All 20 Stephen King Fantasy Books, Ranked

Every Stephen King Fantasy Book, Ranked Image via Donald M. Grant, Publisher Published Aug 14, 2026, 6:48 PM EDT Jeremy has more than 2700 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. Sign in to your Collider account Right off the bat, if you want to classify every supernatural-related Stephen King book as a work of fantasy, this would be a much longer endeavor, and it would probably involve ranking about two-thirds of his novels, rather than a bit under one-third of them. So, there are horror books like Carrie, Pet Sematary, and Christine that have otherworldly/supernatural elements to their plot, but are harder to classify as either works of fantasy or dark fantasy. And speaking of those two different kinds of fantasy, King tends to prefer writing the dark variety. As such, some of his horror books cross over into fantasy, and they will be included. If the fantasy elements feel as important (or more important) than the horror (or the other genres tackled), then that book will probably be included here. It can be hard to define things perfectly, and maybe genre labels are silly sometimes, but in any event, this is an attempt to rank every Stephen King fantasy book published to date. 20 'Lisey's Story' (2006) Image via Hodder & Stoughton There are far more good fantasy books by Stephen King than bad ones, and of those good ones, alongside some absolutely perfect ones, that'll be gotten to eventually, so it’s only a matter of time before things get positive. It’s hard to be positive here, though, with Lisey’s Story, even if it is one of the novels that King himself is most fond of, likely owing to how agonizingly personal it is. It’s a book about a writer who’s passed away, mostly focusing on his wife and how she reckons with her memories of her husband, and some of the work he left behind. Things are romantic, and then it’s kind of a psychological drama, there’s a little by way of horror, and things get more fantastical in the back half, just not in particularly interesting or striking ways. Sure, Lisey’s Story is heartfelt, and there’s something to be said about writing something so personal, but the execution here (and some of the stylistic choices) make it a slog to get through. 19 'Sleeping Beauties' (2017) Image via Scribner Speaking of books that might be hard to get through, here’s Sleeping Beauties, which mostly falters because it’s too long and rambling, but it doesn’t falter when it comes to its premise. Things are interesting for a little while, and you do get some good stretches of the book here, with it all being about a strange phenomenon that makes women fall into some sort of deep sleep, with attempts to wake them turning deadly. Stephen King wrote it with one of his two sons, Owen King, and their collaboration resulted in something that’s flawed, but definitely not flawed all the way through, the way Lisey’s Story arguably is. There are a lot of characters to keep track of here, maybe even too many, and it’s also one of those books where the mystery is more intriguing than the eventual answers/revelations are satisfying. Still, not terrible, as an odd kind of fantasy epic. 18 'The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole' (2012) Image via Hodder & Stoughton The Dark Tower is an intimidating series to get into, to some extent, because you hear a lot of conflicting things about its ending, and then it’s also lengthy, with its seven main books being a few thousand pages. The time commitment’s definitely immense, but you can experience the whole story without having to dive into The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole, which is an interquel. The Wind Through the Keyhole feels like a poorly-disguised short story/novella collection, with the framing device being weak, but still probably the most interesting part. This one takes place between books #4 and #5, and it’s about a few different fantasy-ish stories nestled within the overall fantasy saga that is The Dark Tower. The Wind Through the Keyhole feels like a poorly-disguised short story/novella collection, with the framing device being weak, but still probably the most interesting part, because it’s neat reading about some of the main characters from the series again. The stories themselves, though, are just kind of fine; not much here proves particularly memorable. 17 'Fairy Tale' (2022) Image via Scribner Book Company Like Desperation, which is more of a horror/mystery book, Fairy Tale drops off quality-wise, at a point, which is a real shame. The story here involves a boy who strikes up a friendship of sorts with an old man while working for him, and then he learns that this man has a shed in his backyard that seems to function like a portal to another world, meaning it’s a matter of time before the boy goes on some kind of adventure through it. Shockingly, all the stuff leading up to the fantastical adventure proves more interesting to read about than the more outward fantasy stuff, which really is Stephen King going through the motions in doing a fairy tale of sorts. It also hits way too many familiar beats, compared to a certain novel Stephen King wrote with someone else in 1984, which is also about a young man going on a journey through another dimension, but more on that one (much) later, because it’s (much) better. 