Not a full poll of his works (!) but 8 of his books that I really love.  Yes, I know there are many that could be in this list, but it's a personal one!  I've not included the Dark Tower series, as it's a different beast, and I'm currently halfway through the final part (having read them in order one after the other over the last couple of years).

So, just pick one!

I'm going with 11/22/63, which I think is just magnificent, even compared to these heavyweights.

Hard between The Stand and 11/22/63 for me.

The Stand read it in my teens or early twenties and it blew me away! remained in my all-time hall of fame.. for me, it predated (and bettered) all those (great) apocalyptic movies that came later: Epidemia or 28 days later; though it's been long since I read it.

11/22/63 found it reeeaaaally good, read it some 4 years ago; very clever, entertaining and interesting in a maybe more mature sort of way, with the historical edge and all the documentation about it. I'll keep with The Stand though for the fond memory I keep about it, the epic, the scope, and the impact and great times it had upon me back then; it was huge.

Considering how much and how many books of Gothic Literature I have read and have talked about (including a 2 day class on it!), I have never been enthused with Stephen King and always thought of his work as too much of the Hollywood variety of the Gothic Literature.

That's just me, too much literature and of the few books of his I have read, I still thought it felt more like manipulated pulp than really good stories that took you with them.

It > The Stand > The Long Walk

The OP's list poll is mainly books from his second litterary life.... That +/- means once I got tired of his crud and dropped it all.

From this list, The Stand is the only one I read  (It is the one book that really made me gave up)

Before that I'd read almost everything until roughly  +/- 83/4 or so at the time or release (well Salem & Carrie, a bit after).

faves: Shining, Stand, Different Seasons, Christine and Nightshift. 

In my youth I was a huge King fan. My favourite was the Shining (missing from your list). But The Stand is easily a close second.

I still think the original TV mini-series with Gary Sinise and Molly Ringwald was a great adaptation for its time.

I only read "Needful Things" so far and really liked it until the bloodbath at the end which in my opinion was totally unnecessary and ruined the book for me. this very disappointing end made me avoid him.

it is not that I am generally against bloodbaths; "Die andere Seite" ("The Other Side") by Alfred Kubin has a much bigger bloodbath at the end. but with Kubin the bloodbath made sense; with King it did in my opinion not. there are so many ways these people could have made each others lives living hell that I don't see the point in all these killings

I agree.  The ending was the only part of Needful Things that pained me. King's endings may be his Achilles Heel.  The Lion's share of King's early novels end in FIRE!  

Thanks for your responses.  The problem is that he has written so many, I can't remember how I felt about some of them!  These 8 stand out to me, I just know I loved them.

The Long Walk is a brutal brutal book, probably the most chilling for me. It would be between that, The Stand and It for me for 2nd place.  Or maybe The Green Mile......

Such a fantastic author!!

So many I want to read again.....

Hi,

There are some that you DON'T want to read again, because they are ... yeah!

Try Mathew Gregory Lewis' THE MONK. When you get done you won't be thinking Stephen King at all ... and written in 1796 ... to give you an idea, another monster book also influenced by the bloodshed on the guillotines in France, but it has less blood and more something else! Its horror is ... you can't make a movie of it, it's that strong!

yep; the monk kills his mother and has sex with his sister (without knowing who either are) and winds up with all bones broken at the bottom of a valley or canyon (I don't remember which) with hot sun above where he slowly and painfully dies and winds up in hell. and all because he committed the deadly sin of pride and was led astray by the devil for this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Forces_(book)

I also love 22/11/1963, Needful Things, Under the Dome, Misery and The Green Mile among others (I don't rate The Stand as highly as others do). He's easily my favorite author.

^      The only King I ever read completely was a short story called Survivor Type, also known as "Lady Fingers", famous among adolescents in the '80s for being particularly grim.

Hi,

I think that this is the main reason why folks won't bother reading this book, or a lot of the Gothic Literature history stuff ... a lot of it, has a different sensibility than the mememe idea and style that SK uses, which to me is not as strong as otherwise ... they are just some sort of news stories, a throwback to the material used in theaters in the 30's (when there was a lack of material and plays were created reading newspapers and such).

Some folks think that it is my condescending idea about literature, but, as I mentioned before in a music thread, when you read or listen as much as I do, you don't exactly consider one better than the other, just that SK is not one that has enough "depth" for me to enjoy ... the stories seem empty for me, and many times, just like a newsreel. 

That doesn't say a lot of good things about literature, always making it look like it has to be bigger than it really is, or should, but that's not an idea I would want to debate at all ... it goes both ways. SK simply is not interesting for me, and I would not say that he is a bad writer. Few people that can write that much are not good enough to do what they do. It's just not my thing, and too many of the stories, again, feel that they are overdone, and sometimes I feel the stuff is gratuitous, which, of course, some of the films made off his stuff made sure it was seen. 

