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Into the wild, common sense media reviewers.

Mesmerizing, tragic, and intense bio meant for discussion.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

Parents have strained relationship with teen son.

Discussion of what happens to one's body if fa

Girl flirts with boy; teens discuss "getting

"F--k," "Hell," "S--t,&qu

Mention of Kmart, Colgate toothpaste, Sizzler.

Author mentions own experience with marijuana; adu

Parents need to know this bestseller was intended for adult readers, but teens may want to read it, thanks to the release of the movie adaptation directed by Sean Penn. Readers will find lots of hitchhiking, discussions of an adulterous relationship, challenges between father and son, and a family's uncertainty of…

Positive Messages

Parents have strained relationship with teen son. Father lies to family. Main character builds strong relationships with adult individuals on the road, but he chooses to be on his own, rebuffing their support and help.

Violence & Scariness

Discussion of what happens to one's body if facing starvation, hypothermia, poison. Animals hunted and shot with guns.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Girl flirts with boy; teens discuss "getting laid" story told of teen drunk trying to have sex with teenage girl; father has affair with ex-wife and she becomes pregnant.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

"F--k," "Hell," "S--t," "Goddamn," "Ass."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

Author mentions own experience with marijuana; adults drink to get drunk and use dope. Man with drinking problems.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know this bestseller was intended for adult readers, but teens may want to read it, thanks to the release of the movie adaptation directed by Sean Penn. Readers will find lots of hitchhiking, discussions of an adulterous relationship, challenges between father and son, and a family's uncertainty of a son's whereabouts and grief upon hearing of his death. The author talks of his own experiences on a high-risk climb in Alaska (including smoking a joint and setting part of his tent on fire).

Where to Read

Community reviews.

• Parents say (6)
• Kids say (11)

Based on 6 parent reviews

Horrible, waste of time.

What's the story.

From the start, the reader learns of Chris McCandless' death and how he was found. Slowly the story unravels in a piecemeal chronological fashion. The reader learns of his upbringing in a wealthy family living in Virginia; meets the members of his family and discovers the causes for challenging relationships; and tails him on his wanderings that started soon after high school graduation.

In college he becomes more distanced from his parents, especially his father, and without any communication after graduation he begins his journey. The reader learns of the places he visited, relationships he formed, the letters he wrote, and his family's reaction to his death. Krakauer parallels this experience with others who have sought adventure, including himself.

Is It Any Good?

It's a chilling read and one that can't be put down, but it may not be appropriate for sensitive teen readers or any teens without the maturity to see past the adventure. Overall, parents who have enjoyed it and passed it on to their teens will have much to discuss.

Jon Krakauer, who admits that he identifies with Chris McCandless, carefully follows the bread-crumb trail of McCandless' flight from home after college graduation. He recognizes the recklessness of the young man's behavior and naiveté of his actions, but also describes his brilliance and thoughtfulness. Without over sentimentalizing, he recognizes that most people would not have the wits, intelligence, or internal strength to live as McCandless did for those two years. Ultimately, McCandless made a tragic mistake; one that may not have been made if he had more experience living in the bush, brought a companion, or had a means of communication.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about risk behaviors, including the dangers of hitchhiking and living in a remote area on your own. Parents can ask their teens about their own wanderlust. What is the lure of a wilderness adventure? Or would you rather tour foreign cities? How can this sense adventure be satisfied while being safe? What are specific precautions you should take as a young traveler?

Book Details

• Author : Jon Krakauer
• Genre : Biography
• Book type : Non-Fiction
• Publisher : Anchor Books
• Publication date : January 19, 1997
• Publisher's recommended age(s) : 15 - 17
• Number of pages : 224
• Last updated : July 12, 2017

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Jon Krakauer

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SEEN & HEARD

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

More by Elie Wiesel

by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

From mean streets to wall street.

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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Taking Risk to Its 'Logical' Extreme Date: January 4, 1996, Late Edition - Final Byline: By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT Lead: INTO THE WILD By Jon Krakauer Illustrated. 207 pages. Villard Books. $22. Readers may at first have some trouble sympathizing with Christopher Johnson McCandless, the young man whose mysterious death in the Alaska wilderness Jon Krakauer explores so movingly in his new book, '' Into the Wild .'' Text: As Mr. McCandless's story unfolds in these pages, he seems to have been lacking in both adequate supplies and proper know-how when he waved goodbye to a trucker who had given him a lift and tramped off into the bush on April 28, 1992. What's more, the idealism that prompted this fatal romantic adventure appears both flawed and badly articulated, amounting as it does to phrases like ''plastic people'' and the need to ''revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience,'' and cliched affirmations that writers like Tolstoy, Thoreau and Jack London were leading him on. What's particularly tough to take is Mr. McCandless's refusal to tell his devoted family his whereabouts after he graduated with honors from Emory University in 1990 and set off on his cockeyed hegira. Mr. Krakauer does not even offer speculation about some heroic psychic drama his subject might have been unconsciously acting out. In short, at least at the beginning of ''Into the Wild ,'' you share the outraged reactions of so many who read the article by Mr. Krakauer in Outside magazine from which this book developed. As one angry Alaskan put it in a letter to the author: ''While I feel for his parents, I have no sympathy for him. Such willful ignorance . . . amounts to disrespect for the land, and paradoxically demonstrates the same sort of arrogance that resulted in the Exxon Valdez spill -- just another case of underprepared, overconfident men bumbling around out there and screwing up because they lacked the requisite humility. It's all a matter of degree.'' Yet if Mr. Krakauer too readily exposes his subject's shortcomings, he also does a masterly job of keeping the reader's condemnation at bay. While conceding his subject's many flaws, he keeps hinting that something was special about this case. He reveals through the eyes of many who met Mr. McCandless during his flight how particularly intelligent, unusual and just plain likable this young man was. He describes Mr. McCandless's many forerunners who were driven to climb mountains too high, plumb wastelands too deep or brave elements too unforgiving. He introduces each of his 18 chapters and his epilogue with quotations from the literature of the wilderness that often articulate acutely what Mr. McCandless must have been feeling. What is it that finally pushes you off the fence? On which side of it do you fall? Yet another skill that Mr. Krakauer displays in his reconstruction of Mr. McCandless's life and death is that of artfully withholding the pieces of his puzzle until the last one falls into place in the final pages. So one hates to give any of the mystery away. But certainly among the most moving chapters in the book are the two in which the author discloses why he identified with his subject so strongly. Here Mr. Krakauer reveals how he too was once the rebellious son of a loving but overbearing father and how he too acted out his rebellion by throwing himself into the arms of nature. More precisely, he decided to plunge himself into the Alaskan wilderness and climb a mountain, the Devil's Thumb, by a route that had never been taken before. What follows is a terrifying account of the author's own desperate venture, full of passages that rival the best in mountaineering literature. ''A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream,'' he writes. ''Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence -- the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your dreams -- all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.'' Unlike Mr. McCandless, the author survived his mad adventure, although in his view he probably didn't deserve to. From his experience he concludes: ''At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidian geometry or marriage. I didn't yet experience its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd entrusted the deceased with their hearts.'' Moreover, ''engaging in risky behavior is a rite of passage in our culture no less than in most others,'' Mr. Krakauer writes. ''It can be argued that youthful derring-do is in fact evolutionarily adaptive, a behavior encoded in our genes. McCandless, in his fashion, merely took risk-taking to its logical extreme.'' Mr. Krakauer himself outgrew his need to take dangerous risks, and Mr. McCandless apparently was beginning to do the same. Without giving away too much of the story, one can reveal that eventually he wanted to come out of the wild and settle down. But it was too late. In Mr. Krakauer's eloquent handling, this is not merely sad. Because the story involves overbearing pride, a reversal of fortune and a final moment of recognition, it has elements of classic tragedy. By the end, Mr. Krakauer has taken the tale of a kook who went into the woods, and made of it a heart-rending drama of human yearning.

