(UPDATE: links now go to a full 300dpi version of the image!)
Is a complete list of all of Stephen King’s written works even possible?
This is a question I have pondered for some time. Many people say they’ve read all of Stephen King’s works, but what does that even mean? Have you read all his novels? All the short story collections? What about the uncollected short stories? Some of them are hard, if not impossible, to get copies of. And what of the various essays, or transcripts of interviews or speeches? The graphic novel adaptations? There is so much material out there that it is almost impossible to compile a complete list.
I like a challenge, and I figured if I can compile a time line of The Dark Tower series then surely I can make a simple list of Stephen King’s works? How hard can it be, really? So with that aim, I began assembling as much information as I could about all of Stephen King’s written works.
And then I thought, “why stop there?” Many Constant Readers may brag that they have read all of Stephen King’s books, but do they not then go on to say they’ve watched all the movie and television adaptations of his work as well? And the sequels, and the “loosely based on” adaptations? And so I also researched these, and came up with a fairly definitive list.
This is what I ended up with.
I know, I know – you cannot read it! That’s not surprising, given the immensity of the works included. To appreciate it in all its glory, download the full size, full resolution image here, and zoom in.
You can see from the image that there is a time line (of course!) down the left hand side of the image, showing years progressing from 1974 through to 2022. Then across the top are column headings showing what’s in each column as you move across the image from left to right. They are as follows: –
Novel adaptations
These are pretty much what you’d expect – film and television adaptations of the various novels written by Stephen King. Link lines join each adaptation to the work it is an adaptation of. Due to lack of space, there is only a link line to the first adaptation of a work (so, for instance, Kubrick’s The Shining adaptation gets a link line to the novel The Shining, but, ironically, Stephen King’s The Shining adaptation does not).
Also listed are sequels to those adaptations, but these are shown as grey text in parentheses, since they are not actual adaptations of Stephen King’s work. However, all true completists will want to see all the sequels so I’ve listed them here.
Novels and other novel-length books (and graphic novel adaptations)
This is where things start to get a bit complex. Most lists of “all Stephen King books” contain most of the listings in this column. I’ve included all his novels, but have also included Danse Macabre, On Writing, and Faithful, which are non-fiction but are novel-length books.
In grey text and in brackets I’ve included “adaptations” and “sequels” (for want of a better word) to Stephen King’s novels. This means I’ve included The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life as Rose Red here. This is a novel written by Ridley Pearson, related to the television miniseries Rose Red, the screenplay of which was written by Stephen King. I’ve included comic books and graphic novels of Stephen King’s work positioned slightly to the right of the main list, in small text. I consider these to be adaptations of King’s novels, so again they’re in grey text and in square parentheses. The square parentheses (as opposed to rounded parentheses) indicate a graphic novel adaptation.
Link lines extend in both directions from most entries in this column: either to the left, to link with the first film or television adaptation of the work, or else to the right, to link with shorter stories or novellas or excerpts that make up the work.
Finally, the entries in this column are colour-coded, so that connected works are presented in the same colour. Hence all the Dark Tower novels are shown on a light blue background, the Bill Hodges Trilogy are on a pale yellow background, and so on.
Collections
Entries in the Collections column fall into three categories: collections of short stories, collections of novels or novellas, and collections of works about the craft of writing (i.e. Secret Windows). Link lines primarily extend to the right, showing the short stories, novellas, essays and so forth that appear in each collection. However, in the case of The Bachman Books, the link lines extend to the left to show the four (now three) Bachman novels that appear in that collection. Each set of link lines are colour-coded with the collection, so that it is easier to see which works are collected in which collection.
Shown below are the details for the collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. This collection includes the novellas UR and Blockade Billy, as well as many short stories including the short story Morality. Note also that Blockade Billy was published as a separate novella that also included the short story Morality – hence the dashed link line directly from Blockade Billy to Morality.
Novellas
Novellas are an interesting beast: answers to the questions of when a novella becomes a novel, or a short story become a novella, are hard to pin down. I attempted to determine the relative length of these works, or to define a specific word count cut-off at which these transitions take place, but I could not find detailed information on word count. Going by page number is likewise problematic, since page size and font size and line spacing all come into play here. I even compiled a list of the duration of audiobook versions of these works, but again it can be hard to find the data of individual works, and the duration is dependent on the speed and style of narration.
In the end I simply referred to the author: on StephenKing.com there is a list of novels and novellas, and I have used it as a guide as to which of King’s works he considers to be novellas. And they are listed here.
Note I have included Gwendy’s Magic Feather in this list, colour-coded with the other two Gwendy works, but in smaller grey text to indicate it as a kind-of “adaptation”, since it is written by Richard Chizmar alone, without King’s input.
Link lines in the Novella column either extend to the left, to indicate if they are collected in one of the Collections listings, or to the right to link to film or television adaptations of the work. As shown below, link lines from the novella Mr Harrigan’s Phone extend to the left, showing that it is included in the collection If It Bleeds, but also to the extreme right column of short story and novella adaptations.
Short stories, essays, poems, interviews
This column is naturally the fullest, since King has written so many works that fall into one of these categories. Consequently the font size is very small so that I can fit everything in on a single poster-sized list!
I’ve left-justified all the short stories and poems, and right-justified the non-fiction works: essays and interview transcripts. Colour-coding continues here, showing all short stories from the same collection in the same colour.
Link lines to the left show where a story was collected (if it has been), while those to the right connect to film and television adaptations of the works.
