Stephen King's Favorites: Sci-Fi/Fantasy Recs From the Master of Horror

While The Handmaid’s Tale might be the dystopian novel that Margaret Atwood is best known for, don’t sleep on her MaddAddam trilogy. It’s just as gripping and terrifying as most famous book, and also just as prescient, albeit in regards to technological advancement rather than politics. 

In Oryx and Crake, Snowman lives in the ravaged ruins of Earth as (possibly) the last surviving human. He watches over the Children of Crake, a green-eyed group of mutated beings designed to be better than humans. As Snowman shows, he was once a man named Jimmy, and in the before times, where technology ruled all and biological experiments had grown ever more advanced, he had a front row seat to the planet's destruction.

Stephen King might be famously prolific, but Joyce Carol Oates makes him seem like a real slowpoke in comparison! The multi-award-winning writer (and world-class tweeter) is adept at many genres, from contemporary family dramas to fictional biographies of pop culture icons. Zombie is one of her many forays into horror, and it’s one of her darkest efforts. Inspired by the life and crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer, the book follows Quentin P., a newly freed sex criminal who descends into a violent spree of rape and murder.

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India's independence from British colonization. But this moment of serendipity has left him imbued with an ominous power. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of his beloved homeland. Whenever he is sick, so is the nation. When he is in love, things are bright. 

But most remarkably, there are 1,000 other people like him, those "midnight's children" with telepathic powers linked to India's new era of independence. They are the future in more ways than one.

Many generations of kids were traumatized by this seemingly innocent tale of rabbits that revealed itself to be a devastating tale of death, ecological destruction, and self-determination. And that's before the movie version ruined their childhoods even further! 

It’s no surprise that Stephen King was taken by the Richard Adams allegory, which seamlessly blends the mundane and the horrifying. A group of rabbits must band together to find a new home safe from the destruction of man.

Dystopian fiction as we know it does not exist without the ground-breaking and unnervingly prescient work of George Orwell. Set in an alternate future, Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, is ruled over by a totalitarian regime led by the mysterious Big Brother. 

They are in a perpetual war with Eurasia. Mass surveillance dominates every aspect of life. Thought crimes are punishable by death. And within this nightmare existence, Winston Smith, who spends his days revising history to suit the State's demands, begins to question the status quo.

"I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker." 

King couldn't have paid a higher compliment to his fellow horror pioneer when he blurbed the first US edition of his anthology, Books of Blood. Best known for Hellraiser and Candyman, Barker's unique blend of body horror, surreal fantasy, and queer kink made him an icon of the genre. 

Books of Blood includes some of Barker's most famous short stories and offers a glimpse into his vast and impossible imagination. 

King highly recommended this horror novel that reimagined one of the darkest moments in American history with an even bleaker twist. Tamsen Donner is one of the remaining members of the Donner Party, a group of settlers traveling to supposedly greener pastures out West. 

But things have fallen apart in spectacular fashion. Rations are running low. A young boy's mysterious death has caused suspicion among the camp. And they cannot escape the sense that someone, or something, is following them. As members of the party begin to disappear, they must ask themselves: Who is the biggest threat in this nightmare, man or monster?

King gave a glowing cover quote to this unnerving dystopian novel by Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer behind The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 and Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. At an internment camp in Indonesia, dozens of people drop dead with an acute brain fever. 

When microbiologist Henry Parsons journeys there with the World Health Organisation, he quickly uncovers a terrifying future. This disease is highly contagious, incredibly lethal, and near-impossible to stop. And one infected man is on his way to join the millions of worshippers in the annual Hajj to Mecca. Henry and his team must fins a way to quarantine millions of people, with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance.