10 Weirdest Stephen King Books, Ranked

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Published Jan 26, 2026, 10:10 PM EST

Jeremy has more than 2200 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
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It says something about how strange Stephen King novels often are that one as gonzo as The Stand doesn’t quite crack the top 10, if you're talking purely about the weirdest of the bunch. There are some out-there things that happen in that gonzo apocalyptic epic, which you'll know especially well if you’ve read the extended/uncut version from 1990, because that one’s got The Kid in it (hoo boy).

King’s first story about an evil car, that one about the haunted hotel, and the one featuring time travel and the John F. Kennedy assassination? None of those are here. They're not weird enough. What follows is a look at King’s absolute strangest stories, but it should be stressed right away that weird doesn’t equal good or bad. Some of these are weird and good, and others are weird and… you know. You'll see. If you’ve read a few Stephen King novels (they're often long), then there’s no harm in reading some reasoning and explanations here, right?

10 'Elevation' (2018)

Stephen King - Elevation - book cover - 2018

Though Elevation is short enough to be considered a novella rather than a novel, it didn’t end up in a novella/short story compilation like Skeleton Crew or Night Shift, and was instead released on its own. So, it rides the line between novella and novel, and has been called one or the other. Even if you're not a fast reader, it’s hard to imagine taking too much longer than a couple of hours to get through this, making it one of the more underwhelming books King’s written in the past decade or so.

All that being said, maybe Elevation would've been worse if it had drawn out its story (involving a man losing so much weight, somehow, that he starts to run the risk of simply floating away, eventually) considerably more. As it stands, it’s such an oddity, and kind of compelling because of how unusually short – and overall unusual – it is. It’s not really worth paying full price for, but it might be worth your time, since Elevation doesn’t take up too much of it.

9 'It' (1986)

Since it’s one of the more popular and iconic Stephen King books, you might not expect It to be too weird, with so many people having read it and all, but it really is odd, in so many ways. It pushes a lot of things, being one of King’s longest books, and also being right up there among his most confronting, since there’s a ton of uncomfortable sexual content here, alongside graphic violence and an unwavering tackling of heavy themes throughout.

It’s probably more horrifying for all that than it is with the more traditional horror stuff, but you also get a lot of that here, too, for good measure. Still, It is an incredible book, and maybe the kind where you want to add, “but it’s not for everyone,” though it has apparently been for a lot of people. It does resonate, even with some of the absolutely wild and intensely disturbing content found throughout.

8 'Insomnia' (1994)

Insomnia does not have a movie adaptation yet, and of all the Stephen King stories without one, it feels the least likely to eventually receive one (and an Insomnia movie, if it did exist, might end up being one of the lesser King film adaptations). It’s just tied to an overwhelming number of Stephen King stories, being one of those “for the fans” kind of things, because most of the stuff in Insomnia that’s easiest to appreciate and enjoy is really only understandable if you're up-to-date on various other Stephen King stories.

The whole thing’s weird and potentially alienating for other reasons, too, because it’s about an old man with insomnia who, while sleep-deprived, keeps seeing unusual things that eventually plunge him into a big old battle between good and evil. Insomnia is gonzo, and a go-for-broke kind of book, but there’s a good deal to be enthralled and/or confused by here, if you're a big King fan.

7 'The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three' (1987)

The Dark Tower II_ The Drawing of the Three - 1987 - Stephen King

It was hard to pick a single book in The Dark Tower series to include here, because they're all quite weird for slightly different reasons. The whole series is strange, so consider the other ones not specified here as being worthy of honorable mentions. Anyway, the placement goes to the second book, The Drawing of the Three, because some of the concepts it throws at you are really quite wild, compared to the first book.

That first book is an oddity compared to most other Stephen King stories, but The Drawing of the Three starts with the protagonist getting attacked by giant lobster-like creatures and then involves him going through a series of doors, to a world that seems like our own, recruiting people from New York City to be fellow adventurers, all the while also inhabiting the bodies of others while their minds are still there. Does that sound wild? That’s only scratching the surface. But it’s also great, and it re-energizes the series, adding some cool ideas and good supporting characters, so it’s all largely weird in a good way.

6 'Desperation' (1996)

There’s some effectively creepy stuff early on in Desperation, which is a book of King’s that begins well and doesn’t end quite as successfully… so, it’s in good company. There are quite a few Stephen King books like that. The set-up here is engaging, though, with the way a group of very different people all get taken to – and trapped in – a small town, and then discover the alarming reason why they’ve all ended up there.

