Image by The USO, via Flickr CommonsSo you might think that if Stephen King – the guy who wrote such horror classics like Carrie and The Stand – were to rattle off his top ten favorite books, it would feature works by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft or maybe J. R. R. Tolkien — authors who have, like King, created enduring dark, Gothic worlds filled with supernatural events and malevolent forces. But you’d be wrong. Author J. Peder Zane asked scores of writers about their favorite novels for his 2007 book The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. The list King submitted in reply appears below. When possible, we’ve added links to the texts that you can read for free online.1. The Golden Argosy, The Most Celebrated Short Stories in the English Language – edited by Van Cartmell and Charles Grayson2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain3. The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie4. McTeague – Frank Norris5. Lord of the Flies – William Golding6. Bleak House – Charles Dickens7. 1984 – George Orwell8. The Raj Quartet – Paul Scott9. Light in August – William Faulkner10. Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthyKing, it seems, prefers books that explore basic defects in the human character to spooky tales of fantasy. In other words, he’s interested in stories that are actually terrifying. Orwell’s portrait of a man breaking under the pressure of totalitarianism or William Golding’s parable about a group of boys devolving into beasts are downright troubling. Frank Norris’s saga about the mendacious McTeague isn’t exactly comforting either. And McCarthy’s grim and spectacularly violent masterpiece Blood Meridian might make you crawl into a fetal position and weep for humanity. (That was my reaction, anyway.)The most striking thing about the list, however, is how uniformly highbrow it is. All books would fit right in on the syllabus of an upper level English college course. On the other hand, David Foster Wallace, when asked for his top ten, filled his list with such mass market crowd pleasers as The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy and, at number two, King’s The Stand.If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.Related Content:Stephen King Recommends 96 Books for Aspiring Writers to ReadHow Stephen King Predicted the Rise of Trump in a 1979 NovelStephen King’s 20 Rules for WritersStephen King Explains the Key to His Creativity: Not Losing the Dream-State Thinking All Children Are Born WithJonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.