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Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Title: Into the Wild

Author: Jon Krakauer

Publisher: Anchor Books

Genre: Biography, Travel, Adventure

First Publication: 1996

Language:  English

Major Characters: Christopher McCandless

Setting Place: Alaska, South Dakota, the American Southwest, and Mexico.

Theme: The American Wilderness, Risk and Self-Reinvention, Arrogance, Innocence, and Ignorance, Luck, Chance, and Circumstance, Materialism and Idealism, Isolation v. Intimacy

Narrator: Jon Krakauer reports from a third person perspective and occasionally the first person.

Book Summary: Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

In April, 1992, a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself.

Four months later, a party of moose hunters found his decomposed body. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.

Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash.

He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and, unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw away the maps. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild.

Book Review: Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer is a non-fiction account of the life of Christopher McCandless, a young man who, upon graduating from college in 1990, gave away all his money and took up a life of wandering the country, mostly in the western and southwestern states. In 1992 he went to Alaska, headed into the wilderness, and died there a few months later just north of Denali National Park .

“It’s not always necessary to be strong, but to feel strong.”

McCandless came from a wealthy family in Washington, DC, but had strong ideals about communing with nature, living a life where everything you owned could be fit on your back, and finding one’s true self. Therefore, when he finished with college at Emory University, he cut himself off from his parents, donated the remainder of his college money to Oxfam ($24,000), and took to the road. He eventually abandoned his car, and took to hitchhiking and riding freight trains to get around the country. He became one of America’s itinerants.

“Some people feel like they don’t deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.”

Eventually, in his pursuit to become one with nature and make meaning of his life, he decides to have one “final adventure” in the Alaskan bush. Chris McCandless goes “into the wild” (hence the name of the book) intending to live off the land. What ends up happening is that he starves to death.

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer presents a chronicle of these two years of Chris McCandless’s life, from the time he left Emory University until his death. Krakauer has taken the time to find and interview many of the people that McCandless stayed with during that time, and the book is peppered with entries from Chris’s journal and passages in books that he underlined and annotated (books by Tolstoy, Thoreau, and others like them).

“When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines upon you.”

The author, with his own background of travels takes us on trip to discover the inner workings, not only of McCandless, but of other people like him. People who crave travel , do not care too much about societal norms – or perhaps cannot relate to them and instead march to their own drum.

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Reviews of Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer

Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

Into The Wild

by Jon Krakauer

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Book summary.

Mesmerizing, heartbreaking, Into the Wild is a tour de force. The power and luminosity of Jon Krakauer's storytelling blaze through every page.

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild. Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and , unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild. Jon Krakauer constructs a clarifying prism through which he reassembles the disquieting facts of McCandless's short life. Admitting an interest that borders on obsession, he searches for the clues to the dries and desires that propelled McCandless. Digging deeply, he takes an inherently compelling mystery and unravels the larger riddles it holds: the profound pull of the American wilderness on our imagination; the allure of high-risk activities to young men of a certain cast of mind; the complex, charged bond between fathers and sons. When McCandless's innocent mistakes turn out to be irreversible and fatal, he becomes the stuff of tabloid headlines and is dismissed for his naiveté, pretensions, and hubris. He is said to have had a death wish but wanting to die is a very different thing from being compelled to look over the edge. Krakauer brings McCandless's uncompromising pilgrimage out of the shadows, and the peril, adversity , and renunciation sought by this enigmatic young man are illuminated with a rare understanding--and not an ounce of sentimentality. Mesmerizing, heartbreaking, Into the Wild is a tour de force. The power and luminosity of Jon Krakauer's storytelling blaze through every page.

THE ALASKA INTERIOR April 27th, 1992

Greetings from Fairbanks! This is the last you shall hear from me, Wayne. Arrived here 2 days ago. It was very difficult to catch rides in the Yukon Territory. But I finally got here. Please return all mail I receive to the sender. It might be a very long time before I return South. If this adventure proves fatal and you don't ever hear from me again I want you to know you're a great man. I now walk into the wild. --Alex. (Postcard received by Wayne Westerberg in Carthage, South Dakota.) Jim Gallien had driven four miles out of Fairbanks when he spotted the hitchhiker standing in the snow beside the road, thumb raised high, shivering in the gray Alaska dawn. He didn't appear to be very old: eighteen, maybe nineteen at most. A rifle protruded from the young man's backpack, but he looked friendly enough; a hitchhiker with a Remington semiautomatic isn't the sort of thing that gives motorists pause in the forty-ninth...

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Into the Wild (Krakauer)

Into the Wild Jon Krakauer, 1996 Knopf Doubleday 207 pp. ISBN-13: 9780307387172 Summary   In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter.  How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild .

Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir.  In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his  cash.  He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and , unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented.  Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away.  Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild.

Jon Krakauer constructs a clarifying prism through which he reassembles the disquieting facts of McCandless's short life.  Admitting an interst that borders on obsession, he searches for the clues to the dries and desires that propelled McCandless.  Digging deeply, he takes an inherently compelling mystery and unravels the larger riddles it holds: the profound pull of the American wilderness on our imagination; the allure of high-risk activities to young men of a certain cast of mind; the complex, charged bond between fathers and sons.

When McCandless's innocent mistakes turn out to be irreversible and fatal, he becomes the stuff of tabloid headlines and is dismissed for his naivete, pretensions, and hubris.  He is said  to have had a death wish but wanting to die is a very different thing from being compelled to look over the edge. Krakauer brings McCandless's uncompromising pilgrimage out of the shadows, and the peril, adversity , and renunciation sought by this enigmatic young man are illuminated with a rare understanding—and not an ounce of sentimentality. Mesmerizing, heartbreaking, Into the Wild is a tour de force. The power and luminosity of Jon Krakauer's stoytelling blaze through every page. ( From the publisher .)