16 'The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah' (2004) Image via Donald M. Grant, Publisher Other than the previously mentioned The Wind Through the Keyhole, The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah stands as the weakest of the books in The Dark Tower series, but lots of that has to do with it very blatantly existing just to set up all the drama of the seventh and final book. If it was condensed a bit, and then added onto book #7, making The Dark Tower a series made up of six main books, rather than seven, then it probably wouldn’t feel nearly as flawed. The opening of the seventh book (which will appear much later) is great, but maybe some of it could've happened in Song of Susannah, if King really had been dead-set on making this main saga seven books long. Roland and the members of his ka-tet still get up to some interesting things (and they are separated here, quite a lot, meaning their individual journeys do a lot to continue building the world of the series), but it’s lacking compared to those other non-Wind Through the Keyhole books in the series. 15 'Rose Madder' (1995) Image via Viking Stephen King pushed back against Rose Madder, viewing it unfavorably now, in contrast to the previously mentioned Lisey’s Story. It’s another narrative focused on a woman and her husband, and was one of a handful of stories King wrote in the 1990s about, more specifically, the wife making some kind of escape from an abusive marriage. So, that’s another difference, because the husband here is honestly one of the most monstrous characters King’s ever written. Much of Rose Madder involves the wife escaping, and the husband pursuing, and then in its back half, things get a bit more fantastical, mostly thanks to some strange artwork (shades of Duma Key there, which Stephen King wrote in 2008). The bouncing back and forth between heroine and villain makes Rose Madder interesting for a good chunk of its duration, even if it falls apart a little when it starts operating like a bit more of a fantasy book. 14 'Insomnia' (1994) Image via Signet Books And when Stephen King spoke out against Rose Madder, he did so while levying similar criticism on Insomnia, which was written one year earlier, with the pair being, in King’s eyes, “stiff, trying-too-hard novels.” There’s probably some merit in being your own harshest critic, but still, that’s pretty harsh. Lots of Rose Madder is pretty good, and the same goes for Insomnia, though it flips things a bit because its second half is more engaging than its first, unlike with Rose Madder. Insomnia is a bit creaky and slow-paced to start with, which feels somewhat fitting, considering the main character is an elderly man. He has trouble sleeping, and then he hallucinates/sees things that hint at some kind of conflict that spans beyond the world itself, much of it tying into The Dark Tower pretty heavily (there are so many crossovers and references that a true adaptation of Insomnia feels unlikely to ever happen). 13 'Doctor Sleep' (2013) Image via Hodder & Stoughton Even if you're a movie person and scarcely touch books, you'll know about The Shining, which Doctor Sleep is a sequel to. That being said, Doctor Sleep (2013) ignores the ways Stanley Kubrick played around with (quite roughly, in the eyes of some) King’s original novel, which was published in 1977. So, familiarity with the book version of The Shining is required if you want to follow Doctor Sleep properly. Since The Shining is so great, though, it’s easy to recommend it in any event, and then if you want to see what Danny (a child in The Shining) is up to as an adult, then Doctor Sleep has got your back. As for Doctor Sleep being here, and not The Shining, that 1977 novel is more of a psychological/supernatural horror book, and Doctor Sleep is willing to go more all-out with fantasy elements (mostly with its villains and one key main character), and there’s also a bit less by way of ambiguity between what horrors are actually supernatural, and which ones might be of a more psychological nature. 12 'Black House' (2001) Image via Hodder Paperbacks A sequel to The Talisman, Black House saw Stephen King writing alongside Peter Straub, and the two will also be credited for 2026’s Other Worlds Than These, which is set to make this saga a trilogy, even though Straub passed away in 2022. Black House definitely leaves things open for another book, but before it ends on a cliffhanger (frustrating, but at least that third book is coming), it also works as a pretty great mash-up of all sorts of genres. Like, Black House is a crime/mystery/detective sort of story with a heavy supernatural slant to things, and then there is a bit by way of dimension-hopping and the fantastical world aspect, as was also found in The Talisman. It’s wild and maybe a little too all-over-the-place at times, yet the uniqueness of it all is also admirable, and the whole thing proves compelling more often than not, in all honesty. 11 'The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger' (1982) Image via Donald M. Grant, Publisher The first book in The Dark Tower series, The Gunslinger, is up there among the weirdest of Stephen King’s books, and it’s also… well, not quite up there as one of his best. But it is undeniably important, both for the series it kicks off and for the larger Stephen King multiverse, and there is something interesting about being introduced to Roland as a lone wanderer, with him kind of getting one ally here, but the ka-tet is still a while away from being formed at this point. Things get more bizarre on a stylistic front, enough so that there are two versions of The Gunslinger out there. One’s the version originally published, and the other mitigates some of the confusion and gets things more in line with the other books in the series. As for the plot? It’s about Roland trying to reach the titular Dark Tower. Of course, it doesn’t happen until after a few more books have passed, but the journey has to start somewhere, and here is, more or less, a rather compelling start.