Stephen Kings personal favorite books (as of 1980)
Discover Stephen King's personal favorite books from 1980, a curated list featuring sci-fi and horror classics like Ursula K. Le Guin's *The Lathe of Heaven*, Richard Adams' *Watership Down*, Ray Bradbury's *Something Wicked This Way Comes*, and *I Am Legend*—essential reads for any King fan.
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Watership Down
by Richard Adams
WINNER of the Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Class Animated Program Now a Netflix animated miniseries starring James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult, and Oscar and Grammy award-winner Sir Ben Kingsley. A worldwide bestseller for more than forty years, Watership Down is the compelling tale of a band of wild rabbits struggling to hold onto their place in the world—“a classic yarn of discovery and struggle” (The New York Times). Richard Adams’s Watership Down is a timeless classic and one of the most beloved novels of all time. Set in the Hampshire Downs in Southern England, an idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of “suspense, hot pursuit, and derring-do” (Chicago Tribune) follows a band of rabbits in flight from the incursion of man and the destruction of their home. Led by a stouthearted pair of brothers, they travel forth from their native Sandleford warren through harrowing trials to a mysterious promised land and a more perfect society. “A marvelous story of rebellion, exile, and survival” (Sunday Telegraph) this is an unforgettable literary classic for all ages.
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Something Wicked This Way Comes
by Ray Bradbury
Few American novels written this century have endured in th heart and mind as has this one-Ray Bradbury's incomparable masterwork of the dark fantastic. A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. And two inquisitive boys standing precariously on the brink of adulthood will soon discover the secret of the satanic raree-show's smoke, mazes, and mirrors, as they learn all too well the heavy cost of wishes -- and the stuff of nightmare.
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Invasion of the Body Snatchers
by Jack Finney
On a quiet fall evening in the small, peaceful town of Mill Valley, California, Dr. Miles Bennell discovered an insidious, horrifying plot. Silently, subtly, almost imperceptibly, alien life-forms were taking over the bodies and minds of his neighbors, his friends, his family, the woman he loved -- the world as he knew it. First published in 1955, this classic thriller of the ultimate alien invasion and the triumph of the human spirit over an invisible enemy inspired three major motion pictures.
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Time and Again
by Jack Finney
Simon Morley is selected by a secret government agency to test Einstein's theory of the past co-existing with the present and is transported back to 1880s New York.
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William Golding's Lord of the Flies
by Harold Bloom
In this adventure story about a group of schoolboys stranded on a deserted island, William Golding explores the dark side of humanity and the savagery that surfaces when social structure is broken down, and rules, ideals, and values are lost. In this valuable literary reference guide, a new selection of critical essays on Lord of the Flies is supplemented by a chronology of the author's life, a bibliography, and notes about the essay contributors. Book jacket.
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The Painted Bird
by Jerzy Kosinski
A young boy, abandoned by his parents during World War II, wanders alone from one village to another in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.
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The Lathe Of Heaven
by Ursula K. Le Guin
A classic science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the greatest writers of the genre, set in a future world where one man's dreams control the fate of humanity. In a future world racked by violence and environmental catastrophes, George Orr wakes up one day to discover that his dreams have the ability to alter reality. He seeks help from Dr. William Haber, a psychiatrist who immediately grasps the power George wields. Soon George must preserve reality itself as Dr. Haber becomes adept at manipulating George's dreams for his own purposes. The Lathe of Heaven is an eerily prescient novel from award-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin that masterfully addresses the dangers of power and humanity's self-destructiveness, questioning the nature of reality itself. It is a classic of the science fiction genre.
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The Magic Barrel
by Bernard Malamud
A collection of thirteen short fiction stories, set in New York and Italy, by twentieth-century American author Bernard Malamud.
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V.
by Thomas Pynchon
The wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century and of two men -- one looking for something he has lost, the other with nothing much to lose -- and "V.," the unknown woman of the title.
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Ghost Story
by Peter Straub
Horror. Early novel about four men who inadvertently cause the death of a young woman in the 1920s.
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The Day of the Triffids
by John Wyndham
Explores the timeless tale of Earth's survival against alien forces (man-eating plants) and blinding meteor showers.