Author Bio   Krakauer was born as the third of five children. He competed in tennis at Corvallis High School and graduated in 1972. He went on to study at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, where in 1976 he received his degree in Environmental Studies. In 1977, he met former climber Linda Mariam Moore; they married in 1980 and now live in Seattle, Washington.

More In 1974, Krakauer was part of a group of seven friends pioneering the Arrigetch Peaks of the Brooks Range in Alaska and was invited by American Alpine Journal to write about those experiences. Though he neither expected nor received a fee, he was excited when the Journal published his article. A year later, he and two others made the second ascent of The Moose's Tooth, a highly technical peak in the Alaska Range.

One year after graduating from college (1977), he spent three weeks by himself in the wilderness of the Stikine Icecap region of Alaska and climbed a new route on the Devils Thumb, an experience he described in Eiger Dreams and in Into the Wild .

Much of Krakauer's early popularity as a writer came from being a journalist for Outside magazine. In 1983, he was able to abandon part-time work as a fisherman and a carpenter to become a full-time writer. His freelance writing appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic Magazine, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Architectural Digest .

Into the Wild was published in 1996 and secured Krakauer's reputation as an outstanding adventure writer, spending more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list, which was adapted for film (director Sean Penn) and released in 2007.

In 2003, Under the Banner of Heaven became Krakauer's third non-fiction bestseller. The book examines extremes of religious belief, particularly fundamentalist offshoots of Mormonism. The book inspired the documentary, Damned to Heaven .

2010 saw the publication of Where Men Win Glory , about former NFL football player Pat Tillman, who became a US Army Ranger after 9/11. Tillman was eventually killed in action under suspicious circumstances in Afghanistan. ( Adapated from Wikipedia .)

Book Reviews At the beginning of Into the Wild, you share the outraged reactions of so many who read the article by Mr. Krakauer in Outside magazine from which this book developed. As one angry Alaskan put it in a letter to the author: "While I feel for his parents, I have no sympathy for him. Such willful ignorance...amounts to disrespect for the land... — just another case of underprepared, overconfident men bumbling around out there and screwing up because they lacked the requisite humility. [Yet] in Mr. Krakauer's eloquent handling... because the story involves overbearing pride, a reversal of fortune and a final moment of recognition, it has elements of classic tragedy. By the end, Mr. Krakauer has taken the tale of a kook who went into the woods, and made of it a heart-rending drama of human yearning. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - New York Times

A narrative of arresting force. Anyone who ever fancied wandering off to face nature on its own harsh terms should give a look. It’s gripping stuff. Washington Post

Engrossing . . . with a telling eye for detail, Krakauer has captured the sad saga of a stubborn, idealistic young man. Los Angeles Times

After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving. They also reflect the posturing of a confused young man, raised in affluent Annandale, Virginia, who self-consciously adopted a Tolstoyan renunciation of wealth and return to nature. Krakauer, a contributing editor to Outside and Men's Journal , retraces McCandless' ill-fated antagonism toward his father, Walt, an eminent aerospace engineer. Krakauer also draws parallels to his own reckless youthful exploit in 1977, when he climbed Devils Thumb, a mountain on the Alaska-British Columbia border, partly as a symbolic act of rebellion against his autocratic father. In a moving narrative, Krakauer probes the mystery of McCandless' death, which he attributes to logistical blunders and to accidental poisoning from eating toxic seed pods Publishers Weekly

In April 1992, 23-year-old Chris McCandless hiked into the Alaska bush to "live off the land." Four months later, hunters found his emaciated corpse in an abandoned Fairbanks city bus, along with five rolls of film, an SOS note, and a diary written in a field guide to edible plants. Cut off from civilization, McCandless had starved to death. The young man's gruesome demise made headlines and haunted Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer, who saw "vague, unsettling parallels" between McCandless's life and his own. Expanding on his 1993 Outside article, Krakauer traces McCandless's last two years; after his graduation from Emory University, McCandless abandoned his middle-class family, identity, and possessions in favor of the life of "Alexander Supertramp," wandering the American West in search of "raw, transcendent experience." In trying to understand McCandless's behavior and the appeal that risky activities hold for young men, Krakauer examines his own adventurous youth. However, he never satisfactorily answers the question of whether McCandless was a noble, if misguided, idealist or a reckless narcissist who brought pain to his family. For popular outdoor and adventure collections. — Wilda Williams Library Journal

Some Alaskans reacted contemptuously to Krakauer's magazine article about a young man who starved to death one summer in the shadow of Denali.... A moving story that reiterates the bewitching attraction of the Far West. — Gilbert Taylor, American Library Association . Booklist

Discussion Questions   Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips) • Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction • Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Into the Wild: 

1. Many readers find it hard to have sympathy for young McCandless: his stubborn idealism and lack of preparedness, as someone has pointed out, amount to arrogance. Yet to a one, critics point to Krakauer's power as a writer to evoke sympathy for the young man. Where do you stand?

2. To what extent does Krakauer's own history as a young rebellious risk-taker color his judgment of McCandless? Or does Krakauer's own experience serve to enlighten his—and your— understanding of Chris?

( Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks .)   top of page (summary)

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The Literary Edit

Review: Into the Wild – Jon Krakauer

Into the Wild is one of those books that has been on my radar for a while; and indeed no sooner had I started reading it that almost everyone around me began professing their love for what is probably  Jon Krakauer ‘s best known book. I’m not sure where I got my copy from – whether it travelled with me from my home in London or if I’ve acquired it since living in Sydney, but a recent trip to Byron Bay  seemed the perfect time to see if the tale lived up to its hype.

Published in 1996, Into the Wild is an extension of what was originally a 9,000 word article written by Krakauer which appeared in the January 1993 issue of Outside, detailing the death of Christopher McCandless. The son of wealthy parents, shortly after graduating McCandless donated his law-school fund to Oxfam and cut ties with his family before setting out on what he hoped would be an unforgettable journey into the Alaskan wilderness.

What follows is a tale of adventure and hardship, as McCandless rejects both conformity and materialism to live in the wild. With just rice, a rifle and reading material for company, he spent approximately 119 days in the wilderness, living off roots, berries and game, while keeping a journal documenting his odyssey.  And while much debate has since surrounded the cause of McCandless death; at the time of writing Into The Wild, the author deemed it to be due to the consumption of poisonous potato seeds.

