Image by The USO, via Flickr Com­mons

So you might think that if Stephen King – the guy who wrote such hor­ror clas­sics like Car­rie and The Stand – were to rat­tle off his top ten favorite books, it would fea­ture works by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Love­craft or maybe J. R. R. Tolkien — authors who have, like King, cre­at­ed endur­ing dark, Goth­ic worlds filled with super­nat­ur­al events and malev­o­lent forces. But you’d be wrong. Author J. Ped­er Zane asked scores of writ­ers about their favorite nov­els for his 2007 book The Top Ten: Writ­ers Pick Their Favorite Books. The list King sub­mit­ted in reply appears below. When pos­si­ble, we’ve added links to the texts that you can read for free online.

1. The Gold­en Argosy, The Most Cel­e­brat­ed Short Sto­ries in the Eng­lish Lan­guage – edit­ed by Van Cart­mell and Charles Grayson

2. The Adven­tures of Huck­le­ber­ry Finn – Mark Twain

3. The Satan­ic Vers­es – Salman Rushdie

4. McTeague – Frank Nor­ris

5. Lord of the Flies – William Gold­ing

6. Bleak House – Charles Dick­ens

7. 1984 – George Orwell

8. The Raj Quar­tet – Paul Scott

9. Light in August – William Faulkn­er

10. Blood Merid­i­an – Cor­mac McCarthy

King, it seems, prefers books that explore basic defects in the human char­ac­ter to spooky tales of fan­ta­sy. In oth­er words, he’s inter­est­ed in sto­ries that are actu­al­ly ter­ri­fy­ing. Orwell’s por­trait of a man break­ing under the pres­sure of total­i­tar­i­an­ism or William Golding’s para­ble about a group of boys devolv­ing into beasts are down­right trou­bling. Frank Norris’s saga about the men­da­cious McTeague isn’t exact­ly com­fort­ing either. And McCarthy’s grim and spec­tac­u­lar­ly vio­lent mas­ter­piece Blood Merid­i­an might make you crawl into a fetal posi­tion and weep for human­i­ty. (That was my reac­tion, any­way.)

The most strik­ing thing about the list, how­ev­er, is how uni­form­ly high­brow it is. All books would fit right in on the syl­labus of an upper lev­el Eng­lish col­lege course. On the oth­er hand, David Fos­ter Wal­lace, when asked for his top ten, filled his list with such mass mar­ket crowd pleasers as The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Har­ris, The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clan­cy and, at num­ber two, King’s The Stand.

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