My Favorite Stephen King Audiobooks

If you are a listener of the Stephen King Fancast, you already know that I prefer audiobooks over books. I find that, when I’m reading, my mind tends to wander and I end up re-reading a lot of passages and still don’t fully under the story once I have finished the book. When I listen to the audiobook, I am enthralled and allowed to play the mind movie game, which is my favorite part about books, while still grasping the story. That being said, I recently got an email from someone who wanted to get into listening to audiobooks and they were asking what a good place to start would be. That got me thinking about this topic, and I wanted to put up a post about what my favorite Stephen King audiobooks are, and why.

This is a tough topic for me to cover, because there are qualities of the audiobook (reader, tempo, etc.) that have no bearing on the story but add a sense of gravitas that outweighs the story, in a way. As an example, I will say that anyone that has listened to Frank Muller read an audiobook, will probably admit that they would gladly listen to him describing disturbing fetish porn, in great detail, and love every minute of the reading. He is VERY good! I actually had to attempt to exclude some books from this list, simply because they are read by Frank Muller, and I would be biased towards them. This wouldn’t be a very good list if it were just, “The first four Dark Tower’s and Black House” as a Top 5. So I am trying to give a fair assessment in the interest of great story tellers, telling great stories. I am also basing my assessment on the idea that you haven’t really listened to a lot of audiobooks, and would like some variety to try out. One quality that all of the readers listed here share, is just being a great reader. You ever see a movie in which the actors are overdoing the role and ruining it in the process? A great actor makes you believe that they actually are the character they are portraying. The same can be said about a person that isn’t good at reading aloud, if not done well, you can just mess the whole thing up.

As River Song would say, *SPOILERS* My number one is not, actually, a Dark Tower Book. Well… I guess that could be argued.

Connections Among the Bag of Bones

I’m never sure whether Stephen King’s ability to spend pages upon pages introducing a place or character is something that annoys me or something that I love.  What these amazing descriptions allow me to do, however, is make connections between other King works and real life.  Let’s talk about connections for a minute.

Richie Osgood.  Because of the way my brain works, the minute I read his full name I began thinking of Richie  Tozier from It.  Beep beep, Richie.  I don’t think the greasy little real estate agent would take too kindly to that.  Then once I read the three page description of Richie Osgood and how he drove into the driveway with, his headlights bouncing off the windows and breaking Mike out of his vision, all I could think when Mike finally opened the door, his pants pockets loaded down with steak knives and bottles of bug spray was, “You Stole My Story.”  Why does my brain feel the need to find connections between this novel and not one but two additional King stories?