McCandless’ demise was gut-wrenching to read, and while many claim he had a death wish, Krakauer opines that wanting to die is a very different thing from being compelled to look over the edge. A haunting, riveting account of McCandless’ travels and travails, and the impact he had on those with whom he came into contact, Into the Wild is a thought provoking book about an ill-fated pilgrimage and a stand against consumerism.

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Book review: the creativity of ‘into the wild’.

However, as his journey continues on, McCandless discovers that modern heroes are unable to completely escape their reality thus ending his journey. 

Krakauer creatively tells the story of McCandless in a biography of his journey by drawing from certain aspects of the Monomyth . The Monomyth, better known as the Hero’s Journey, is a term coined by Joseph Campbell, an American professor of literature, who used the phrase to describe a classical series of actions present in many stories.

Although it is impossible to know the exact reason why McCandless went into the wild without personally asking him, his letters to the people he knew as well as the interactions he had with them assist in painting a reason for his abandonment of society. It’s easy to infer that McCandless’s reason for separation, the first phase of the hero’s journey, is due to pressure from his parents. In a letter he wrote to his sister, Carine, Chris swears that he is going to disown his family and live a life in the Alaskan wilderness. 

It’s apparent that McCandless had developed some sort of tension between him and his guardians; this is due to the fact that his parents never took him seriously, or in other words, never saw him the way he wanted to be seen. From a young age, it can be deduced that McCandless was raised in a strict household with massive amounts of pressure for him to excel in school. Information such as grades is acquired through the samples of his letters given by Krakauer. 

A copy of his final transcript, a short thank you and a quick update on his life were the last things that Chris’s family had ever heard from him. The tone of the letter to his parents appears to be void of any possible emotions, indicating that the letter may have just been written on a whim. It can be concluded that McCandless only wrote the letter because it seemed mandatory for him to speak with his family about his well-being.

In addition to the brief letter, McCandless also mailed a copy of his final grades with nothing else, indicating that the letter is completely business-related and revokes any sense of sentiment. The letter alone can be indicative of the reason why McCandless left. 

The Call, also known as the opportunity for adventure, is the first subsection of separation in the Monomyth. In terms of the hero’s journey, McCandless’s parents were the reason for his leap into the wild, making it synonymous with any beckoning.

However, McCandless did not accept his calling right away. During college, McCandless partakes in multiple short road trips, but none of them correlate with his real adventure, rather they’re just forms of preparation. McCandless reaches his threshold, or jumping-off point, after college when he decides to travel west. 

At this point, McCandless does his best to rid himself of his physical belongings from his past life, which can be compared to a hero leaving the known limits of his/her world and venturing into a new state where rules and limits are unknown.

McCandless, according to the novel, conceals his car as best he could beneath a brown tarp, buries his deer-hunting rifle, and promptly reduces the remainder of his money to ash and smoke. During this moment, McCandless ends the phase of separation in his version of the hero’s journey and promptly begins the second phase: initiation. 

During the initiation phase of the Monomyth, the hero enters a special world and faces a series of tasks and challenges before he/she reaches the climax or abyss of the story. Throughout his journey through the special world, McCandless repeatedly faces challenges related to nature as well as issues with his own conscience. For example, temptations of danger, a subphase of initiation, repeatedly cross McCandless’s path.

However, these forces of danger are due to McCandless’s desire for thrill and adventure. The sheer idea of risk-taking is bewitching to him and in order to satisfy this desire, McCandless incessantly shoves himself in the face of danger. In his May 1992 journal entry, McCandless sprawled out a declaration of independence.

McCandless is clearly proud of himself and what he has accomplished so far on his journey. His addiction to not only the thrill of dangerous situations but also the gratification of the aftermath will continue to push him forward on his journey, ultimately causing more challenges to come. In addition to internal pressure, McCandless also needs to fight the frigid temperatures of Alaska.

Along the way, he is able to receive help from a select group of people which include Jan Burres and Bob, Jim Gallien and Ronald Franz; however, none of them are unable to convince McCandless from ending his journey and instead they fulfill the roles of supernatural aid and the Goddess in the hero’s journey.

During the spring of his journey in Alaska, temperatures reached the low thirties and would drop into the low teens at night. Being unable to completely adapt to the cold as well as the fact that he was lacking the proper equipment and food for the climate, McCandless suffers the most during this point of his journey, ultimately leading to the abyss, the most treacherous part of his story.

Now ending the initiation phase, a hero must face some sort of transformation, whether it’d be a death, a rebirth or an epiphany. In other words, one part of a hero must die in order for a new part to be reborn.

McCandless faces this sudden epiphany after he manages to kill the moose. In his journal he writes: “I am reborn. This is my dawn. Real-life has just begun.” After killing the moose, McCandless’s pride skyrockets. He takes a photo of the carcass of the moose and spends days trying to cure the meat.

However, since he was unable to cure the meat properly and in time, it ultimately ended up spoiling and becoming inedible, making him have to leave it for the wild animals to eat. 

From this experience, McCandless comes to the realization that the value of an object or idea is measured via only its value to an individual. This means that to other people, the moose carcass has little to no value and is seen as a waste. He also recognizes that happiness really only matters when it’s able to be shared amongst other people.

Reflecting on his epiphany or rebirth, McCandless writes in his journal that he has lived through much and now he thinks that he has found what is needed for happiness: a mate and children. After all the hardship he’s faced, McCandless realizes that true happiness can only be around people, causing him to want to integrate himself back into society, leading to the Return.

Unfortunately, McCandless’s story is not one with a happy ending. Due to either starvation or poisoning, McCandless is unable to return back to society and finish his hero’s journey, cutting it short and thus, leaving the cycle unfinished. 

Krakauer’s “ Into the Wild” is a modern rendition of classical Monomyth, the Hero’s Journey, overlayed on the real journey of a young boy searching for meaning in his life. During his ambitious travels throughout North America, Chris McCandless’s journey follows many of the components of the original hero’s journey.

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Book Review: Into the Wild

September 1992, a young man named Chris McCandless is found dead in the Alaskan Wilderness and Jon Krakauer is determined to sniff out every clue as to why. Into the Wild follows the life of Chris McCandless, a young man who dropped everything and took to the road, and how he even ended up in Alaska in the first place; and although he is dead, the trail and influences he left behind live on in those he met. The story jumps around occasionally, but it is just extraordinary to me how a single young man was able to travel almost all of the United States by foot and hitchhiking, and then end up in Alaska where he lived in the Wild until August 1992. Krakauer interviews the people who Chris has interacted with, and all of them say that Chris changed their life for the better, even those who he only shared a car ride with. I personally enjoy this book because it makes you feel as if what he did was amazing and if you, too, need an adventure like that in your life. I definitely recommend this book to all readers since every single person can take something from this book, negative or positive. Reviewer Grade: 11

Book review: ‘Into the Wild’

Natalia Brudkowska in Editor's Picks Travel on 20 February, 2022.

