Stephen King has no doubt forgotten writing more books than most of us will ever publish. But even now, in his prolific “late career,” if you ask him to name his own most favored works, he can do it without hesitation. Stephen Colbert tried that out a few years ago on The Late Show, when the writer made an appearance to promote his then-latest book Billy Summers. The first of Stephen King’s top five by Stephen King is “Survivor Type,” a 1982 short story about “a physician who gets stranded on a little island, and he’s smuggling heroin, and he’s starving, so he eats himself piece by piece.”
“Survivor Type” may be a deep cut — and one that initially struggled for publication, being so disturbing that King remembers “even men’s magazines” turning it down — but it’s nevertheless been adapted into five different films since the twenty-tens alone. King may have enjoyed massive book sales throughout almost the entirety of his career, but it certainly hasn’t hurt his brand that so many of his works have become movies and television shows, many of them cultural phenomena in their own right. Take the case of Misery, another of King’s selections, the 1990 feature-film version of which gave us Kathy Bates’ Oscar-winning performance as a crazed fan who kidnaps her favorite novelist.
Misery was directed by Rob Reiner, who’d worked with King’s material before: in 1986, he turned the story “The Body” into Stand by Me, which is now considered a high point in the categories of eighties teen-star vehicles and early-sixties nostalgia pictures. After seeing its first screening, King declared it “the best film ever made out of anything I’ve written” — before characteristically adding, “which isn’t saying much.” (That same year, recall, King not just wrote but directed Maximum Overdrive, a spectacle of malevolent machines taking over a truck stop that he later described as a “moron movie.”)
King also enthuses about his 2006 novel Lisey’s Story, as well as its Apple TV+ series adaptation, which had just come out at the time. Also still-new was the second televisual rendition of The Stand, King’s 1978 novel set in the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic. “Any similarities to what’s going on now are just too close for comfort,” he says to Colbert in this COVID-era clip, though it’s ambiguous whether the book actually makes his top five. Colbert suggests filling out the list with Billy Summers, presumably on the principle that every writer favors his most recent work. But where would King rank the three novels he’s cranked out since?
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How Stanley Kubrick Adapted Stephen King’s The Shining into a Cinematic Masterpiece
Pretty Much Pop #18 Discusses Stephen King’s Media Empire
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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