▸ Essay

Every Stephen King Book of the 1970s, Ranked

Q: What books did Stephen King publish in the 1970s?

wp:paragraph Across the decade King published eight books: Carrie (1974), 'Salem's Lot (1975), Rage (1977, as Richard Bachman), The Shining (1977), Night Shift (1978), The Stand (1978), The Dead Zone (1979), and The Long Walk (1979, as Richard Bachman). Seven are novels and one, Night Shift, is a short story collection. /wp:paragraph

Q: What is the best Stephen King book of the 1970s?

wp:paragraph My pick is The Stand (1978). The Shining is arguably the more perfect novel, but The Stand is the more ambitious one, King reaching past horror to write a kind of American myth, and its scope and the way it makes you mourn a country's worth of strangers put it at the top for me. It's a close call with 'Salem's Lot and The Shining, and reasonable readers rank all three differently. /wp:paragraph

Q: What is the worst Stephen King book of the 1970s?

wp:paragraph I put Rage (1977) last. It's the raw, thin Bachman novel about a school shooting that King himself pulled out of print, and while its psychology is sharp, its philosophy is undercooked and its execution is the weakest of the decade. "Worst" is relative here, though, since it's still a decade where King was rapidly becoming one of the best writers of his generation. /wp:paragraph

Q: What was Stephen King's first novel?

wp:paragraph Carrie (1974) was his first published novel and the book that made his name. He'd actually written Rage and The Long Walk earlier, as a college student, but both were held back and published later under the Richard Bachman pseudonym, so Carrie is the first King novel to reach readers. /wp:paragraph

Q: Which 1970s King books were written as Richard Bachman?

wp:paragraph Two: Rage (1977) and The Long Walk (1979). Bachman was the pen name King used for the rawer, meaner material he and his publisher felt didn't fit the "Stephen King" brand. He wrote both books years before they were published, and later revealed himself as Bachman in the mid-1980s. /wp:paragraph

Q: Is The Stand better than The Shining?

wp:paragraph It depends on what you value. The Shining is tighter, more elegant, and close to flawless in craft. The Stand is bigger, messier, and more ambitious, an attempt at American mythology on a thousand-page canvas. I rank The Stand first because its ambition and emotional scale win out for me, but if you prize perfect execution, The Shining is a completely defensible number one. /wp:paragraph

Q: In what order should I read Stephen King's 1970s books?

wp:paragraph Publication order works well and tracks his growth as a writer: Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, Rage, The Shining, Night Shift, The Stand, The Dead Zone, then The Long Walk. If you want to lead with his best, start with The Stand or 'Salem's Lot. If you're short on time, The Long Walk is the quickest gut-punch of the bunch. /wp:paragraph

Q: Are Stephen King's 1970s books connected to each other?

wp:paragraph Loosely, and it's the start of the web that later became his shared universe. Several are set in fictional Maine towns that recur across his work, The Dead Zone plants the Castle Rock that shows up in many later books, and Randall Flagg, the "dark man" of The Stand, echoes in the shadowy figure at the end of The Long Walk and returns throughout King's career. In the 1970s these are mostly thematic links rather than a formal continuity. /wp:paragraph

Q: Why did Stephen King take Rage out of print?

wp:paragraph Because its subject, a student holding his class hostage at gunpoint, came to sit too close to real school shootings, including cases where disturbed students were found with copies of the book. King decided it could do more harm than good and allowed it to go out of print, and it remains the one novel of his you can't easily buy new. It's covered in full in our Rage episode. /wp:paragraph

FILED	JULY 8, 2026
SUBJECT	Stephen King
SECTION	Rankings

The 1970s were Stephen King at his hungriest. In a single decade, he went from an unknown high school teacher to the most famous horror writer alive, and he did it with eight books that still cast a shadow over everything the genre has done since.

So here’s the whole decade ranked, worst to best: every novel and the one story collection King published between 1974 and 1979, including the two he hid behind the Richard Bachman name. All eight of these have a full Into the King-Verse episode on the channel, linked as we go, if you want the deep dive on any one of them.

A quick note: ranking these means talking about what each book is really doing, so I get into themes, characters, and a few endings along the way. If you’re saving one to read cold, tread carefully in its section. If you’d rather watch the ranked rundown, the video’s right above.

