I went looking for one thing tonight, which is always the mistake. Collider has a ranked list of the ten greatest Stephen King books of the 1980s, and I read it the way you read anything about King at this hour, which is to say I read it and then I started thinking about what the '80s actually were for that man's typewriter.

Because think about the run. Misery. Pet Sematary. Firestarter. Cujo. It. That's not a decade of output, that's a decade of a guy opening a vein every eleven months. The Collider list puts the usual suspects near the top and it's hard to argue. Pet Sematary is the one I keep coming back to, the one where a burial ground gives a grieving father back something that looks like his son but isn't, not really. It's a book about grief wearing a horror novel's skin, and it works because by the end you understand exactly why he does the thing you're screaming at him not to do.

Misery reads differently now. A writer held captive by his number one fan, forced to keep producing a story he's already sick of. There's a clinical patience to what Annie Wilkes does to Paul Sheldon, and the horror isn't the hobbling, it's the wait before it. You spend the whole book knowing it's coming. A man forced to keep writing for the person most devoted to his work. I'll just leave that sitting there.

And It. Over a thousand pages about a shapeshifting thing under a small Maine town that feeds on children and comes back in cycles, and the unsettling part was never the clown. It's the memory mechanism, the way the Losers' Club forgets, completely forgets, the worst thing that ever happened to them, and then has to remember it as adults. That's the premise that keeps me up. Not the monster. The forgetting.

Cujo gets mentioned and I'm glad, because it's the cruel one. On the surface there's almost no supernatural machinery in it at all, just a rabid dog and a hot car and coincidences stacked like dominoes. (King readers will tell you there's a faint dark undercurrent in it if you go looking, and they will tell you at length.) It's the book where nobody arrives in time, where the ordinary world is the horror, and it still ends like a fist.

Firestarter is the odd one out on the list, the government-experiment paranoid thriller, a kid who can start fires with her mind and the agency that wants to weaponize her. It's the most '80s of the bunch in how it distrusts institutions and the least '80s in how well it's aged.

Rankings of King are arguments you have with yourself at 2 AM, and this one's worth having. My only quarrel with any list like this is structural: the '80s were so absurdly fertile that whatever sits at number six or seven would be most writers' career peak. You're not ranking good books against bad ones. You're ranking nightmares against nightmares.

Go read it. Then pull one of the books off the shelf, the one with the creased spine, the one you first read too young. You know the one. The one you found in a relative's house and finished anyway.