Stephen King's 1980s Books: Collider Ranks the 10 Best

Collider has ranked the 10 greatest Stephen King books of the 1980s, and the list is a reminder that the decade was King at his most ambitious. Collider notes that King has published in every decade since the 1970s, but his 1970s and 1980s output is the work readers keep returning to.

The list

Collider's top 10 includes:

• Thinner, the Bachman novel about a lawyer who wastes away after a curse
• The Running Man, the Bachman dystopian thriller about a desperate father on a deadly game show
• The Dark Half, King's Jekyll and Hyde story about an author and his violent alter ego
• The Tommyknockers, which Collider says even King has criticized
• Firestarter, about a girl with pyrokinetic powers and her father on the run from a secret agency
• The Gunslinger, the first Dark Tower novel, following Roland Deschain
• Cujo, about a rabid Saint Bernard and a mother and son trapped in a Ford Pinto
• Misery, about author Paul Sheldon and his terrifying rescuer Annie Wilkes
• Pet Sematary, King's story of grief, resurrection and a very bad idea
• It, the 1,100-page epic about the Losers' Club, Derry and Pennywise the Dancing Clown

Collider's write-up gives the two Bachman books serious space, and that is a useful reminder. Thinner and The Running Man are not sidelines in King's career. The Running Man, in particular, gets a sharp description in Collider's piece: Ben Richards is an angry, desperate man, not an invincible hero, and the chase is a satire of television, inequality and corporate power.

For readers who want a place to start, Collider's top 10 is hard to argue with. The list leans on the books that have stuck with readers for decades, and it gives the 1980s its due as the era when King stopped being only a horror writer and started building the connections that would tie his fictional universe together.

• 1980s horror
• book rankings
• It
• Misery
• Richard Bachman
• Stephen King