Stephen King's Ten Favorite Novels
King compiled a list of his ten favorite novels that has been widely circulated via Goodreads and outlets like Open Culture. The full list is: Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter, Watership Down by Richard Adams, The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson, The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, 1984 by George Orwell, American Pastoral by Philip Roth, and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. King has cheerfully acknowledged the exercise is "slightly ridiculous," noting that on another day ten different titles might come to mind. What the list reveals is a reader whose tastes run far deeper into literary and political fiction than his public reputation as a horror novelist would suggest.
The Surprising Breadth of His Taste
Only one of King's ten favorites — arguably Lord of the Flies — sits anywhere near the horror genre. The rest span dystopian fiction (Orwell's 1984), American literary realism (Roth's American Pastoral, Ellison's Invisible Man), an anthropomorphic adventure epic (Adams's Watership Down), high fantasy (Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings), and a bleak Western (McCarthy's Blood Meridian). This breadth is the point: King reads as a student of all fiction, not as a genre loyalist. His enthusiasm for McCarthy in particular is well documented — Blood Meridian earned its place on his favorites list — and his admiration for Tolkien openly shaped his own multi-volume epic, The Dark Tower. The horror specialist is, in his reading life, an omnivore.
The Champion of New and Lesser-Known Fiction
Beyond his classic favorites, King is one of publishing's most active promoters of contemporary fiction, using a very large social-media following to spotlight books he loves — often by newer or lesser-known authors. He has publicly recommended horror and thriller titles including Paul Tremblay's Growing Things, Thomas Olde Heuvelt's Hex, Alma Katsu's The Hunger, David Mitchell's Slade House, Dan Simmons's The Terror, and Nick Cutter's The Troop, the last of which he said "scared the hell out of me." A King recommendation can measurably boost a book's sales, and he gives them freely and frequently. This makes his reading list a living, growing thing rather than a fixed canon — a real-time feed of what an obsessive reader is currently excited about.
The Horror Classics He Reveres
When King does turn to his own genre, he treats its best work as serious literature, most fully in his 1981 non-fiction study Danse Macabre. There he praises Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House as one of the finest horror novels of the twentieth century — a book whose influence is visible throughout his own The Shining. He has also championed the work of his friend and collaborator Peter Straub, whose Ghost Story King has cited as a standout of the modern supernatural revival. King's reverence for these predecessors reflects a core belief of his reading life: that horror, done well, belongs in the same conversation as any other literary form, and that knowing the genre's classics is part of reading well within it.
What His Reading List Teaches
King's recommendations are less a syllabus to copy than a model of how to read. The throughline is omnivorousness: a horror master whose favorite books include Orwell, Roth, Ellison, and Tolkien, and whose current reading is a constantly refreshed stream of new novels. The practical lesson is to read across genres and eras rather than staying in one lane, because breadth is what builds judgment and keeps reading exciting over a lifetime. It also helps to follow great readers — King's social feeds function as a curated recommendation engine for anyone who trusts his taste. Above all, his list shows that reading widely and reading constantly are the same habit viewed from two angles.