The 20 Scariest Stephen King Short Stories
By now, we all know that the legendary Stephen King is capable of doing many more things than scaring us. He can move us, make us laugh, make us cry, and make us ponder the depth of his ideas for hours at a stretch. But through it all, King has never lost his tight grip on all the things that terrify us most, and nowhere is that more evident than his vast and diverse body of short fiction.
So, with Halloween on the horizon, I gathered up what I find to be the 20 most frightening short stories in King’s entire output, from early tales to recent releases. I tried to avoid longer pieces like novellas wherever possible (with one notable exception), and they’re presented here in rough chronological order based on when they were collected, so you know exactly which book to pick up if you want to be scared out of your wits by Halloween night.
Enjoy, Constant Readers.
Children of the Corn
A story so famous that you probably know what it’s about even if you’ve never read it or seen the movie, “Children of the Corn” has lost none of its horrifying power over the decades.
It follows a couple as they head into a small Nebraska town while on a road trip, only to find that all the adults have been murdered and the children have turned into monstrous worshippers of a mysterious corn deity. It’s a frightening idea, but in this case, it’s what King doesn’t show us, what he only suggests lurking behind the rows and rows of corn, that really gets under your skin.
Read It In: Night Shift (1978)
Graveyard Shift
There are many different kinds of terror lurking in Stephen King’s short stories, from the psychological to the human to the utterly existential. Then there’s “Graveyard Shift,” which goes for pure, gut-churning creature feature panic.
Set in an old textile mill and inspired by King’s own work history, it’s the story of a group of men who are cleaning out the mill’s basement and find it infested with rats. But not just rats. Monster rats like you’ve never seen or heard of before. It’s a wonderful exercise in imaginative grossness, and by the time the rats are scrabbling down the throats of their human victims, you’ll be struggling to hold the book open.
Read It In: Night Shift (1978)
I Am The Doorway
The premise here is simple: An astronaut goes to space, comes home, and develops a weird physical condition which suggests he’s become a doorway for an alien parasite of some kind.
What makes it undeniably creepy is the condition itself: A series of eyes that have opened up all over the astronaut’s hands. It’s an image so horrifying that it was actually used as the cover for some paperback editions of Night Shift, and it’ll make your hands itch for hours after you’ve read it.
Read It In: Night Shift (1978)
The Mangler
King’s early stories, published in the days before his first novel hit print, are tight, sharply crafted tales of gore and shock designed to appeal to readers of men’s magazines like Cavalier, and “The Mangler” is one of the peaks of that era of pulpy fun.
It is, quite simply, a story about a cursed laundry folding machine and the awful things it does to people, but it’s done so effectively, and with such stomach-churning energy, that you’ll barely want to touch your own dryer when it’s over.
Read It In: Night Shift (1978)
The Jaunt
In the future, humanity has invented a means of teleportation that requires subjects to be completely unconscious, lest they witness the infinite terrors of the trip as they pass through wormholes. It’s a great sci-fi hook, and King uses it to turn a very familiar trope—a family on a big trip—into one of the most terrifying things you will ever read.
There’s a reason this story comes up over and over again in discussions of the scariest horror short fiction ever published, and it’s all in the way King brings this tale in for a landing.
Read It In: Skeleton Crew (1985)
The Monkey
King has an incredible gift for adding depth and color to a very simple premise, and with “The Monkey” he turns that gift on the cursed toy subgenre of horror fiction.
It’s a very straightforward setup: A man returns to one of his family’s homes with his sons and finds an old cymbal-banging monkey toy that he thought he’d thrown away decades ago. The monkey is cursed, the family is in danger, and our hero must relive all the traumas of his past in order to understand exactly how far he must go to solve the problem. It’s a wonderful character piece and a great cursed object riff, and you’ll be seeing that monkey in your dreams for quite a while.
Read It In: Skeleton Crew (1985)
Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut
A legendary old woman obsessed with finding shortcuts between places gets under the skin of an elderly man after he hears her story, and starts to consider whether or not she might be onto something. What happens next is one of the most delightfully strange, most gradually unhinged King stories you’ll find anywhere.
What the shortcuts themselves actually are is frightening enough, but it gets more frightening when you realize the effect those shortcuts have on humans. It’s the perfect companion piece for “The Jaunt.”
Read It In: Skeleton Crew (1985)
Survivor Type
One of the single most viscerally upsetting things King has ever written, “Survivor Type” is the diary of a doctor who’s washed ashore after a shipwreck on a deserted island.
Disgraced and desperate to get back into the medical profession, he’s carrying with him a shipment of smuggled heroin and not much else. As he slowly loses his grip on his sanity, he starts to contemplate how much of himself he might be able to eat while still remaining alive to be rescued, and the rest…well, just read it. With the lights on. On an empty stomach.
Read It In: Skeleton Crew (1985)
Crouch End
One of King’s occasional forays into H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, “Crouch End” follows a missing persons investigation in the London neighborhood of the same name, which is both a real place and, in the story, a kind of doorway to creatures beyond our understanding.
Unfolding from the point-of-view of a pair of police officers and a woman who’s lost her husband, it’s a slow, often charming descent into the kind of wide-eyed terror Lovecraft fans know so well, and still ranks among the best stories ever to dabble in the realms of this particular horror mythos.