‘McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large, but rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul’. This is a quote from the book written by Jon Krakauer in 1996 entitled ‘Into the Wild’. This critically acclaimed work of non-fiction was adapted into a film of the same title directed by Sean Penn in 2007. It addresses the themes of isolation, identity, and rejection of societal norms, retracing the steps of Chris McCandless. On April 28, 1992, the intrepid explorer hitchhiked to the Stampede Trail in Alaska and began his expedition down the snow-covered trail. With little more than a camera and a journal, McCandless survived 113 days in the harsh Alaskan wilderness before dying of starvation.  The dilapidated bus abandoned by a construction company that served as Chris’s shelter remains a symbol of youthful idealism and a relentless search for one’s identity.

‘He was now Alexander Supertramp, master of his own destiny’

Chris Johnson McCandless was born into a middle-class family living in an idyllic suburban town in Virginia. After graduating from the prestigious Emory University in 1990, he gave away the entirety of his savings to Oxfam, abandoned his car, burned the money in his wallet, and embarked on a journey across the United States. Early on into his odyssey, he changed his name to Alexander Supertramp and cut ties with the members of his family and his college friends. Free from his material possessions, having created a new identity for himself, he was ready to immerse himself in a new life and vanish into the wild.

‘Driving west out of Atlanta, he intended to invent an utterly new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience.’

Jon Krakauer digs deep, searches for clues, and pieces together the mysterious story of Chris McCandless’s life and death. The book constitutes testimonials of people who the young explorer encountered and bonded with throughout his journey, including Wayne Westerberg – a rancher in South Dakota, Jan Buress who drove across the country selling knickknacks at flea markets, and Ron Franz who saw McCandless as the son he never had. Krakauer, who himself attempted to climb the notoriously dangerous Alaskan peak of Devils Thumb, explores the similarities between the desires and motivations of Chris and his own. The author devotes a part of the book to the experiences of grief and disquiet of McCandless’ parents and sister Carine – the only person from his old life with whom the young man kept in touch throughout his journey.

‘That’s what was great about him. He tried. Not many do.’

‘Into the Wild’ sheds a light on the internal exploration of one’s identity outside of the societal ties and conventions. It raises the pertinent question of what drives some of us to risk more than we can afford to lose. Chris McCandless was inspired by American Transcendentalists, such as Emerson or Thoreau, who believed that people could only become their true selves when self-reliant and independent. The young man was eager to immerse himself in such unfiltered experience and give in to his desire and longing for something greater than his life from before. This exploration cost him his life which is why the story encapsulated in Jon Krakauer’s book is regarded by some as a cautionary tale of excessive recklessness and risk-taking. The bus which McCandless spent his last days in will soon become part of an exhibition at the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Featured image:  Diego Delso , with license 

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Wednesday 10 January 2024

Review: into the wild.

Although published in 2020 (yes, I’m ridiculously behind in my reviews!), this story is still as relevant as ever. Clever too. It begins with Roman, a lone wanderer . We’re immediately invested in this unique boy thanks to his name-word-play. 

Roman’s isolation is appealing and relatable for small children who, although may roll within large groups of same-aged others, will often stop and admire the curious or unusual, utterly and privately captivated by a new discovery.

Then, during one of his many intrepid treks, Roman makes a discovery that simultaneously changes and crystallises his outlook.

In The Wild is unforced and fanciful. Grounding and gratifying and above all else, gloriously good for one’s soul. Bright splashes of colour and striking lined drawings alternating between intriguing vignettes to full page spreads draw young readers into the wild with Roman while Vescio’s text provides just enough incentive to keep page turning until the heartwarming end.

The message here, if one must expose one, is simple: to simply soak in the simple things, the small things, the seemingly uninteresting things. Roman’s curiosity and wanderlust promote adventure and an appreciation of all that surrounds us, suggesting that while doing so children may uncover beautiful footnotes of friendship. Because, joy shared is joy doubled, right?

Title:   Into The Wild Author: Robert Vescio Illustrator:   Mel Armstrong Publisher:   New Frontier, $11.99 Publication Date:   1 October 2020 Format: Hardcover ISBN : 9781921928789 For ages:  3 – 6 Type:  Picture Book

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The Phoenix

Into the wild book review.

Ellie Kroening , Writer | April 13, 2023

Students in Honors American Literature are familiar with Into the Wild. Everyone else is missing out on a great story. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer provides interesting insights into the story of Christopher McCandless, a young man in search of himself and his place in the world. 

McCandless was an American adventurer who preferred to live a simple, solitary lifestyle. When he was younger he had a hard home life. His father had many secrets that he kept behind his wife’s back which caused her to turn cold and not treat the kids as her own. Chris had a sister named Carine, with whom he shared a close bond. Throughout his whole life he went to her whenever he needed someone. Despite his relationship with Carine, the hardships that he endured at home caused him to become withdrawn from his parents and he began to figure out a way to leave.

McCandless was a smart kid and earned good grades, allowing him to go to college. While in college, he began reading works of Thoreau and Tolstoy. They preached the importance of living simply and not letting little or material things get in the way of living life to the fullest. After finishing school to please his parents, he made it seem as though he were going to get a job and have a good life straight out of college; however when they least expected it, Chris packed his bags and left without a goodbye.

The story focuses on the experiences of Chris and what he endures from start to finish of his adventure. I would recommend this book if you enjoy reading biographies, about nature, and the idea of uniqueness and nonconformity. 

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'Baby Reindeer' review: You’re in for a wild ride into the bruised places of the heart

A stalker walks into a London pub and makes life hell for a bartender who offers her tea and sympathy. Big mistake. After 41,000 emails, hundreds of tweets, and 350 hours of voicemails, the barkeep—she calls him "baby reindeer" after her cuddly childhood toy—runs for his life.

What do you do with such trauma? If you're Richard Gadd, 35, a struggling Scottish stand-up comic in his 20s in 2015 when he says he was stalked, you create a one-man show—with illustrative props— starring a semi-fictionalized version of yourself who you call Donny Dunn.

"Baby Reindeer" is now a must-see, top-rated Netflix phenom, with new viewers joining every day to examine each of its seven half-hour episodes with the forensic focus of a crime scene, which it definitely is. Fun? Sure. But so dark you'll choke on every laugh.

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Why does Donny wait months to report Martha (Jessica Gunning in an unnerving, unforgettable performance), his frumpy, middle-aged harasser? Is he flattered by the attention of this alleged lawyer, with a prison stint for stalking, even when Martha dangerously confronts his parents and attacks therapist Teri, his trans girlfriend (a superb Nava Mau)?

