The 10 Most Popular Stephen King Books, According to Goodreads

Image via Doubleday Published Sep 5, 2026, 8:20 AM EDT Jeremy has more than 2800 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 With movies, you’ve got box office results. Complications arise when you have to adjust for inflation, and then if you're comparing newer movies to older ones, there was a time, decades ago, when box office earnings weren’t as widely reported. With music, there are also limitations, though Billboard is decently reliable. Books, though… it’s harder with books. Trying to determine the best-selling of all time comes with some real obstacles, and estimates are needed, even when there's some data. This is all to say that you can’t determine the best-selling Stephen King books. Like, there isn't a way to say, with even a little reliability, that one book sold more than a second, and then a third book sold even more than both that first and second book put together. So, here’s a ranking of the most popular Stephen King books on Goodreads. It’s not the same as sales, but it does suggest which books of the prolific author’s are gravitated toward more than others. 10 ‘The Outsider’ (2018) Image via Scribner Book Company This is probably the most surprising one to crack the top 10, partly because it’s the most recent, and partly because it’s probably the most flawed here. It’s The Outsider, and actually, calling it the “most flawed” isn't too bad, since it’s still really good, and not nearly as flawed as various other Stephen King books out there (when you’ve written dozens of novels over the span of several decades, they're unlikely to all be winners). The Outsider has just under 400,000 ratings, at the time of writing, which puts it fairly far behind the others here, which all have 600,000+. It’s the most popular book to feature Holly Gibney, who has a supporting role in The Outsider’s second half, after being introduced in the Bill Hodges trilogy, and she’d go on to face further threats (of a more mundane variety than what you get in The Outsider) in the novella “If It Bleeds” and the novels Holly and Never Flinch. 9 ‘The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger’ (1982) Image via Donald M. Grant, Publisher As mentioned just before, The Outsider sits far below everything else here, so now there’s a jump to The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, which has about 680,000 votes on Goodreads. Calling this one better than The Outsider might be contentious, because it’s got a slightly lower average rating, but the average rating is different from looking at the number of votes. The former’s about quality, while the latter’s concerned with popularity. It’s also a Western, albeit a strange one, and a book mostly focused on Roland, who’s made intriguing here, as a protagonist, though it also takes getting a little further into the series before he becomes more compelling. As for what The Gunslinger is about? Introducing the primary world of The Dark Tower, as a series, but definitely not the only world, owing to all the eventual universe-hopping. It’s also a Western, albeit a strange one, and a book mostly focused on Roland, who’s made intriguing here, as a protagonist, though it also takes getting a little further into the series before he becomes more compelling. In later books, there's more by way of being a “hero” in the term “antihero.” In this first book, he’s mostly pretty “anti.” 8 ‘Salem’s Lot’ (1975) Image via Doubleday Salem’s Lot is up there among the most entertaining Stephen King novels, and it hits a sweet spot length/ambition-wise. It’s more than a few hundred pages long, but it’s not hovering around the 1000-page-mark. It takes its time building up a supernatural threat inside a small town, and you're given reasons to care about a fair few straightforward but well-defined characters before things get deadly. Therein might lie something good about horror books, versus horror movies. Characters aren’t hugely deep in either, but books provide more time to make characters at least a bit endearing, and then the horror’s more horrifying when you’re actually fearful of those endearing characters getting killed. Salem’s Lot does all this extremely well, and especially so considering how young (and comparatively inexperienced) King was, as a full-fledged novelist, when he wrote it. For now, it has a very respectable 683,000 ratings on Goodreads, too. 7 ‘11/22/63’ (2011) Image via Scribner Stephen King doesn’t really do hard sci-fi, and that’s okay. He doesn’t even often do mid-strength (or mid-firmness?) sci-fi, but went a little more into science fiction with 11/22/63, just because time travel is the main thing here. There’s a strange piece of technology that allows people in the early 2010s to go back in time to 1958, and two men plan to go there, have one of them wait out five years, and then prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which is destined to happen on that titular date. Lots of 11/22/63 involves waiting around for that date to happen, including ensuring just how vast (or non-existent) the “plot” behind J.F.K.’s murder is, since that does impact the amount of planning that has to go into thwarting it. 11/22/63 is non-stop with how it builds, and it proves continually exciting for about 850 pages all up. It’s a time commitment, but you will have a great time. Maybe 700,000 Goodreads voters are like 50,000,000 Elvis fans: neither group can be wrong. 