"Sometimes dead is better...." When the Creeds move into a beautiful old house in rural Maine, it all seems too good to be true: physician father, beautiful wife, charming little daughter, adorable infant son -- and now an idyllic home. As a family, they've got it all...right down to the friendly cat. But the nearby woods hide a blood-chilling tr...more

Why read Carrie? Stephen King himself has said that he finds his early work "raw," and Brian De Palma's movie was so successful that we feel like we have read the novel even if we never have. The simple answer is that this is a very scary story, one that works as well--if not better--on the page as on the screen. Carrie White, menaced by bullies at...more

If any of King's novels exemplifies his skill at portraying the concerns of his generation, it's The Dead Zone. Although it contains a horrific subplot about a serial killer, it isn't strictly a horror novel. It's the story of an unassuming high school teacher, an Everyman, who suffers a gap in time--like a Rip Van Winkle who blacks out during the...more

Stephen King's idea for It came from a favorite childhood image: the entire cast of the Bugs Bunny Show coming on at the beginning. He thought of bringing on all the monsters, one last time: Dracula, Frankenstein's creature, the Werewolf, the Crawling Eye, Rodan, It Came from Outer Space. It is about a group of adults who were once troubled chil...more

In the process of successfully "outing" himself as a vampire via his simultaneous career choices of rock star, author, and actor, Lestat has annoyed much of the vampire "community," who are furious that he has revealed their secrets (even if most of Lestat's fans don't really believe in his bloodsucking ways). More importantly, however, Lestat's an...more

Lestat, the vampire-hero, enchanter and seducer of mortals, speaks in the new book in the bestselling Vampire Chronicles that began with Interview with the Vampire and continued with The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned. For centuries Lestat has been a courted prince in the dark universe of the living dead. But now he is alone, and everyt...more

Anne Rice wasn't the first writer to show vampires as sexy--there are powerfully perverse sexual undercurrents in Bram Stoker's Dracula, granddaddy of all modern vampire novels. But Rice's 1976 Interview With the Vampire made vampirism lusher and more explicitly attractive. Though there's still a dark and messy side (as with sex), non-vampires...more