It's a compulsively riveting tour de force from Gadd whose earlier solo show, "Monkey See Monkey Do," is also incorporated into the series, drawn from Gadd's account of being groomed, drugged and sexually assaulted by an older TV writer. The fictionalized Darrien O'Connor (Tom Goodman-Hill) pretends to be his mentor and assaults Donny. Episode 4 details that abuse, and it's enough to give you nightmares.

"Why did I freeze?" Donny asks in voiceover. "Why did I just let it happen?" 

Why indeed? It's the attempt to go in depth on the nature of Donny's trauma that separates "Baby Reindeer" from crass tabloid exploitation. Gadd is as hard on himself as he is on his predators. What kind of shame makes Donny a glutton for such verbal and physical abuse?

The answers are as chilling as they are illuminating. We learn that, after breaking up with an earlier girlfriend, Keeley (Shalom Brune-Franklin), Donny moved in with her mother Liz (Nina Sosanya), to create a cocoon for his obsessions about bi-sexuality and his blinkered future.

When Donny makes his victimhood part of his stand-up act, the effect is shattering, prodding Martha to show up and heckle him mercilessly. In this series about unhinged behavior, the empathetic Donny always looks inside himself to find the roots of his own self loathing.

MORE: This is Going to Hurt keeps you riveted from first scene to last: Review

"Baby Reindeer" grabs you and won't let go. Questions keep nagging at you. There were times watching "Baby Reindeer" when I cringed so hard I wanted to cover my eyes. But stay alert, people, and you're in for a wild ride into the bruised places of the heart.

While the show describes itself as a "true story" in the opening, it adds in the credits, "This program is based on real events: however certain characters, names, incidents, locations, and dialogue have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes."

So much for the amateur sleuthing going on to find the real Martha and Darrien. "That was never the point," Gadd has said. But gossips will gossip, clouding the core of truth that makes "Baby Reindeer" such a twisted spellbinder. Emmy voters take note; this is one of the best and most audaciously original series of the year, the kind you never forget.

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Only the Astronauts by Ceridwen Dovey review – playful and deeply moving close encounters

Metal objects launched into space observe perplexing humanity in this wildly inventive novel from the author of Only the Animals

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T elling stories from the perspectives of dead animals was, Ceridwen Dovey admits, “a tiny bit nutty”. Only the Astronauts – a “sequel of sorts” to her book Only the Animals – is a bolder and madder venture again. This time Dovey’s first-person narrators are inanimate objects which have been launched into outer space, including the International Space Station; the Voyager 1 space probe; a mannequin by the name of Starman; a sculpture on the moon (containing Neil Armstrong’s spirit); and a tampon that once belonged to Sally Ride.

The “tamponaut” declares that if anyone considers her ridiculous, then they “clearly don’t understand that most space missions are performative and symbolic above all else”. She could be defending Dovey here, who is troubled by the “spectre of ridiculousness” haunting books like hers.

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Dovey’s object-astronauts cannot communicate with humans but they study them with anthropological curiosity. Toothpaste, unlike food, is spat out; the “funny soft tubes” at the end of human legs turn out not to be permanently attached. The narrators lament humans’ grandiosity, hierarchies and belief in their own exceptionality. Ivan Ivanovich, the mannequin used for testing Vostok spacecraft, is disappointed that, after his “great service to humankind”, Yuri Gagarin took all the credit. The space station, who regards itself as a home, is hurt when some of its human inhabitants coldly describe their departure as ‘“deorbiting” or “end-of-life disposal”. Space exploration’s official history may be one of heroism and conquest but the objects’ omniscient gaze exposes another hidden reality of human scale: rifts over personal space and personal hygiene; heartache, longing and pretence.

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The object-narrators are particularly attuned to human language; its blind spots and shortcomings. Once upon a time, Armstrong’s spirit reminds us, there were no words to describe oceans or forests but gradually humans found them. In turn, he grapples to describe the moonscape; to capture in words the quality of its light; its highlands and rilles. The narrators also point out gaps in the (human) astronauts’ emotional vocabularies. These people are sometimes conscious of “a blank space where there should be new words for new feelings”, but, tending to be practical, obedient sorts, are “not necessarily the type to dwell on this absence”.

“But what does it say about humans,” asks the space station, “that, in thirty years, they never got around to sending me the people who might properly put this way of life into words, and thus into perspective?”

For all its imaginative flights, Only the Astronauts is grounded in actual space history, lending the book a strange veracity. Some facts feel invented: Ivanovich’s body was stuffed with mice and a recipe for cabbage soup; the Voyager’s Golden Record, sent into space as a message from humanity to aliens, contained sound recordings of thunder, whale song and laughter. Space tourism, toxic space junk, international rivalries and protocols: all are integrated into Dovey’s narrative, as are references to various personalities (Buzz, Yuri, Musk) and spacecraft (Zvezda; Cupola). As with the writerly history underpinning Only the Animals, these details are woven in convincingly and seamlessly.

As well as being a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction, Dovey is a science writer. Only the Astronauts draws on this expertise but the reader never suspects an agenda. To provide but one example: in her journalism, Dovey has criticised the “overview effect”, and how it serves the commercial interests of space industry entrepreneurs. She doesn’t employ that term here but does make reference to the feelings of “transcendent oneness with all creatures on the planet” that some astronauts experience on seeing the Earth from afar. One astronaut questions what use this is if the “terrible reality” of life for many people can’t be seen. What if, she asks, we are not “all in this together”?

In its wild inventiveness, and its deft marriage of the playful and the profound, Only the Astronauts brings to mind the work of Max Porter’s Lanny. His Dead Papa Toothwort is an ancient shape-shifting spirit who watches and listens to humanity, loving the “creaturely” child Lanny with the sort of tenderness Dovey’s objects feel for their humans.

And, like Porter, Dovey is stylistically innovative. One passage consists of a girl emailing chunks of her freshly written screenplay to her grandmother (who is actually a tampon salvaged from a trip into space). In short, aspects of this collection really shouldn’t work. But in Dovey’s sure hands they do. For a book filled with metal objects, Only the Astronauts is suffused with immense feeling. Dovey wouldn’t see this as a contradiction: in literature, she observes, it’s generally when there’s an overload of feeling that writers will turn to narrators of the non-human kind.

As with any kind of travel to an unfamiliar location, entering Dovey’s world requires a degree of adjustment. But, once acclimatised, readers will fall under the spell of her voices, and have the sense, on finishing, of having ventured into a place of unusual and unearthly beauty.

Only the Astronauts by Ceridwen Dovey is published by Penguin Random House

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All 66 stephen king books ranked from worst to best.

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10 Wild Theories That Completely Change Stephen King Movies

1 stephen king theory completely changes how you see his books, mad max director's mel gibson return response is a huge relief after 97% rotten tomatoes classic.