8. Rage (1977, as Richard Bachman)

Someone has to come last, and it’s Rage, the book King himself decided the world was better off without. He let it fall out of print and has kept it there, and you can understand why: it’s the story of a high school senior, Charlie Decker, who shoots a teacher, takes his classroom hostage, and spends the rest of the novel justifying himself in what turns into a twisted group-therapy session. King wrote the first draft as a teenager, and it reads like a teenager’s fury set down before he’d learned how to shape it.

What keeps it from being worthless is the psychology. Charlie is articulate, bleakly funny, and sharp about the hypocrisies of every adult who failed him, and the truly unsettling thing is how his classmates start to see him as a truth-teller. That’s King suggesting there’s something in us that wants to side with the violent outsider when the alternative feels like suffocation.

The idea is strong. The execution is thin, the philosophy is half-baked, and the book can no longer be read apart from the real school violence it now sits beside. King was right to let it go, and it lands at the bottom because he became a far better writer almost immediately after.

7. Night Shift (1978)

I’ll be upfront: short fiction isn’t my favorite form, and that shapes where Night Shift lands. King’s first collection is a greatest-hits album from before he was a household name, and like most greatest-hits albums, it’s uneven. There are real bangers here, “Quitters, Inc.,” “The Boogeyman,” “The Last Rung on the Ladder,” and then there are tracks that feel like a decent idea stretched a little thin.

The value of the collection is watching King stress-test every kind of fear at once: Lovecraftian cosmic dread, body horror, domestic dread, and campfire urban legend. It’s his laboratory, and some of these stories are clearly proof-of-concept pieces while others feel like he’d been carrying them for years. But short stories can’t build the slow architectures of dread that his novels do, and dread built over hundreds of pages is what King is best at. I respect the range on display. I just don’t return to many of these the way I return to the novels, so it sits at seven.

6. Carrie (1974)

Ranking Carrie this low almost feels like a crime, and it only tells you how strong the decade is. I first read it around fifteen or sixteen, the same age as its heroine, and what disturbed me wasn’t the prom massacre. It was the opening shower scene, the casual cruelty of the other girls, captured so precisely that it stayed relevant decades later.

The lasting image everyone carries is blood-soaked Carrie wrecking the town, and that almost makes you forget how carefully King dissects the mechanics of scapegoating underneath it. This is as much an anthropological novel as a horror one.

Carrie White has godlike power and no power at all. Her mother controls her through religious terror, her classmates through exclusion, and King’s real point is that the most dangerous monsters are the institutions and beliefs that decide who counts as human, not the ones with supernatural power.

Margaret White is his first great villain, terrifying precisely because her cruelty comes from total certainty that she’s saving her daughter’s soul. And the fragmented structure, telling the story through news reports and inquiry testimony, so you know the ending from page one, turns the book into an autopsy of a preventable atrocity.

Nearly fifty years on, it still works, because it was never really about telekinesis. It’s about rage as a rational response to being ground down.

5. The Long Walk (1979, as Richard Bachman)

The premise of The Long Walk sounds impossible to sustain: a hundred teenage boys walk, hold four miles an hour, or take a warning, three warnings, and you’re shot; the last one moving wins. Watching people walk for three hundred pages should be dull. It’s one of the most emotionally devastating things King ever wrote, and he did it around nineteen.

It’s also him at his most disciplined and merciless, a whole novel of bodies failing and minds breaking with mechanical efficiency, and it’s his most direct look at American authoritarianism with the metaphor stripped away: a state that murders children for entertainment while the crowd cheers.

The cruelty of the structure is that it makes you hope. You know only one boy lives, and you still start believing your favorites might be the exception, and King does that to you ninety-nine times. He’s writing about Vietnam, about how authoritarian control targets the body first, and about how quickly atrocity turns into background noise once survival eats all your attention.

That a teenager looked at America and saw this tells you everything about the darkness he was working through. If you’ve seen the 2025 film, I broke down everything the adaptation changes in The Long Walk: book vs movie.

4. The Dead Zone (1979)

Reading The Dead Zone now feels like a fever dream because King understood, with unnerving clarity, how a demagogue markets himself in America and what it costs to stand against one.

