10 Scariest Stephen King Novels
4. The Stand
By 1978, King had three novels and a short story collection to his name (plus a fourth novel under his pseudonym Richard Bachman). Next came what was to be one of his longest and most enduringly popular novels, centred on one of the key themes of horror: the end of the world as we know it.
823 pages long in its first published edition, and later reissued in an extended version reaching a whopping 1,152 pages, The Stand is a bona fide epic in any form. It was also in some respects a divergence from his existing work, as it moved into shades of mythic fantasy, as would be explored more deeply in the Dark Tower series.
Even so, The Stand remains seriously scary stuff. Once again demonstrating his knack for painting eerily plausible pictures of the unthinkable occurring in the everyday world, the early part of the novel explores in lingering detail how a deadly virus spreads across the world, eventually wiping out the bulk of the population.
As if that wasn't unnerving enough, we then see how the lucky few to be immune face up to a grim post-apocalyptic world - under the shadow of another of King's scariest antagonists, Randall Flagg (a character revisited as The Dark Tower's Man in Black).