• Stand By Me is Stephen King's favorite movie adaptation as it faithfully followed the novella The Body and captured the emotional essence of the story.
• Stephen King's uncut version of The Stand is considered a masterpiece due to its detail, immersive storytelling, and gruesome nature.
• King's iconic novel The Shining delves into Jack, Wendy, and Danny Torrance's haunting experiences at the Overlook Hotel, where spirits torment them with a history of substance abuse and violence.

As the king of horror, almost all the 66 Stephen King books ranked among the best in the genre. When he authored Carrie , his first novel, in 1974, his name immediately skyrocketed to one of the most recognizable in the horror genre — both for his novels and short stories. Studios noticed Stephen King's literary talent and offered movie adaptations immediately with Carrie . King remains a powerhouse with new stories and movie/TV adaptations coming from the mind of horror's most cherished author every year, but how do they compare?

King has authored over 200 stories, with short stories, novellas, and novels. Carrie was his first movie adaptation, but it was nowhere near the last. Movie adaptations of Stephen King books are released at the same frequency as his literary tales, with at least one making its debut every year since 1980. Numerous upcoming King stories are in development to become a series or movie. King's legacy makes his last name the definition of the genre . Each of Stephen King's novels is impeccable in its own right, but some Stephen King books ranked higher than others.

Stephen King movies have made way for a variety of theories, and if some of them were true, they would completely change one or more movies.

Stephen King's short story collections are not included in this list.

66 Dreamcatcher

March 20, 2001, dreamcatcher.

Stephen King's Dreamcatcher amalgamates some of horror's greatest sci-fi elements, including alien invasion and body horror. The story is set in Derry, Maine, one of the three fictional towns that King created for his literary multiverse. Dreamcatcher has some captivating moments but leads to underwhelming scenes and dialogue that could've been bettered had its plot not been reliant on so many sub-genres meshing together.

Despite its closeness to the source material, even the movie adaptation is regarded as one of King's worst — though some find it underrated . King himself said he doesn't like Dreamcatcher very much (via Rolling Stone ). He said he wrote the book after an accident where he was out walking and was hit by a van. He said, " I was pretty stoned when I wrote it, because of the Oxy, and that’s another book that shows the drugs at work. " He personally ranked it below Tommyknockers as his least favorite release.

65 The Tommyknockers

November 1987.

The Tommyknockers is a Lovecraftian tale with Stephen King stylization, However, it was also one of King's first attempts to go outside the horror genre with a pure sci-fi tale here. There are horror elements, as King drifts into hints of body horror in the story, but at the end of the day, this ended up as one of King's lesser-liked books in his illustrious career. Not only was it disappointing for fans at the time of its release, but it is one of the books King himself hates the most .

King blames the poor writing on his drug use at the time, and he calls it an " awful book " that he wrote while embroiled in the harsh drug addiction that he dealt with in the 1980s. However, he said it had some good ideas underneath it all (via Rolling Stone ). " The Tommyknockers is an awful book. That was the last one I wrote before I cleaned up my act . And I’ve thought about it a lot lately, " he said at the time. " The book is about 700 pages long, and I’m thinking, 'There’s probably a good 350-page novel in there. '"

February 2006

If there's one thing that Stephen King books do well, it's the apocalypse. In the 2006 novel Cell, a New England artist discovers that a bizarre cellular signal transforms people into zombie-like creatures. It is no George A. Romero horror story , but it is King's valiant attempt at making his mark in the zombie horror sub-genre . Due to the vast amount of literature featuring the living dead, it reads as an unremarkable tale that could've been far better had he focused more on the technological aspects and social commentary that was woven into Cell.

It was mostly lightweight stuff and the movie that resulted received terrible reviews. Interestingly, Stephen King wrote the script for Cell and decided to change the story's ending in the script, as the book ends without a clear resolution and readers have to determine if the book's hero, Clay, is able to save his son Johnny or not. It didn't help as the movie ended up certified rotten with an 11% score on Rotten Tomatoes , and even the audience hated it, rating it at a low 17% rotten score.

63 Rose Madder

Rose Madder features a common theme in King's stories: domestic violence . It is an unbelievable tale about a woman named Rose who dares to leave her abusive husband before he has the chance to take her life. Rose then finds a painting where she sees her life mirrored in the painting. The painting itself constantly changes and expands, and soon Rose has to help a woman in the painting save her baby while having to protect herself when her abusive husband finds her.

King said in his memoir On Writing that he was " trying too hard " when writing this novel. While its story is important, the book's fantasy elements threaten to overwhelm the true message. It seems that the best villain in the book was "Nearly Normal Norman," the husband, and when the story veered into the arena of mythology, it kind of fell apart. However, King did write a solid story of an abusive relationship, which he had done before, but made the woman here powerful, standing on her own .

62 The Regulators

September 1996.

Stephen King returned to his pseudonym of Richard Bachman years after retiring the name with the book The Regulators. Unlike the previous Bachman novels, King let his fans know this was him as he released it simultaneously with Desperation in 1996. The two novels act as mirror stories to one another , taking place in a parallel universe with the same characters - but in very different situations. King wanted to tell two stories - a horror tale under the name King and a more fantasy story under the Bachman name.

In The Regulators , the story follows various people who live in a small neighborhood, but all find themselves sucked into a horrific situation thanks to a young boy who might have supernatural powers that he can't fully control. This manifests when mysterious people show up in vans and begin shooting people , which leads to an increase in local violence. The Regulators is more complex than Desperation but wasn't quite as strong of a tale.

61 Gwendy's Button Box

While Gwendy's Button Box is considered a novella, it is consistently listed under King's bibliography of full-length novels. He co-wrote the story with Richard Chizmar, and it follows the story of a young girl named Gwendy Peterson, who lives in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine . Castle Rock, King's most beloved fictional town, returns to his novels for the first time since he said goodbye in Needful Things .

It isn't a very remarkable story, as it is composed of remnants of each author that merge into an account that only strengthens the mythos of Castle Rock rather than Gwendy's experiences in the town. Chizmar and King are strong writers, but their styles are different and that makes the book a little different than most King novels , as it makes it a strange read at times. However, King said that it was Chizmar who helped him finish the story, with the two re-writing each other's work. " I had a story I couldn't finish, and [Chizmar] showed me the way home with style and panache " (via EW ).

60 From A Buick 8

September 2002.

King has written several stories about cars throughout his career. From A Buick 8 features a supernatural car that can shift between worlds. It's an entirely different take on his first story about a possessed car, Christine, but its uniqueness does not make it better than its predecessor. It lacks the excitement attached to a killer Stephen King car story and opts for a bizarre story about a car that can travel between worlds instead . This is far more reminiscent of Charlie Manx's Rolls-Royce Wraith in Joe Hill's novel, NOS4A2.