6 ‘Pet Sematary’ (1983) Image via Doubleday There’s very little that’s even close to breezy or funny in Pet Sematary, which has well and truly earned its reputation for being one of the darkest Stephen King books. The sadness of it all hasn’t turned readers off from it on Goodreads, at least, and yes, if you know it’s about death and grief and some other difficult things in advance (and you're someone who likes horror), then it’s not all that hard to recommend. As for the vote count, it’s at about 730,000 on Goodreads, currently. That puts it just outside the top 5 most popular/most voted-on, but it’s surprising how much further ahead the books at the very top are, since King’s most popular title on the site has about 1 million more votes than Pet Sematary. But more on that one shortly. 5 ‘Misery’ (1987) Image via Viking Press From the fairly miserable Pet Sematary to a book that’s actually called Misery, this 1987 novel is iconic and even pretty close to perfect, as far as psychological thriller/horror books go. Misery is also potentially the best Stephen King book about writing, or his best fictional book that’s largely about writing. There is On Writing, which is a memoir and also partly a guide offering genuine writing advice. With Misery, and the other books Stephen King’s written that touch on writing, there are personal and/or autobiographical elements added, so it’s never really pure fiction. No book is ever purely fiction, honestly, so long as the author’s writing with at least a little personality. Oh yeah, plot… there’s a writer, he’s taken captive, and then his number one fan psychologically (and physically) torments him, making him write the kind of stuff she says she wants to read. It deservedly cracks the top 5 most popular King books on Goodreads, with a total of 857,000 votes. 4 ‘The Stand’ (1978/1990) Image via Doubleday The Stand only just inches ahead of Misery, and things could change as time passes, but for now, it’s got a few thousand more votes on Goodreads than Misery. You could make the argument that it deserves to be even higher, since there’s also an argument to make that it’s Stephen King’s masterpiece, and the kind of book so good you can read it first, without ever having been a Stephen King reader before, and find yourself hooked. It has happened to at least one man, and he’s probably not alone. This one’s post-apocalyptic, and also epic in scale, with tons of characters, even though more than 99% of the world’s population dies very early on. There’s a battle for the future of humanity, and fantasy, sci-fi, adventure, horror, and thriller genres (plus maybe some others) all thrown together. If you read the uncut 1990 version, you will be holding in your hands the single heaviest/longest Stephen King book. Only The Dark Tower, which is one continuous story, is longer, though that was divided into seven main books that all form part of that overall story. 3 ‘Carrie’ (1974) Image via Cemetery Dance The usual suspects are being rounded up, well and truly. It makes a lot of sense for Carrie to be here, because it was Stephen King’s first published novel, and it’s also one of his most approachable and easy to digest. Like, The Stand is also digestible, considering its length, though that length is something of a hurdle. With Carrie, there isn't much length. It’s fairly simple, really, and structured in a way where you know what it’s building to at all points. But it keeps things interesting, and it doesn’t waste time, either. Carrie was the first of many Stephen King books to merge a kind of coming-of-age story (or at least something about the hardships of being young) with horror elements, and it’s still a classic for that blending of genres. It has nearly 900,000 ratings on Goodreads, but the book that tops it does so quite decisively, and while also being a coming-of-age story. 2 ‘IT’ (1986) There’s the coming-of-age stuff in Carrie and the epic scale of The Stand colliding for IT, which could be one way to describe the book and its appeal. The stakes aren’t as high as they were in The Stand, but the titular villain in IT is still a huge threat to the entire town of Derry, and said town is populated and developed in a way where IT still feels like an epic, even without taking place across a large stretch of the United States in the manner that The Stand did. When they're kids, the main characters battle the titular creature known as IT, and then that same creature re-emerges every 27 years, so they have to battle it again as adults. It’s more inventive with its structure than any adaptation to date has been, and then IT is also infamously more extreme than any adaptation so far (there are some alarming things that happen by the standards of a book that’s amassed more than 1.3 million votes on Goodreads). 1 ‘The Shining’ (1977) Image via Vintage The Shining came early on in Stephen King’s writing career, with only Salem’s Lot and Carrie preceding it, and both of those have gotten a ton of votes. The Shining might well be his most purely horror-heavy novel to date, or at least of his classic era, so if people want to see what the big deal is when it comes to someone who’s most famous for his horror, The Shining does seem like a logical place to start. This might be the main reason for it having more than 1.75 million votes on Goodreads, putting it well and truly in the lead. It’s also linked to an iconic film adaptation, but that film adaptation is also controversial. So, those wanting to get more out of what they liked in the movie have the book, and those who might not have liked the movie could be willing to read the book to see what it “gets right,” compared to the movie, or just get to the bottom of why King himself has never really gotten behind Stanley Kubrick’s vision for that 1980 version of The Shining. The Shining Release Date June 13, 1980 Runtime 144 minutes Cast Shelley Duvall Wendy Torrance