Since the publication of his first novel, Carrie, in 1974, Stephen King has been a wildly prolific author, to the point where you could’ve been a fan of his for more than half a century, and gotten about a book or two a year, on average. If you’re just counting his novels, there are close to 70 (though that number can fluctuate, as some of his shorter works get called novels or novellas, according to different sources), and then there are short story compilations and works like Different Seasons, which group together several novella-length stories. And even if you don’t read, you’ll probably run into plenty of his stories, since there are so many film and TV adaptations of his various works.
He’s remained prolific into the 2020s, with enough releases in this decade so far to make ranking the bunch of them worthwhile. He probably hasn’t put out anything this decade as good as 11.22.63, which came out in the early 2010s, or any of his full-fledged classics from the 1970s or ‘80s (like The Stand, It, and The Shining), but most of these are still pretty solid, and easy to enjoy if you like King’s style. He does still have it, for the most part, as a writer in his 70s, and there are still more planned novels to come, so consider a ranking like this – focusing just on the 2020s – a work in progress.
6
‘Holly’ (2023)
Holly isn’t bad because it gets political and touches upon social/cultural things inherent to the early 2020s, necessarily, since Stephen King hasn’t shied away from politics in some of his earlier works. Take The Dead Zone, for instance, which gets political for sure, but also, that book is very engaging for other reasons. The problem with Holly is that all the stuff about COVID-19, and the U.S. response to it, just gets so tedious, like King cannot help himself by referencing one of those things at every possible opportunity.
It’s a bit like Cell, where he couldn’t stop complaining about cell phones. You can agree with what King’s saying, regarding COVID and cell phone usage, and yet still find it annoying just how much he goes on about it. As for the rest of Holly? Yeah, it’s not very good. Holly Gibney is a character King loves, though she’s a bit more divisive among readers, and this is easily the weakest story she’s been featured in, and the whole thing features her slowly figuring out who might be behind a series of disappearances. It’s ultimately very silly, but not in a fun or endearing way, and there is so much repetition before it gets silly; not just with the COVID stuff, but also with King going on and on about the conditions the villains are suffering from, the anxieties Holly has, and the memories she’s haunted by regarding a recently deceased relative. It’s a book that drones on for more than 400 pages, and would’ve felt tedious if it had been a quarter of that length. It’s weak and sloppy and just not good enough.
5
‘Gwendy’s Final Task’ (2022)
It’s a bit difficult to know whether to include Gwendy’s Final Task here, since it was co-written with Richard Chizmar, but it does still technically count as a 2020s book King wrote. Well, co-wrote. It’s also part of a trilogy that started in the 2010s with the short but overall decent Gwendy’s Button Box, which featured Castle Rock as its main setting. The second book, Gwendy’s Magic Feather, was only credited to Chizmar, and wasn’t very good, while the third book was – as mentioned before – a collaboration again, and it was… interesting?
Gwendy’s Final Task goes big and feels messy, and there is that dreaded sense of Stephen King repetition creeping in here, in terms of how often it’s reiterated what health problems the titular character is grappling with.
Another difficulty with Gwendy’s Final Task, beyond knowing whether to include it here, is to assess it critically. It jumps the shark for the trilogy it belongs to, with a weird sci-fi slant that’s so out of left field, it feels like a spoiler to divulge, even if it lays the sci-fi stuff out straight away. It goes big and feels messy, and there is that dreaded sense of Stephen King repetition creeping in here, in terms of how often it’s reiterated what health problems the titular character is grappling with. But there are some links here to a certain series about a Tower that’s Dark, which makes Gwendy’s Final Task a little more interesting if you’re a Stephen King fan, potentially elevating things the same way Insomnia works a lot more if you’re fairly invested in the Stephen King multiverse, so to speak.
4
‘Never Flinch’ (2025)
Returning to Holly Gibney, Never Flinch is at least better than Holly, even if it’s still ultimately only pretty decent at best. Holly was mostly a crime novel, with a little horror, while The Outsider – which also featured Holly, as a character – did start off as a crime book, but became more horror-focused. Never Flinchsticks to the crime/thriller side of things, and does feel a bit like Stephen King was writing two different stories about two different criminals, and just decided to make them clash together a little awkwardly at one point.
That makes Never Flinch hard to summarize. It’s about Holly being hired to protect an activist, who herself has a stalker, and then there’s also an ongoing series of murders that seem to be connected to a separate act of injustice. If Never Flinch had made these two threads cross paths in a smarter or more surprising way, it could be genuinely pretty great, but as it stands, it’s just fine. It’s readable, and stretches of it are engaging, but it doesn’t really crescendo and sort of ends with a shrug. It’s a bit like, “Huh, that’s it?”, but if you’ve read a few Stephen King books, you’re probably well aware of how getting to such an ending feels.
3
‘Later’ (2021)
There are some pretty wild places Later goes to, and it’s oddly disarming for a Stephen King novel. It settles into a fairly familiar groove, with a mystery/crime story that has a supernatural spin, since the main character can speak to ghosts. And that sounds cheesy, but you do just have to go with it, and if you can, Later is fun. It’s snappy, being a pretty quick read, and there is a genuine plot twist here, which you don’t often get with Stephen King.
King likes suspense, and he’s not afraid of having surprising things happen at almost any point in a story, but he doesn’t really do twists the same way, say, Agatha Christie does, so Later is a pleasant surprise in that regard. It’s like a B to B+ Stephen King story, being a little distance away from true greatness, but it’s not unreasonable to call it one of the more overlooked or underrated stories of his from the past decade or so.
2
‘Fairy Tale’ (2022)
Of all the books Stephen King has had published in the 2020s, Fairy Tale is the one that feels like it’s the closest to “classic” King. That could be turned away and used as a criticism, since if you’ve read The Talisman, you will probably think of it a few times while reading this one, since both focus on a young boy who’s able to travel into an unusual world, and in both cases, the boy’s journey involves saving someone who’s close to death.
Also, if you’re a fan of The Dark Tower, Fairy Tale is particularly reminiscent of the fourth book in that series, Wizard and Glass, with both it and Fairy Tale referencing The Wizard of Oz a bunch of times. King does go back to wells he’s already been to before (hell, look at Thinner and Elevation both being about men who are losing weight at a rapid rate), but Fairy Tale also has enough to offer as its own thing to still be compelling. And that old-school Stephen King feel of a story being made up a bit as it goes along, but in a mostly good way? That’s here, in Fairy Tale, and it does make the whole thing feel quite nostalgic and/or bittersweet if you’re fond of King’s earlier books.
1
‘Billy Summers’ (2021)
Since it’s one of the better Stephen King books of the 21st century so far, it also feels fair to crown Billy Summers the best he’s written in the 2020s… to date. Again, King still seems to be writing pretty often, and until the decade’s over, it can’t exactly be called the definitive best. As a thriller, it’s genuinely very engaging for pretty much its entire duration, with a plot centered on an assassin who carries out a hit, planning it methodically and pulling it off, but then finding various complications ensuing after it’s done, which shakes up his life quite a lot.
Also, like so many other Stephen King stories (including the aforementioned Fairy Tale), Billy Summers is also about storytelling, especially relating to how one can use the act of writing to try and make sense of a difficult past. That whole side of things could derail the more outwardly thrilling stuff, but that thankfully doesn’t happen here, as Billy Summers generally gets the balance right. There’s introspection and a plot that always moves forward, making for a pretty effortless read (or listen, if you prefer audiobooks).
