The 7 Best Stephen King Adventure Books, Ranked

Image via Donald M. Grant, Publisher Published Oct 19, 2026, 9:38 PM 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 There aren’t a ton of full-on adventure novels written by Stephen King, and those that are identifiable as such usually blend the adventure elements with quite a bit by way of horror, fantasy, or science fiction… or maybe even a bit of everything, if you're looking at his especially ambitious epics. He has seemingly been most comfortable writing horror in the past, and that’s nothing you can get all that angry about when his works of horror can be as good as The Shining, Carrie, and Cujo, just for starters. But what about the books about journeys, or that feel at least a little adventure-focused? Well, that’s where the following titles come in. These all rank among Stephen King’s best adventure books, as long as you're willing to accept that most of them have aspects of other genres mixed in for good measure. When Stephen King wants to, he can indeed tackle this broad and always popular genre fairly well, as the following books of his will hopefully demonstrate. 7 'The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon' (1999) Image via Hodder & Stoughton Before leaping into some chunkier and more epic-in-scope Stephen King novels, here’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, which is one of his slimmest if you look at the page count, but it still qualifies as an adventure story. Well, maybe it’s more survival horror, because it’s about a little girl getting lost in the woods, yet she does still have to journey through unknown terrain on her own, and overcome odds stacked against her while learning how to become independent. It’s a coming-of-age kind of thing in that way, too, and that’s a sort of story King’s always been good at tackling, as is made very clear by the likes of IT and The Body (the last of those being a novella from Different Seasons that was made into Stand by Me). The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon definitely isn't as good as either of those, but it is more of an adventure story, and it does very much succeed at doing what it sets out to do, even if that’s a little less ambition-wise than a good many other novels written by King. 6 'Fairy Tale' (2022) Image via Scribner Book Company There is a problem with Fairy Tale, and that’s how, at a point, it drops off quality-wise, and it ultimately stands as one of a fair few Stephen King books that has a better first half than a second half. That being said, the stuff here that’s good still makes it worth a read, if you like fantasy/adventure sorts of stories, and especially if you're fond of King’s approach to fantasy, even if The Eyes of the Dragon is a much better book, but it was hard to include here because it’s not really an adventure tale. With Fairy Tale, though, it’s hard to see it as anything but a fantasy/adventure book. There’s a young character who finds a portal to a different realm, and he goes in there for personal reasons, only to find more than he was expecting on the other side. As for what the reader might be expecting? Probably a little more than what the reader gets, because the actual fantasy-heavy portion of the story is a little lacking, and somehow not as good as the set-up, but even that slower and less impressive stretch of the book is still far from bad. It’s a worthy read, if you like King, and so long as you go in knowing it’s not quite one of his very best or anything. 5 'The Talisman' (1984) Image via Viking Press/Stephen King/Peter Straub Stephen King co-wrote The Talisman with Peter Straub, and maybe it’s the involvement of Straub that makes it a sometimes divisive book among King fans. It’s still very Stephen King-ish, though, and King and Straub marry their styles pretty well here, collaborating on a story that’s about a young boy who, as was the case in Fairy Tale, goes to a different and unusual realm for a personal journey, hoping to save someone he cares about. And then because King’s involved, things get strange. Or because Straub’s involved, things get strange. If you're used to King’s strangeness, maybe the parts Straub really had control over will throw you. There are two sequels to The Talisman, too. Black House (2001) is worth mentioning, but it doesn’t have quite the same adventuring feel as The Talisman, being more of a mystery/horror/fantasy book that still has a bit of flipping between dimensions. It wasn’t until book #3 in what ended up being a trilogy that the itch scratched by The Talisman was properly scratched once more. 4 'Other Worlds Than These' (2026) Image via Hodder & Stoughton At the time of writing, Other Worlds Than These is the most recent Stephen King book, but he’s announced at least one more book to be published later, so it does have to be emphasized that it’s “at the time of writing.” And hey, it’s that one that wraps up the story that began in The Talisman, with Peter Straub being credited as the co-author here, though King wrote it largely solo after discussing a third book with Straub, but the latter passed away in 2022, meaning it wasn’t the same kind of collaboration as The Talisman and Black House marked. You can definitely feel that it’s more of a Stephen King book, but that’s okay, because there is a lot here to like, especially if you were invested in the strange three-part story that took more than four decades to ultimately be concluded. And there are a lot of ties here to another iconic adventure/dark fantasy series that Stephen King’s written, but more on those books in a little bit. 3 '11/22/63' (2011) Image via Scribner There’s a sense of traveling through time and space found in a certain series that'll be mentioned shortly, and then something similar happens in 11/22/63, but it’s a more limited kind of travel here. There’s a man who learns from a friend that he can go back in time, but only to 1958, and so he goes there and waits until November 22, 1963, intending to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy from happening on that day. Things both do and don’t go to plan, but that’s what keeps it all interesting, of course. For what it’s worth, it could well also be the strongest single work of science fiction that Stephen King has ever written. The adventuring here is a little more abstract, but still worth highlighting, since so much of 11/22/63 involves the protagonist exploring an unfamiliar time and place, and some other less expected things uncovered along the way, too. It’s a lengthy book, but an always engaging one, and for what it’s worth, it could well also be the strongest single work of science fiction that Stephen King has ever written, with the fact that it’s also a pretty great adventure novel kind of being something of a bonus. 2 'The Dark Tower' (1982–2004) Since the whole of The Dark Tower is about the one journey, more or less, it feels right to include it as a series here. If that’s cheating, in your eyes, then too bad. The Gunslinger is a smaller-scale Western/adventure novel of sorts, being about Roland, a gunslinger, chasing a man across a desert, and it’s all about a bigger journey toward the titular Dark Tower, and then the seventh and final book is, in many ways, also about getting to the tower. But, of course, actually reaching it. There’s a whole lot of suspense drawn out about what’ll be there, and who may or may not make it, of the supporting cast, but it’s ultimately very rewarding and emotional, even with the premise technically being quite simple. There is a great deal more that happens throughout the seven main books, but the main thing is you do need those seven main ones to fully appreciate the enormity of the adventure, and all the highs and lows that come about because of it. 1 'The Stand' (1978/1990) Image via Random House USA Inc While there are two versions of The Stand, both have a similar level of ambition in tackling various genres, so you get horror, as expected, and then it’s probably more dark fantasy than science fiction, even though it’s a post-apocalyptic novel. And then there’s a fair bit of wandering, traveling, and adventuring, with the survivors of a deadly flu outbreak all being drawn toward one of two locations, effectively putting them on one side of a conflict that’s about to be fought for what remains of the world and its potential future. Without going into things too much, there is an element of trekking between the two camps, all in a very purposeful The Lord of the Rings-style way, so you do feel the immense amount of journeying undertaken by a whole bunch of characters here. And then quality-wise, The Stand is also exceptional, being compelling for what is, once more, a very sizable number of pages, because it’s an epic if you read the original text from 1978, and then it’s obviously even grander if you read the uncut version, which was first published in 1990. The Stand Release Date 2020 - 2021-00-00 Network ABC Cast Whoopi Goldberg Lucy Swann