10 Scariest Stephen King Novels

The one that started it all, 1974's Carrie remains a watershed moment for horror literature, which two years later would make a similar mark in cinema; Brian De Palma's 1976 film went on to spawn the oft-forgotten 1999 sequel The Rage: Carrie 2, a 2002 TV movie originally planned as the pilot for a series, and a 2013 remake from director Kimberley Pierce.

Yet for all these screen reinterpretations (to say nothing of the many books, films and TV shows to show its influence), King's original novel retains a tremendous power of its own.

As with King's subsequent work, a sense of verisimilitude intensifies the scares; but in Carrie this is achieved by somewhat different means than his later work, as it is an epistolary novel (i.e. written in the form of letters/journal entries/newspaper articles, like Dracula before it and World War Z since).

Above all, Carrie underlines that key truth about horror which genre devotees have long understood: the supposed monster is almost always the character most demanding of our sympathy, whose deplorable deeds are rooted in their own pain.

As the put-upon teenage outsider treated with cruelty at every turn, until her telekinetic powers develop to the point that she can no longer hold them back, Carrie White is at once one of the most terrifying yet inherently sympathetic characters in horror history.