By Matthew McConkey
When I'm asked, as I often am, what I think are King's most underrated books, I have a quick response. It's a fast response because my list hasn't changed over the years. And some of his underrated novels are favorites of mine.
So, here are my 10 Underrated Stephen King Books in no particular order:
Lisey's Story - This novel explores long-term marriages at the forefront and the secret worlds that husbands and wives share and create together. It's about a type of undecipherable language that long-time married people have that outsiders can't understand. It's also about the death of a life partner and what has to be done in their wake. It's one of those novels that you have to have some marriage years under your belt to get, like 20-plus years, to fully understand what one has to go through after the death of a spouse.
.jpg)
From a Buick 8- This novel will never be on anyone's list of good books by King. At least I've never come across a list that includes it. With that being said, 'Buick 8 is on my list of most underrated novels. To me, it's a homerun and one of my personal favorite novels. The book deals with death. Much like a lot of King's work, death is a substantial chunk of what his characters have to deal with. In this book, it's no different. This novel deals with a son trying to cope with his father's death and the obsession that his father had over an otherworldly car over the decades. At the heart of 'Buick 8, the son just wants to know who his dad was.
.jpg)
Roadwork- Written under the Richard Bachman name, King paints us a novel where a man, who could be any of us, refuses to give up his home in the name of progress. What happens is that a road is being built through his neighborhood, and all of his neighbors have sold their homes, homes where they raised their families. After the death of his son and his marriage burning away, we see a broken man made unstable by the events of his life. The road coming through was the breaker. The home was all he had in his life, and state officials were trying to take it away from him. This novel is truly an underrated piece of work if there was any.
Delores Claiborne - This book features one of King's strongest female character leads. And one of the best stories that he's written in years. Why do I put this novel on an underrated list if it's so damn good? It's because it hasn't received much fanfare since its publication. Why, I don't know. What Delores Claiborne is is a tour de force where one woman has had enough of her abusive husband over the years. The thing that pushes her over the edge is the fact that her husband had sexually molested their daughter. From there, Delores devises a plan to exact revenge on Joe for all his terrible deeds over the years. Plus, there's a really cool connection to another underrated novel, Gerald's Game, where the events of both books occur during a solar eclipse. How cool is that?
Gerald's Game - Another book by Stephen King, in which a strong female character is the driving force of the novel. In this novel, Jessie Burlingame is forced to deal with a past experience in the form of being molested by her father during a solar eclipse, the same solar eclipse as in Delores Claiborne. Jessie is handcuffed to the bedposts of a bed during sex while her dead husband lies dead on the floor from a heart attack. To make matters worse, all this happened out at their secluded lake house. Jessie has to deal with the impending doom of never getting herself uncuffed from the bed and perhaps dying while having to deal with the voices inside her head, who bring out the repressed feelings of long ago. This book examines how we cope with traumatic events in our lives and how we, as individuals, process them mentally to move forward.
Bag of Bones- This is a really neat story. It's part haunted house story, part love story, part murder mystery. All three elements combined in Bag of Bones make for one fantastic read. This book explores another of King's death narratives, in which Mike Noonan, the main character, has suffered the untimely loss of his wife. Dealing with and reeling from her death, Mike decides to visit the cabin where they stayed, and he discovers that maybe his wife is there with him. The murder mystery part of the novel comes when Mike begins to piece together what exactly his wife was doing at the cabin before her death, and what she was doing puts Mike in connection with a deadly secret from long ago.
Dreamcatcher- I call this book an IT part 2...sort of. It has all the elements of that classic book: A gang of best friends from childhood to adulthood, set in the town of Derry, and dealing with something not of this world. Sound familiar? Dreamcatcher is one of those novels that invokes the memory of King's masterstroke, IT, and why not? Even though it's nowhere on par with that book, what Dreamcatcher manages to do is throw the reader into a world where you have to keep turning the pages, especially the last 150, to see if these guys prevail over Mr. Gray. Much like other King stories, the characters in Dreamcatcher have to deal with an outside disturbance in their everyday lives.
Finders Keepers- This is the strongest novel in the Mr. Mercedes trilogy. The narrative is one we've seen before in Misery, but King is able to turn the plot of an obsessive fan into a subplot of the story. Even though the book is the second entry into the trilogy, it doesn't feel like the middle book. Finders Keepers can stand on its own thanks to familiar characters that drive it. To me, this is a heavily underrated novel.
Needful Things- One of my favorite novels from King. However, there is a turn-off here. The turn-off is that Stephen King gets really wordy and profoundly descriptive in his town of Castle Rock. In the story itself, the characters save the book. It's not a unique story at all. It centers on a store opening in Castle Rock called Needful Things, where the owner sells you what your heart desires. But in return, you are indebted to Leyland Gaunt, the owner of the store, to perform a deed, a prank on someone of his choosing in town. After Leyland gives nearly everyone in Castle Rock what they want, and after all the pranks and deeds are finished, the shop owner watches all the chaos ensue as the townspeople fight one another in total murder, bedlam, and bloodshed. This book had a message hidden inside of it: What price would you pay to have the one thing you've always wanted?
The Dark Half- You never see this one on any good or bad list. The Dark Half is a novel I think is buried beneath all of King's other work and goes nearly unnoticed. The book is straightforward, exploring the duality of the human experience. In true King fashion, the duality of man comes to life as writer Thad Beaumont's pen name, George Stark, becomes a living, breathing entity bent on killing his creator. This is a kick-ass story with a touch of Frankenstein. Plus, as a neat side note, Sheriff Alan Pangborn, who was also the main character of Needful Things, is in this book trying to help Thad.
