Apt Pupil” (1982)

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With Different Seasons, Stephen King ventured outside the horror genre quite confidently, since “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” and “The Body” are up there among his very best stories, and neither can really be called horror. The collection does conclude with “The Breathing Method,” which is fairly eerie (and underrated), but the scariest story of the bunch is one that’s probably more definable as a thriller: “Apt Pupil.”

It’s about a teenage boy who discovers one of his neighbors is a German war criminal in hiding, with “Apt Pupil” exploring their very uncomfortable dynamic, and the way they both drive each other to further insanity and evil (since neither seems like a particularly good person from the start, to put it very mildly). It’s frightening as a thriller, with some parts of it ultimately being just as striking as the more horrific parts of any good Stephen King work of horror; like, horror in the conventional sense. “Apt Pupil,” if it is horror, showcases a different sort of horror from the kind King had typically written before 1982, and if it’s a thriller, then it’s easily one of the author’s most unsettling efforts within said genre.

Apt Pupil

Release Date

October 23, 1998

Runtime

111 Minutes

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1

“The Library Policeman” (1990)

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There aren’t too many novellas or novels by Stephen King that haven’t had a movie or TV adaptation yet, with “The Library Policeman” being one of them. And this is a particularly rare one in the sense that it’ll probably never get an adaptation, or if it did, it wouldn’t really be able to go to the same places the novella does. The titular library policeman is, inevitably, a lot more than just someone who goes after people who don’t return library books on time.

There’s a flashback here that is important to the overall narrative, as part of the main character’s traumatic past, but it really is a lot, and it proves uncompromising even compared to other dark and upsetting Stephen King stories. “The Library Policeman” easily ranks high among King’s most disturbing works for that alone, and yes, this is dancing around – and avoiding discussion of – what specifically happens, but it’s for your own good. Probably. The internet is there, and your friend (or enemy) if you do want to know more, for whatever reason.