The Regulators : In 1996, King released two books simultaneously - one under his own name and one under his retired pseudonym, Richard Bachman. Though the sections dealing with the elderly protagonist and his lady love have a poignance to them, they are undercut by heavy-handed subplots about spousal abuse and the pro-choice/pro-life debate.Ħ0. Insomnia : Unless you are familiar with King’s epic Dark Tower series, entire swaths of this gargantuan novel are unreadable. The only thing worse is the clichéd Down syndrome–afflicted character with the telepathic powers.Ħ1. Though the descriptions of the pain and suffering felt by the main character (who suffers a similarly crippling accident) are convincing for obvious reasons, the book’s “shit weasels” - which literally make their way out of human bodies by getting crapped out - are the lowest type of gross-out horror. Dreamcatcher : King’s first novel released after the 1999 car accident that nearly killed him, Dreamcatcher is so body-obsessed as to be off-putting.

Anyone who remembers the deadly levitating Coke machine would agree.Ħ2. Full of anger at himself and the eighties, The Tommyknockers is a white-hot mess.

Writing with “his heart running at a hundred and thirty beats a minute and cotton swabs stuck up my nose to stem the coke-induced bleeding” (as he would later describe it), King filled his book with addicts and thinly veiled metaphors for what he was going through. The Tommyknockers : This tale of a Maine writer (you’ll be seeing a lot of these) who accidentally comes across a piece of alien metal in her backyard and finds herself compelled to dig up the flying saucer that it’s attached to was written at the height of King’s addiction troubles. The combination of the real (the title character, the battered women’s shelter she ends up with, her monster of a husband) with the supernatural (a magical painting that offers a gateway to a Greek myth-tinged world) feels less convincing here than it does in any other of King’s books.Ħ3. This one was the last and least of the bunch.

Rose Madder : In the early nineties, King wrote a set of novels focused on abused women and the horrible men who beat and haunt and entrap them. Every Stephen King Movie, Ranked From Worst to BestĦ4.

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