The Stand (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $8.99) – From Amazon:
This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death.
And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides — or are chosen. A world in which good rides on the frail shoulders of the 108-year-old Mother Abigail — and the worst nightmares of evil are embodied in a man with a lethal smile and unspeakable powers: Randall Flagg, the dark man.
In 1978 Stephen King published The Stand, the novel that is now considered to be one of his finest works. But as it was first published, The Stand was incomplete, since more than 150,000 words had been cut from the original manuscript.
Now Stephen King’s apocalyptic vision of a world blasted by plague and embroiled in an elemental struggle between good and evil has been restored to its entirety. The Stand : The Complete And Uncut Edition includes more than five hundred pages of material previously deleted, along with new material that King added as he reworked the manuscript for a new generation. It gives us new characters and endows familiar ones with new depths. It has a new beginning and a new ending. What emerges is a gripping work with the scope and moral comlexity of a true epic.
For hundreds of thousands of fans who read The Stand in its original version and wanted more, this new edition is Stephen King’s gift. And those who are reading The Stand for the first time will discover a triumphant and eerily plausible work of the imagination that takes on the issues that will determine our survival.
It (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $9.99) – From an Amazon customer review:
In the summer of 1958, seven friends encountered something horrible in their town of Derry, Maine. This something fed on children, hunting them, preying on them, and devouring them. It could shape itself in any way It liked, whatever their nightmares suited, but always with one trademark: the semblance of a clown. The seven friends all had something in common: They had all escaped It at some point. And in that summer, they learned about It, confronted It, and killed It… or so they thought.
28 years later… A boy named Adrian Mellon is apparently thrown off a bridge by two other boys for his sexuality. It seems like an open-and-shut case, but the boys claim that there was something down below… a clown and a cloud of balloons.
Soon the friends are being called back to Derry, told that It is back. They made a vow, sealed in blood, to return if It wasn’t dead. Each of them is now very successful, and the thought of returning to Derry, of going back to the horror that they’d all forgotten, is more than they can bear, but they had made a promise.
The Shining (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $7.99) – From Amazon:
Terrible events occur at an isolated hotel in the off season, when a small boy with psychic powers struggles to hold his own against the forces of evil that are driving his father insane.
Also see the excellent Stanley Kubrick film adaptation of The Shining (Amazon Instant Video currently priced at $2.99 to rent and $9.99 to buy), starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall.
Night Shift (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $7.99) – From Amazon:
More than twenty-five stories of horror and nightmarish fantasy transform everyday situations into experiences of compelling terror in the worlds of the living, the dying, and the nonliving.
This is just the smallest fraction of King’s body of work. Click here to view Amazon’s full catalog of Stephen King books in Kindle format.