I have really only done 2 games, and have NEVER participated in a thread on other games, unless you want to discuss Lemmings! I was one of the first and originals in EQ and then WOW when EQ blew out its great players and many of them went to Blizzard, and are still there. They were the best players in that game, before going to WOW, and some of the best known "players" in the game. 

Shadowyzard wrote: ... For your information, those "some folks" are very much aware of many things here. You cannot get away with "you're misinterpreting my post" type of cheap tricks.

Right. Like you are? I have never stated that I know and others don't or vice versa. I merely stated what I thought was an opinion, and not a fact. You, otherwise, don't know the difference!

Hi,

I think you are intentionally misinterpreting the whole thing to simply make your point more valid. My only valid point in that whole thing was that neither game meant a whole lot for me, and I found it too limiting. Specially EQ in the early days, and its first many years, when in essence it was the players that developed the game with their ability to have the characters do something that was not considered or coded.

No other game was that exciting and featured a wow level that was not only fun to see but also be able to do. I got D2 and played 15 minutes of it and that was that. D1 had not been that great for me, and my roommate  did not care for it himself, and he was a top line code expert and is still in that field way up there in rank and all, and his evaluation of many of those games, was interesting, not to mention that the majority of them had the same engine for starters, which many of the online games did the same thing and did not know how to not make it so obvious.

I see no point in continuing this discussion, as your idea of a discussion is one that means you are right and no one else can say anything that does not kiss your skirts or socks so you feel more important and on top of your own ideas in this board. I am not into this board for ego gratification, like you appear to be. It's the art that matters, not the personal state, but you do not seem to know the difference yet!

Hi,

I had gotten the original Diablo with another purchase. By the time BG came out, I was aware of "copies" and was not even interested in trying it. 

What I stated in the thread, did not specify that I played Diablo or BG at all. The only two games I have played in this life is EQ and WoW and I have no other interests whatsoever in some of the other copy crap out there, and all you are doing is showing your favoritism, instead of specifying what it is that you think makes it a great game.

I already told you that about myself and both EQ and WoW and their history, but that is stuff that is way too far out for you to even conceive, and if I told you that one of the best known players in EQ is still with Blizzard and running one of their games you wouldn't have any idea who it was, or how valuable and important he was to the development of the two massive online games, and now, helping one other part of WoW stand up and make its presence felt! It shows that there is a bunch of folks in there that are special and then some. 

There is not a whole lot, as a way of comparison to show the "talent" in D1 or D2, and BG. The graphics are always nice but the development of graphics had been a huge issue on EQ and WoW from the very start, and it is believed that they influenced the improvements on graphic cards a lot more than we give them credit for. The D games, of BG could hardly say anything to that effect or standard. 

Of it it matters to you, I beta tested 2 other games, and one of them died a bad death 3 months into their life (started out really well) when they were basically killed by a bunch of loud pvp'rs that wanted to turn the game in another direction which caused massive issues in balance, and ended up losing them half their members. A well deserved ending I would say, since pvp is not what EQ and WoW were really about, and while they made room for it, in the end, they did not succumb to the pressures of hurting the balancing of the game because of it.

The day you want to discuss some history of all these games, let me know ... I was there and tried many of them, but I did NOT play them in the sense that you think, because they were not worth it. And the ability for the character/class to do something different that what was intended was totally gone in those games ... and you should have seen the talent of some bards in EQ, kiting a whole zone ... a trully worth while spectacle that will never be duplicated or seen, and how one character by itself, was the major reason for all the rest of the games to become somewhat mechanized and controlled by spreadsheets and databases to ensure that you did not do more than "intended".

Get off the right or wrong bs. And again, to me, compared to hundreds of years of literature, Stephen King still is the pulp writer for Hollywood ... as it has been shown by the quantity of films done off his novels, when few have the talent or ability to do a "real" Frankenstein (still not done right), a real "Vampyr", or a really well done "Carmilla" ... stuff that is far better written, and we have not, yet, even mentioned the very good work by Anne Rice, probably the last of the great Gothic writers in literature. SK will never have that distinction in the "horror" or even "Gothic" field.

Hi,

Such a low class attitude towards a difference of opinion. And you consider yourself knowledgeable and intelligent. oh well .... !!!

Hi,

Literature will decide its history, not me. Or you!

We'll see 50 to 100 years from now ... folks like Mary Shelley, Lord Polidori, Sheridan LeFanu, Lord Byron, Anne Rice, will still be discussed in Literature classes. I sincerely do not think that SK will be there for whatever reasons. He might be if someone invents a new class in literature ... famous writers that sold millions ... but I don't see a whole lot of studies on Stephen King's work in a whole bunch of University listings or catalogues!