It is sometimes the case that so many of these short works were published in a single year that I have had to distort the background colour bar (charcoal / darker charcoal) so that works from a particular year align with the years listed on the left of the poster. I’ve listed them in chronological order, as best I can.
There are many known stories and poems that Stephen King wrote between 1956 and the late 1970s which have never been collected or officially published, or perhaps have only been published as part of an anthology years after their writing. I’ve included many of these stories in a separate paragraph at the top right of the column (starting with Jhonathan and the Witches). These are the stories that are probably hardest to find, and indeed some only appear in Stephen King’s personal collection (see, for example, the self-published People, Places and Things), but I include them to be complete (or at least, fairly complete 🙂 )
Some of the short stories in this column are excerpts from novels that appeared in magazines (for example, The Bear, Lisey and the Madman, Memory). Some of these were early versions of what eventually appeared in the novels, and have been included for that reason. However, I understand that other pre-publication excerpts exist that I have not included. This is where my research becomes sketchy, and one of the reasons why the list is only fairly complete.
Regarding interview and speech transcripts, I have included all those published in Secret Windows, as well as any that were listed at StephenKing.com. There are probably hundreds more interviews out there on the web, and presumably many have been transcribed by someone, somewhere, but for whatever reason they are not listed on Stephen King’s website and I have not attempted to included them all here.
Short story adaptations
This is the final column, on the far right of the poster. It lists film and television adaptations of the short stories and novellas, together with other film and television works that Stephen King has written the screenplays or stories for, although those screenplays or stories may not be generally available to the public. Examples include Sleepwalkers and Kingdom Hospital. The image here shows, using red link lines, four of the stories that were adapted in the original Creepshow.
This column also includes sequels and “loosely based on” adaptations of Stephen King’s works (including the countless sequels to Children of the Corn!) As usual, these are shown in small grey text, in parentheses. For the completists.
Note that I have listed the names of television shows that include at least one episode dedicated to a King adaptation, and these entries are shown as underlined. Examples include Tales from the Darkside, and The X-Files.
Should it really be included?
It’s difficult to categorise all of King’s work into six headings, and so I have naturally taken some liberties in what I have and have not included. Bev Vincent’s latest book (see references), which I only received at the tail end of this project, drew my attention to a few of King’s works that I wasn’t aware of, or else I had initially decided to exclude.
The first of these is the non-traditional musical titled Ghost Brothers of Darkland County. According to Vincent, King worked on this over several years with John Mellencamp, and that King “turned the concept into a complex Southern Gothic tale”. That sounds to me like a Stephen King work, so I have included it in the list of Short Story Adaptations.
Another inclusion that might not truly fit is the musical theatre adaptation of Carrie. I initially thought not to include this, however, on reflection it seems to me that it is definitely an adaptation of Stephen King’s first published novel, and so was worthy of inclusion in the left hand column: “Novel adaptations”. Bev Vincent’s book contains (on page 219) a list of other non-movie or TV adaptations, that includes various stage shows of King’s novels, as well as the relatively recent audio podcast rendering of Strawberry Spring. I decided to include Carrie, since it is an established stage musical with its own accompanying book and score, and also Strawberry Spring, since it is still accessible (and freely available) on many podcasting services. These other stage adaptations seem more like one-off events, and so it could be argued that they don’t warrant inclusion in this list. At least, that is what I have argued.
Have I read them all?
In short, no.
I’ve read all of the traditionally available novels and novel-length books (column 2), except for Faithful. I have no interest in, and only a marginal understanding of, baseball, so I figure what is the point?
While I’ve read most of all of the collections (column 3), I couldn’t bring myself to listen to Head Down, for similar reasons to leaving out Faithful. I’m really not interested in Owen King’s baseball season, even if it is written wonderfully.
I’m not terribly interested in graphic novels and comics, so have not delved into these adaptations. I may one day take a look at the Dark Tower graphic novels, just out of interest, but it’s not high on my list of priorities.
I’ve read one of the uncollected short stories (namely, Red Screen), so there’s a lot still for me to explore there.
As for movies and TV shows, I’m surprised that I have now seen 23 of the primary adaptations from column one (Novel Adaptations), and 10 from column six (Short Story Adaptations).
I have not seen a single adaptation of Children of the Corn, and for now I intend to keep it that way!
References
I have used many sources to compile this list. First and foremost is Stephen King’s official web site, which gives lots of information about almost all the titles on this list. It is searchable, and you can select which type of work you are looking for (Novels, Short Stories, etc). You can find it here: –
Additionally, I obtained a lot of information from Wikipedia, including
Unpublished and uncollected works by Stephen King
Stephen King short fiction bibliography
List of adaptations of works by Stephen King
I was lucky enough to recently obtain my copy of
Stephen King: A Compete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences by Stephen King guru Bev Vincent
Mt Vincent’s book has a handy set of appendices at the end which lists King’s officially published works, as well as all adaptations. This provided a handy check of the work I’d put in already, and helped me ensure I had everything in the correct chronological order. The text also provided guidance of some of the more esoteric publications, a few of which I had not yet found.
Finally, I have obtained lots of useful information from Twitter user @stephenkingjrny, (now on mastodon as @stephenkingjourney@mastodon.sdf.org) a person who is going through all of Stephen King’s works somewhat chronologically, including listening to key podcast episodes about each one. What a project! At time of writing they are up to day 317 of their journey.
Conclusion
So there you have it – a fairly complete, chronological list of Stephen King’s works, as well as adaptations of them, with some justification of what I included and why. Please download, print out, and enjoy!
Long days and pleasant nights,
Chris
Charting The Tower 