That reason is sufficiently surprising, but then there’s not as much done with it as you might hope. Or it might just be more the case that the eventual conflict isn't really all that clever or engaging. Still, it’s weird in a good way for a while, and then weird in a not-so-good way for the rest of the book’s duration, so in any event, it is weird. But weirdness-wise, it’s not on the same level as…

5 'The Regulators' (1996)

…The Regulators, which King published more or less under his pseudonym, even though it wasn’t a secret anymore, and hadn’t been for more than a decade prior to 1996. The Richard Bachman persona was broken out again because The Regulators is a companion novel to Desperation, being released on exactly the same day, and King maybe didn’t want both of them to be published under the same name.

Having the pseudonym is a way to distinguish it, maybe, because it’s otherwise somewhat hard to do, what with the characters all having the same names in both stories (even if they are different people). There are also concepts and conflicts that are found in both, but everything is a good deal more confounding in The Regulators, which is also a book that falls apart far faster than Desperation.

4 'Gwendy's Final Task' (2022)

There’s a whole Gwendy trilogy, which is justifiably one of the more obscure works within Stephen King’s back catalog. It was co-written with Richard Chizmar, though it’s almost more his story than King’s, because Chizmar wrote the second book on his own, while King and Chizmar were credited with books #1 and #3. But then again, there are so many ties in this trilogy to other Stephen King books, so his fingerprints are also all over it, obviously.

The third book is the strangest, because in Gwendy's Final Task, the titular character is dealing with Alzheimer's, and she decides to go into space to dispose of a box that’s impacted her life in all sorts of ways since it came into her possession, when she was a kid. It’s a real jumping-the-shark kind of thing, going to space, almost feeling like a parody, since there was really no indication earlier on that’s where the third and final book in the series could end up.

3 'Dreamcatcher' (2001)

The word “Dream” isn't in the title of Dreamcatcher just because the whole thing is like a fever dream, or a particularly bizarre nightmare, but it feels at least a bit fitting. It’s a novel that rambles and gets sprawling, but not in a way that’s as fun as some of King’s earlier novels (like The Stand and It) that did that sort of thing, because it’s kind of unknown territory this one stumbles into, at a point.

There are aliens and government people who want to shut the alien stuff down, and then a few ordinary folks who are stuck in the middle of it all. People die suddenly, develop strange powers, and also fart a lot. It is wild how much people fart in Dreamcatcher. As far as non-comedies go, the only other thing out there that rivals the quantity of farting found in Dreamcatcher is the 2019 film The Lighthouse. It's almost Blazing Saddles-esque.

2 'From a Buick 8' (2002)

A warped image of a vintage car on the book cover art for From a Buick 8 by Stephen King.

Truthfully, it’s hard to know what’s even going on in From a Buick 8. It’s structured in a weird way, with flashbacks and multiple narrators, and the threat/villain of the story is hard to discern, with it just playing out like a fever dream of sorts. It’s surreal, but more so than Dreamcatcher, because at least you can follow that one for maybe a couple of hundred pages before it explodes into confusion.

All that being said, it’s not one of King’s worst books, because you can almost admire just how gonzo and different it is. Christine was already a bit strange, but then From a Buick 8 is next-level, as far as King’s stories about otherworldly and seemingly sentient cars go. It’s a vibes-over-narrative sort of book, and maybe some people will be able to get on board with that. If you like reading Stephen King for the clarity of his storytelling and how easy most of his weird books can be to read, then this one’s probably not for you.

1 'The Tommyknockers' (1987)

The Tommyknockers - book cover - 1987 (1)

Stephen King has admitted that The Tommyknockers is a mess, and an overlong one at that, so there’s no need to feel bad about experiencing those feelings yourself as you try to slog through it. A bit like the last two mentioned books, The Tommyknockers is almost impressive for its weirdness, but it’s also a bit much, with the strangeness of it all eventually becoming quite exhausting.

It’s one of many King novels about a small town falling apart gradually because of some unusual force, but it’s not done as well as that sort of premise was tackled in the likes of 'Salem’s Lot, Needful Things, or Under the Dome. It’s also a book of King’s that can be used to make an argument that the author doesn’t really do sci-fi horror as well as he tackles other kinds of horror (especially supernatural-related, as far as the broad horror sub-genres go).