What to Read if You Like Stephen King

If you enjoy the dark fantasy aspects of King’s novels, like in The Eyes of the Dragon and The Dark Tower series, this medieval horror will be perfect for you. Set during the Black Death, it’s about a disgraced knight who meets an orphan girl in a Norman village who believes she communes with God’s angels. Bonus: the new edition of the novel has an introduction by King’s son, author Joe Hill (who is an obvious read-alike as well).

Everything Tananarive Due writes is excellent, but this might be her most King-ish novel. It’s about a mother who goes back to the family home to face the tragedy that occurred two years earlier. And she discovers that what was once considered the town’s “good house” may be inhabited by an evil her grandmother fought more than seven decades ago.

If you love the bigger King books, then you should definitely sink your teeth into this juicy novel about cults, legacies, and evil. After the death of his wife, a father tries to save their son from his birthright, a place in his late wife’s family’s completely unhinged cult, the Order, who believe committing atrocities will earn them immortality.

If you count The Stand among your favorite Stephen King books, this award-winning novel is probably the best read-alike there is. (The Passage by Justin Cronin is a great comp, too.) Called one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read, it’s the story of an America after a nuclear war, the remaining citizens of the country’s wastelands must fight each other and monsters in an epic final battle of good vs. evil.

This is a really fun book for fans of “tag, you’re it” evil, like in The Regulators. There are 30 young boys and a few priests living at St. Vincent’s Orphanage for Boys in a remote spot in Pennsylvania in the early twentieth century. When a stranger dying of an unknown illness is granted admittance to the house late one night, he brings with him an ancient evil that spreads among them like wildfire. Will anyone be left alive when it’s over?

One of the new masters of horror is indisputably Stephen Graham Jones. Not only does he share a first name with King, he’s almost as prolific! This is one of his best, which, like It or Dreamcatcher, features a group of friends who encountered something supernatural as children that has come back to ruin their lives as adults. In the case of this novel, it’s an angry entity hell-bent on revenge. (There’s also a new sequel to this book, called Off the Reservation.)

Sarah Langan has a knack for writing stories full of insidious happenings in communities, like in her excellent novel Good Neighbors, where people turn on one another like in Needful Things or Under the Dome. But her most recent, Trad Wife, gets the big spotlight this time around, since Stephen King himself called it “The best horror novel of 2026. Hands down.” It’s about a “trad wife” influencer whose seemingly perfect life is masking some real terrors.

Lastly, check out this horror farce, which is working from the whole Dead Zone/politician angle. It’s about a young Black boy in a tiny African village who houses the soul of the President of the United States. The POTUS is accidentally ejected from his borrowed body, and now he’s desperate to get back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue so he can stop a plot against his administration. But in order to succeed, he has to make a deal with the biggest evil he’s encountered (even in Washington D.C.)