On the surface, it’s about Johnny Smith, a Maine teacher who wakes from a four-and-a-half-year coma able to see a person’s past and future when he touches them. King makes clear this is no gift. Every handshake is a violation, and the power slowly destroys the life Johnny only wanted back. Throughout the decade, King kept circling back to the same idea: power you didn’t ask for in a world that’s unjust.

Two things push it this high. One is Greg Stillson, a vulgar outsider candidate who runs on working-class anger, wears a hat with his name on it, speaks in slogans, and performs authenticity so effectively that none of his sociopathy sticks. King wrote him in 1979 out of Huey Long and George Wallace, and he reads like a warning we’ve since lived through (twice).

The other is Johnny and his father, Herb. King spent the decade writing about parents who fail catastrophically, and here he finally gives us a good one: a working-class man who simply stays, never doubts his son, and never abandons him. Their quiet scenes are among the most tender pieces of writing King produced in the 1970s. Their relationship made me think about my own dad and how much I miss him.

3. ‘Salem’s Lot (1975)

Dread is the word for ‘Salem’s Lot: the slow realization that a town is being eaten house by house and nobody notices until it’s too late.

Past the surface of the vampire story, it’s about how easily a community cannibalizes itself, and it’s the book where King stopped being a promising debut author and became a master. He spends the first third just introducing Jerusalem’s Lot, the drunk, the realtor, the doctor, the bus driver, because you can’t mourn a community until you know it. Then he destroys it. That patience is the confidence of a writer who knows exactly what he’s doing.

What makes it brilliant is that Barlow doesn’t invade; he simply buys his way in. He purchases the house, sets up a business, and the vampirism spreads along the ordinary bonds that hold the town together: the gravedigger at work, the boys through friendship, and Susan through romance. Your neighbor becomes a predator, your friend a parasite, and the rot turns out to have been there all along.

The scene that still gets me is Danny Glick floating outside Mark Petrie’s window asking to be let in, the familiar made predatory, a dead friend wearing a living face. And Father Callahan, facing Barlow, the moment his faith fails him, might be the single defining scene of King’s entire 1970s run. The only reason it isn’t number one is nostalgia for what beats it.

2. The Shining (1977)

I read The Shining in my late teens and never shook it. Room 217 sent me around the house, turning on every light. I reread it as an adult and was still looking over my shoulder, but by then it wasn’t the woman in the bathtub that frightened me most. It was Jack Torrance.

Having grown up under an alcoholic’s roof, I found he cut close to the bone. If Carrie is King’s first look at inherited violence, this is where he mastered it: abuse as legacy, handed down like genetic code, wearing down resistance until the cycle repeats. For me, it’s the most psychologically devastating book he’s written.

The Overlook doesn’t possess Jack. It reveals him. King, fighting his own drinking as he wrote it, gives us a man who loves his son, is trying to be better, and is losing, and then externalizes his psychology through the hotel.

Lloyd, the bartender, is his alcoholism; the woman in 217 is his guilt; Grady, who murdered his own family, is the permission Jack is looking for. The hotel is a mirror, and what it reflects is his father’s rage, the violence he swore he’d never repeat. It’s very nearly a perfect novel, and it still comes in second, which should tell you something about what’s at the top.

1. The Stand (1978)

The first time I read The Stand I was burned out on reading, the way high school can do to you, until a teacher handed me the uncut edition and I fell back in love with books over three or four weeks. It’s monumental in size and in every other way.

There’s an early scene, Campion crashing his car into a gas station with the superflu already loose, where you watch the end of America arrive, and from there it becomes an apocalypse that somehow stays intimate and personal.

The “No Great Loss” chapter might be my favorite chapter in any book. One by one, people we’ve never met die, and King makes every death matter. You keep asking how he’s making you mourn strangers. That’s the whole novel in miniature: his most complete vision of America, its violence and potential and failures and stubborn hope, reaching past horror toward myth.

It runs in three movements, apocalyptic collapse, a psychic sorting of survivors toward Mother Abagail or Randall Flagg, and the final confrontation, and Flagg is one of my favorite villains in all of genre fiction, an ancient evil under a dozen names who’s lived in my head for twenty years.

So why does it beat The Shining, which is the more perfect book? Because it’s more ambitious. The Shining is King mastering what he already knew how to do. The Stand is King attempting something he’d never tried, an American answer to The Lord of the Rings, and mostly pulling it off.

