5 Stephen King Books You Need To Read If You're Missing Stranger Things
Even though Stranger Things season 5 is releasing sometime this year, it appears it won't be until late 2025 – but there are a few Stephen King books that can scratch the itch while you wait for a return to Hawkins. It's no secret that the Duffer brothers were heavily influenced by Stephen King when developing Stranger Things, particularly his classic novels of the '70s and '80s. Other pop-culture elements of the 1980s also have a strong influence on the Netflix show, including Dungeons & Dragons and Steven Spielberg's movies, but Stephen King is the most notable.
It's not hard to see why. With a show as steeped in '80s nostalgia as Stranger Things is, there's no way it could avoid being inspired by the King of Horror, not only one of the most influential figures in the culture of the '80s but in American pop culture, period. If you're impatient for the fifth and final season of Stranger Things to drop, the best way to capture the same feeling in the meantime is to pick up a Stephen King book, with a handful of his novels hitting all the right thematic notes.
5 Firestarter
1980
Of course, the underrated Stephen King book that most directly influenced Stranger Things is Firestarter. Published in 1980, the book centers around a young girl named Charlie McGee who has awesome and terrifying pyrokinetic abilities. Charlie is on the run with her dad, Andy, who also has abilities, though his are limited to mild telepathic and mind-control abilities. The reason they're on the run will sound familiar to any Stranger Things fan: Charlie is on the radar of a shady, black ops government organization only known as The Shop, and the agency is determined to capture her to control and exploit her prodigious abilities.
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It's impossible to read that description and not immediately think of Stranger Things' Eleven, including the nosebleeds she gets when she overexerts her powers, just like Andy does in Firestarter. While Eleven knows what it is to have been captured by that government organization, in her case the Hawkins Lab, Charlie doesn't – yet, so her story is more akin to El trying to stay ahead of the agents coming after her once she escapes. And though Jim Hopper isn't El's biological father, the relationship he develops with his adopted daughter closely resembles the one Charlie has with Andy in Firestarter.
4 Carrie
1974
Even if Firestarter is the most obvious Stephen King influence on Stranger Things, it's impossible to mentally conjure a young girl with telekinetic powers without immediately thinking of the most definitive work in that subgenre: Carrie. When Carrie was published in 1974, it became an immediate hit, and Brian De Palma's movie adaptation came out two years later. Stephen King's story is the blueprint for the modern "telekinetic girl" story, the prepubescent girl on the cusp of puberty who has powers she neither fully understands nor can she control.
It's impossible to mentally conjure a young girl with telekinetic powers without immediately thinking of the most definitive work in that subgenre: Carrie.
Of course, there are significant differences between El's story and Carrie White's, with Carrie never having been trapped in a shady government laboratory. Still, the abusive Stockholm syndrome relationship that each girl has with her caregiver is similar. For Carrie, it's her mentally unstable, religious zealot mother, Margaret White, and for Eleven, it's Dr. Brenner, whom she calls "Papa." One is biological and the other not, but for both girls, their twisted relationships with the parental figures in their lives are the only ones they've known, and part of the fun is seeing how they break free of the control and manipulation.
3 The Institute
2019
That said, not all King novels reminiscent of Stranger Things were written in his early years. A more recent novel is The Institute, which was published a handful of years ago in 2019, just a few months after Stranger Things season 3 was released. If Firestarter echoes Eleven's Stranger Things story after she escapes Hawkins Lab, then The Institute would be a mirror of the years she spent as a test subject in the government laboratory. Considering the story, it's arguable that The Institute was the one time Stranger Things influenced King, rather than the other way around.
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In Stephen King's The Institute, currently in production as a TV show, a young boy named Luke Ellis, who has mild telekinetic abilities, finds himself kidnapped one night and his parents murdered, only to wake up in an isolated laboratory known only as "the Institute." There, Luke finds several other kidnapped children who also have special abilities and learns they're all tortured and experimented upon to see if their abilities will increase. Meanwhile, a cop in the small town of DuPray discovers there's something sinister happening when Luke manages to make contact. Sound familiar? It certainly should.
2 It
1986
Even beyond kids with telekinetic abilities and sinister government operations, Stranger Things still owes parts of its DNA to other Stephen King books. One of those books is his seminal 1986 novel, It. You could drop the main child characters of Stranger Things - Mike, Lucas, Will, Dustin, El, and Max - right into Stephen King's book without missing a beat. The fundamentals are all there, with Stranger Things' kids acting as a modern stand-in for the Losers Club of It. For a while, the makeup of the group even exactly mimicked King's Loser's Club, too, before Max joined to even out the gender dynamics, right down to the less fantastic tokenism of both friends' circles only including one Black kid.
But it's also the feel of It from which Stranger Things draws so much inspiration. Like the telekinetic young girl story, King arguably also created the modern story of a group of neighborhood kids banding together to fight a great evil. There are heavy strains of Steven Spielberg's work in Stranger Things, too - The Goonies is an especially strong influence. But a group of nerdy small-town kids organizing themselves to stand against an awesomely psychically powerful, malevolent entity from another dimension is purely King, and Pennywise's fingerprints are all over Stranger Things villain Vecna as much as his Dungeons & Dragons namesake is.
1 The Talisman (Co-Written With Peter Straub)
1984
The last Stephen King book to read while waiting for Stranger Things season 5 may seem like a bit of a strange choice, but it's not once one looks at the themes at its core. For starters, there's a direct connection that King and Peter Straub's The Talisman has with Stranger Things: viewers with good memories might remember that it was the book Lucas was reading to Max as she lay in a coma in Stranger Things season 4, episode 9. It's a nice Stephen King Easter egg and a nod to the horror author and his influence on the show.
While the Territories are not quite the nightmarish void that is the Upside Down of Stranger Things, it's still a warped, dark mirror dimension of Jack's world, just as Vecna's realm is to Hawkins.
But those who have read The Talisman know just how fitting it is that that's the book Lucas reads to Max. The Stephen King novel follows the story of 12-year-old Jack Sawyer, who is pulled into the Territories, an alternate, parallel world version of America. While the Territories are not quite the nightmarish void that is the Upside Down of Stranger Things, it's still a warped, dark mirror dimension of Jack's world, just as Vecna's realm is to Hawkins. For anyone who wants a little less horror and a little more epic adventure in a read that's still reminiscent of Stranger Things, The Talisman is a great choice.
- Birthdate
- September 21, 1947
- Birthplace
- Portland, Maine, USA
- Notable Projects
- The Shawshank Redemption, The Shining, It, The Stand, Misery, The Dark Tower, Mr. Mercedes, Carrie
- Professions
- Author, Screenwriter, Producer, Director, Actor
- Height
- 6 feet 4 inches
