3 Stephen King Story Collections As Good as His Best Novels

If you want to start reading Stephen King, you’re probably going to feel overwhelmed with choices, just because he’s written so much. It’s fair to start with one of his novels, though. Technically, his earliest published works were short stories that appeared in magazines as early as the 1960s, and then some more in the early 1970s, but starting with Carrie, his first novel (from 1974), feels a bit more sensible. It’s not his very best novel, but it is generally very good, and it’s also not long. “Not long” is not something you can say about many Stephen King books… thankfully, though, some of those lengthy novels are great. If you’re not scared by many pages and a good many disturbing scenes, then both The Stand and IT are also very compelling, and the kinds of works that’ll help you see the light, regarding King as an author (more so than the adaptations of those novels, with all of them, so far, being flawed in one way or another). There’s also The Shining, which is a good bit longer than Carrie, but not quite as comparable to a brick in appearance as The Stand or IT, so that’s a good middle-ground, and another strong entry point.

Then, if any of those do the trick for you, you’ll probably start wanting to churn through all the other novels, and honestly, if you like his writing style, almost everything he published in the 1970s and ‘80s will prove worth digging into. Also, don’t forget about his short fiction. He’s prolific as a novelist, yes, but if you don’t read some of his best short stories and novellas, you’re ultimately missing out. There are a dozen official collections that compile most of his published short stories, sometimes refined or edited from how they initially appeared in – more often than not – magazines, and some collections that include his novellas, too. You won’t get literally all his short fiction from reading these 12 collections, but you’ll get most of it. The quality varies a bit, so what the following (fairly short) ranking intends to do is highlight the particularly consistent and striking story collections of King’s. One of these contains only short stories, one is mostly short stories with some novellas, and then the final one is just novellas. They’re all pretty great, and often hit the same highs that many of his very best novels do.

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‘Night Shift’ (1978)

Image via Doubleday

With Night Shift, you get almost nothing but horror. And you literally don’t get anything but short stories, since there are 20 stories here, and only a bit over 300 pages (at least in the first edition) with which to contain all of them. Maybe “Jerusalem’s Lot,” which is the first story, gets close to novella-length, but is classified as a short story (and there are some ties to ‘Salem’s Lot, which was his second novel, after Carrie). “Jerusalem’s Lot” is a good start, but things really pick up with some of the pretty much bite-sized stories contained in Night Shift. Highlights will differ from person to person, and maybe it’s more important that there aren’t really any low-lights, or true duds. As for potential highs, you’ve got “Graveyard Shift,” “Night Surf,” “The Mangler,” and “The Boogeyman…” all of them occurring in the first half of the overall collection.

It really is a strong one, especially if you’re mostly looking to be scared. If one story doesn’t focus on horror, it’s probably doing something intense, as can be found with “The Ledge,” which is about a crime boss making the man who’s having an affair with his wife walk around a long five-inch ledge that spans the building the crime boss lives in… many floors up, so that the fall would be fatal. The man has everything to lose, and still something to gain, and King milks the suspense for all it’s worth. “The Ledge” might not even be the very best story here, but it feels worth highlighting because it’s kind of underrated, and maybe also because it stands out a bit from pure – and supernatural – horror. It’s a little more realistic, and horrifying, sure, but in a fairly different kind of way. Everything else achieves more or less the same kind of horror and suspense you could reliably find in early Stephen King novels like Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Dead Zone, and Cujo. For being steady and mightily effective at delivering what feels like a remarkable series of no-nonsense – and easily digestible – horror stories, Night Shift is a winner of a collection all around.

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‘Skeleton Crew’ (1985)

Skeleton Crew is pretty much on the same level as Night Shift overall, though there are a few differences worth noting. It’s mostly a collection of short stories, but there are a couple of novellas in here (“The Mist,” for one, is a pretty lengthy story to kick things off with). There are also some bits of poetry that are even shorter than short stories, so for better or worse, there’s a bit more variety on that end of things, too. Finally, it may be a little less consistent in terms of quality, but what it does have going for it are some immense highs. The best short stories here all rank highly among the best short stories Stephen King has ever written. There’s “The Jaunt,” “The Raft,” “Word Processor of the Gods,” and “Survivor Type,” all of which are scary and/or interesting for slightly different reasons.

The stories are mostly horror-related, but with a bit more variety regarding what genres the horror is ultimately mashed up with. “The Jaunt” is a very creepy sci-fi story, for example, “The Raft” is King in his horror comfort zone (but done very well regardless), “Word Processor of the Gods” is more concerned with being a fantasy story of sorts, and then “Survivor Type” is a brutally effective (and just plain brutal) survival story with a lot of psychological horror thrown in for good measure… oh, and it’s weirdly funny, too. Stephen King isn’t really super well-known for his intentional comedy, even if a few books do have their moments, but he channels a dark sort of humor into “Survivor Type” that’s quite remarkable, and a key reason why it might well be a contender for the crown of “best Stephen King short story.” It’s worth the price of admission for Skeleton Crew for “Survivor Type” alone, and then there are short stories and novellas here that prove almost just as good, all while being good without hitting too many similar beats as “Survivor Type.” If you wanted to nitpick, maybe “The Mist” and “The Raft” mine from a comparable horror-related well, but, well, when he does it so well, who are any of us to – in frustration – scream and yell? (That wasn’t too much worse than some of Stephen King’s poem “Paranoid: A Chant,” by the way).

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‘Different Seasons’ (1982)

Image via Viking Press

Since there are only four stories in Different Seasons, and they’re all of a very high quality, it’s possible to go over each pretty easily. It was Stephen King’s first novella collection, and it remains quite comfortably his best, and it’s also easy to recommend because most people are probably familiar with two of the four stories here already. “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” was the basis for The Shawshank Redemption, which is beyond popular and beloved, as a film, and then “The Body” also got adapted as Stand by Me, which is another much-loved film, and justifiably considered one of the best of all the King adaptations. There was also a movie adaptation of “Apt Pupil,” which wasn’t nearly as good as the other two adaptations that came from Different Seasons, but “Apt Pupil,” the novella, is surprisingly great, being the darkest story of the bunch, with its main conflict being between two terrible people who bring out the worst in each other and engage in what amounts to some kind of psychological warfare. It gets violent and quite nasty, but it is undeniably gripping.

There’s also “The Breathing Method,” which is the oddest and least well-known story of the bunch, but it’s also – for the most part – a winner. It also might be the most horror-focused novella of the bunch, which comes as a surprise, even if King was particularly known for horror at this stage in his career. After all, this collection was largely an attempt to write outside the horror genre, with “Apt Pupil” being horrific at times, definitely (albeit it might be more of a thriller), “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” being a prison drama, and “The Body” being a coming-of-age story. “The Breathing Method” was King writing a little horror, (probably) as a treat, and that’s okay. It’s a good horror story, and then the rest of the collection well and truly succeeds at showcasing King’s range, doing so much earlier than most of his other great non-horror books, which generally came later (see most entries in The Dark Tower series, 11/22/63, and The Green Mile… though those all have at least a handful of frightening moments). You really can’t go wrong with Different Seasons, and it is, without a doubt, just as worth reading as the very best of his novels.