It’s messier, the Boulder stretch sags, the ending divides people, but those are the costs of swinging for the fences, and the ambition matters more to me than the polish. Every time I finish it, I don’t want to leave. That’s the mark of a masterpiece.

The decade, in one breath

Eight books in six years, from Carrie to The Dead Zone, and across all of them, King kept teaching the same lesson: the real horror is the systems that fail us, the institutions that betray us, and the monsters who live here with us, wearing familiar faces, not ghosts or vampires or telekinetic teenagers. Done right, it’s a reckoning. That’s your ranking. Now tell me how wrong I am about it in the comments, especially if you’d put ‘Salem’s Lot over The Stand.

Read or hear my number one

Mysterious Galaxies is a Libro.fm and Bookshop.org affiliate. If you buy the audiobook or physical book through the links below, the channel earns a small commission at no extra cost to you. If any book from this decade is worth starting with, my pick is The Stand.

FAQs

What books did Stephen King publish in the 1970s?

Across the decade King published eight books: Carrie (1974), ‘Salem’s Lot (1975), Rage (1977, as Richard Bachman), The Shining (1977), Night Shift (1978), The Stand (1978), The Dead Zone (1979), and The Long Walk (1979, as Richard Bachman). Seven are novels and one, Night Shift, is a short story collection.

What is the best Stephen King book of the 1970s?

My pick is The Stand (1978). The Shining is arguably the more perfect novel, but The Stand is the more ambitious one, King reaching past horror to write a kind of American myth, and its scope and the way it makes you mourn a country’s worth of strangers put it at the top for me. It’s a close call with ‘Salem’s Lot and The Shining, and reasonable readers rank all three differently.

What is the worst Stephen King book of the 1970s?

I put Rage (1977) last. It’s the raw, thin Bachman novel about a school shooting that King himself pulled out of print, and while its psychology is sharp, its philosophy is undercooked and its execution is the weakest of the decade. “Worst” is relative here, though, since it’s still a decade where King was rapidly becoming one of the best writers of his generation.

What was Stephen King’s first novel?

Carrie (1974) was his first published novel and the book that made his name. He’d actually written Rage and The Long Walk earlier, as a college student, but both were held back and published later under the Richard Bachman pseudonym, so Carrie is the first King novel to reach readers.

Which 1970s King books were written as Richard Bachman?

Two: Rage (1977) and The Long Walk (1979). Bachman was the pen name King used for the rawer, meaner material he and his publisher felt didn’t fit the “Stephen King” brand. He wrote both books years before they were published, and later revealed himself as Bachman in the mid-1980s.

Is The Stand better than The Shining?

It depends on what you value. The Shining is tighter, more elegant, and close to flawless in craft. The Stand is bigger, messier, and more ambitious, an attempt at American mythology on a thousand-page canvas. I rank The Stand first because its ambition and emotional scale win out for me, but if you prize perfect execution, The Shining is a completely defensible number one.

In what order should I read Stephen King’s 1970s books?

Publication order works well and tracks his growth as a writer: Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, Rage, The Shining, Night Shift, The Stand, The Dead Zone, then The Long Walk. If you want to lead with his best, start with The Stand or ‘Salem’s Lot. If you’re short on time, The Long Walk is the quickest gut-punch of the bunch.

Are Stephen King’s 1970s books connected to each other?

Loosely, and it’s the start of the web that later became his shared universe. Several are set in fictional Maine towns that recur across his work, The Dead Zone plants the Castle Rock that shows up in many later books, and Randall Flagg, the “dark man” of The Stand, echoes in the shadowy figure at the end of The Long Walk and returns throughout King’s career. In the 1970s these are mostly thematic links rather than a formal continuity.

Why did Stephen King take Rage out of print?

Because its subject, a student holding his class hostage at gunpoint, came to sit too close to real school shootings, including cases where disturbed students were found with copies of the book. King decided it could do more harm than good and allowed it to go out of print, and it remains the one novel of his you can’t easily buy new. It’s covered in full in our Rage episode.

Sources

Wikipedia, “Stephen King bibliography” (publication years and the Richard Bachman attributions for the 1970s titles)
Wikipedia, “Rage (King novel)” (King allowing the novel to go out of print and its connection to real school-violence cases)
The channel’s own episodes on each book, linked throughout, for the readings and character detail.