Read It In: Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993)
The Moving Finger
A man is just trying to watch Jeopardy at home in his apartment, when he notices a strange sight in the bathroom sink: A finger, sticking up out of the drain, wriggling. What starts as something that’s simply odd soon turns into a maelstrom of madness, as the man must study his newfound opponent, fight it, and eventually defeat or go mad trying.
It’s another of those amazing examples of King taking something extremely simple and transforming it into an absolute nightmare.
Read It In: Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993)
The Night Flier
A tabloid journalist is on the hunt for a serial killer with vampiric tendencies, named “The Night Flier” because he always seems to strike at small airports after nighttime trips in his private plane. While trying to land the story of his career, the reporter encounters the Night Flier, and finds those rumors of vampirism are all too founded in fact.
A darkly funny look at tabloid sensationalism and a genuinely inventive vampire tale, “The Night Flier” is also worth remembering for one of the scariest scenes ever to take place in a men’s room, which is really saying something.
Read It In: Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993)
Suffer the Little Children
One of King’s 1970s stories that was finally collected in the 1990s, this chilling little tale follows a school teacher who begins to suspect that her students are demons. As in literal demons, monsters sent to torment her and hide through shapeshifting. But is it real, or is it all in the teacher’s head?
King rides that line wonderfully while also delivering a modern spin on the legend of the changeling, and it’ll have you looking twice at every kid you see for a bit.
Read It In: Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993)
1408
You’d think King had probably used up all of his haunted hotel tricks with The Shining, but you’d be wrong. Decades after that book, he returned to hotels with this story about an evil hotel room that traps one skeptical writer and puts him through a gauntlet of terror.
The story began in King’s nonfiction book On Writing, where its opening scene was used as an example of how to edit a story, and eventually grew into one of the most beloved King tales of the past 25 years. Why? Well, it’s all because of what lurks behind that hotel room door, and just how far King is able to go with just four walls and a lot of fear.
Read It In: Everything’s Eventual (2002)
Lunch at the Gotham Cafe
A crumbling marriage meets a violent madman in this vivid tale, inspired, according to King, by nothing more than a sly wink from a maitre’d at a restaurant.
It begins with an already frightening scenario to many – two parties in a dissolving marriage meeting for lunch to go over pending divorce agreements – then escalates to levels of absolute savagery when one of the restaurant staff goes on a violent rampage. The rampage itself is great horror writing, but what makes the story sing is how well King is able to interweave it with the dynamics of this marriage gone wrong.
Read It In: Everything’s Eventual (2002)
The Man in the Black Suit
One of the single most acclaimed pieces of writing King has ever produced is also one of his most terrifying. Inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” it follows a young boy who encounters the Devil in the woods while he’s out one day fishing.
That’s the core of the tale, and it’s certainly a spooky premise, but it’s the way the King centers that premise in a story of memory, existential fear, and the certainty of death that makes it soar. It’s one of King’s best short stories, and the sheer force of his depiction of the Devil will leave you squirming.
Read It In: Everything’s Eventual (2002)
N.
This one is more of a novella than a short story, but it appears in one of the short fiction collections, and it’s just so good that we can’t help but stretch to fit it in.
Inspired by Arthur Machen’s legendary tale “The Great God Pan,” the story follows a group of people who are all slowly consumed by the same obsession with a circle of stones in a field in Maine and its possible connection to an otherworldly monster. The monster is definitely important, but what makes this tale truly terrifying is the slow descent into madness it depicts, and how well King anchors the cosmic terror of the story within the simple quirks we all deal with every day.
Read It In: Just After Sunset (2008)
The Dune
King is great at tales of quiet obsession, at depicting people who fixate on a seemingly simple thing until, through their thinking or some other supernatural intervention, that thing is imbued with an unearthly power.
This story, about a dying man thinking back on the power of a death-foretelling sand dune, is a remarkable example of King’s gift for horrific obsession, a great meditation on mortality, and a chilling depiction of how the little things get us in the end.
Read It In: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2002)
The Little Green God of Agony
What if pain had a shape, a form that could be transferred and expelled? That’s the hook in “The Little Green God of Agony,” in which a preacher convinces a billionaire that he can relieve his chronic pain by getting rid of a “demon-god” inside him.
It’s a fun concept, and King uses it to explore everything from the nature of belief and capitalism, to what real pain is in a world full of suffering. It might sound simple, but it’s another of those classic examples of King growing his tale beyond its premise, until it’s under your skin.
Read It In: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2002)
Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream
This tale from the latest King short story collection is built on a very intriguing question: What if, just one time in your life, you had a psychic dream and decided to act on it? That’s exactly what happens to Danny Coughlin, a custodian who dreams about the location of a dead body, then tells the police.
What happens next is a procedural and psychological nightmare that leaves Danny questioning everything about his reality. Imagining yourself in Danny’s shoes, even for a second, will absolutely shred your nerves.
Read It In: You Like It Darker (2024)
Rattlesnakes
When You Like It Darker was released, “Rattlesnakes” got a lot of press because it serves as a kind of sequel to King’s novel Cujo, but that’s only the beginning of what makes this story compelling.
Set in Florida, it follows one of the characters from the earlier novel as he meets a woman who once lost her sons to a tragic accident involving the title reptiles. Bound together by a shared sense of grief, the two new neighbors find a connection, forged not just by tragedy, but by the literal and metaphorical ghosts still lurking in the landscape. It’s a moving and vital story, but it’s also undeniably, often stunningly creepy.
Read It In: You Like It Darker (2024)
Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.