The story has little in the way of a plot arc, but the idea of a kid learning more about his dad through the car is pure King. The novel is one of the few that King optioned to a movie studio, but it was never able to get made . George A. Romero, Tobe Hooper, and Thomas Jane have all been attached to the story, but it has never made it to the big or small screen, likely because of the lack of an in-depth plot.

59 Gwendy's Final Task

February 15, 2022.

Stephen King collaborated with fellow writer Richard Chizmar to write the Gwendy's Button Box trilogy. In this finale, the mysterious and destructive button box makes its final appearance after Gwendy reaches fame as a successful novelist and rising political star. Gwendy reconciles with the box, drawn to both its remarkable effects on well-being and its terrible power. King gets the chance to bring in more of his favorite sci-fi influences , as the main character must go from King's cursed Castle Rock to the MF-1 space station.

The stakes are incredibly high in the book, but King and Chizmar have distinctly different styles, and the change in tone hurts here . This was the end of the Gwendy trilogy and the two authors sought to take it to an apocalyptic level. It is a good ending to what started out as a mostly slight and short tale, and one that morphed into something entertaining and exciting.

58 The Running Man

The running man.

Set in 2025, The Running Man tells the story of Ben Richards as he participates in a game show that shares a title with the novel. The contestants are required to outrun hunters who are sent out to kill them under the totalitarian regime of the new world . Ben is a man living in this world who needs money for his gravely ill daughter and agrees to the competition so he can afford her medicine. However, the games are dangerous and soon Ben realizes his family might also be in danger.

The Running Man is as if Stephen King had written a long-form episode of Black Mirror . The book features elements of Charlie Brooker's series with its dystopian setting and the exploration of technology's impact on the world. The Running Man was also a Richard Bachman book that predicted the rise of reality television two decades before it became such a successful genre. It also spawned a fun adaptation starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and will get a second one soon from Edgar Wright.

November 1984

Thinner (1996).

Billy Halleck is cursed by a Romani man named Taduz Lemke after killing an elderly woman in a car accident - and getting away with it in court. Soon, he begins to shed weight at an alarming rate. While doctors speculate that he likely has cancer, others involved in his legal battle begin to show signs of growing scales and painful acne, all of which were not present before the case. The man then has to find out more about the curse and see if there is a way to reverse it before he wastes away.

Thinner has not aged well due to its ascription of curses alongside Romani people and their culture, but its story remains socially relevant. At its core, the novel is about the pressures of weight loss and disordered eating. Tom Holland ( Cujo ) adapted the novel, which was the last that King wrote as Richard Bachman before his discovery, into a movie that received mostly negative reviews and barely made back its budget at the box office.

56 Sleeping Beauties

September 2017.

While King's works with his son, Joe Hill, are the most well-known King family collaborations, he also co-authored a novel with his youngest son, Owen. Sleeping Beauties features women wrapped in gauze who could become feral if given the opportunity. It is a bizarre story that includes a somewhat Biblical character named Evie (Eve Black), the only woman who is immune to the illness that is causing women to fall into deep slumbers . If the women are awakened they wake up as feral and violent creatures.

This global pandemic ("Aurora") is unlike any other in King's repertoire , making it stand out among the rest of his novels that feature a dystopian world or apocalyptic disaster. It is clear that this is a book that Stephen King, and his son Owen, wanted to write as a message about the women in the world and the dangers they face, but at times it seems a little heavy-handed.

September 1977

Rage is the first novel King penned under the name Richard Bachman . Since he was restricted to publishing one book a year, he created Bachman to produce more content outside the horror genre. Rage is also the only book that King wrote that he has taken off the market because of the rash of school shootings across America. According to King, " I pulled it because in my judgment it might be hurting people, and that made it the responsible thing to do " (via Business Insider ).

The story is good, but it is a challenging read that struggles when putting readers in the mind of the school shooter, and seeing everything from his point of view, which is often the view of a young man with no moral character. Rage's ending is particularly maddening, as it finds the school shooter with a somewhat sympathetic ending where he is found not guilty due to his mental instability; his victims find no justice. However, that is also King's point, as he questions who is really responsible for these tragedies.

54 Elevation

October 2018.

When Scott Carey discovers that he has contracted a strange illness, he is faced with several symptoms that are nothing short of bizarre. Set in Castle Rock, Maine, Elevation includes social and political discourse intertwined with an otherworldly story of a man struggling to be cured of his new ailment. It is considered a sequel to Gwendy's Button Box, but it is more of a soft sequel than anything. " it’s almost like a sequel to Gwendy. Sometimes you seed the ground, and you get a little fertilizer, and things turn out ," King explained (via EW ).

It isn't an entirely remarkable tale, as its attempt at detailing specific social problems in the world tends to fall short of achieving its intended purpose. This is also short, a novella in length, and while it is one of King's more political-leaning stories, its main message is that people can just get along if they try . There is a movie in the works, but it hasn't made it to production yet.

53 The Gunslinger (Dark Tower Book #1)

October 1978.

The Gunslinger is the first installment in King's The Dark Tower series . It introduces Roland Deschain, one of the last remaining gunslingers, who must navigate a fantastical world filled with demons, monstrous creatures, and more. In this story, nothing much happens other than Roland wandering across the desert, looking for the Man in Black. He does meet Jake in this novel, but this is more of a meditative tale that doesn't dig too deep into the mythology that makes it such a great series . However, it is important to read before starting the main journey.

While it is not a particularly bad novel, it's the weakest of the books in that particular series. Stephen King is primarily recognized for his horror novels, and The Gunslinger is far more fantasy-oriented than anything he had done before this 1982 book. It was new to the author's general wheelhouse, and it seems that King struggled to get his pacing right with this introduction to the Dark Tower.

52 Insomnia

October 1994.

When Ralph Roberts of Derry, Maine, begins to experience severe insomnia, his sleep deprivation allows for supernatural abilities to develop . He perceives people's auras as well as entities that are divided into "The Purpose" and "The Random." It is an investigation into the realities of life while questioning the concepts of fate and destiny. The problem with the book is that when the demonic creatures become the main part of the story, it loses a little concerning the best parts of the book — the characters and their relationship with each other.

Insomnia ties in with several Stephen King books, including The Dark Tower, IT, Dreamcatcher, Black House, and Pet Semetary. While it could be perceived as solely serving the purpose of being a universe-building device, the lengthy novel uniquely captures the impact of insomnia on the human psyche as well as life's greater design.

51 Song Of Susannah (Dark Tower Book #6)

While some book series get better over time, The Dark Tower's sixth novel, Song Of Susannah, proved that some things don't always hold up over the years. As the title indicates, this book in the series follows Susanna Dean mostly, as she is trapped in her own mind by Mia, the former demon who is now pregnant in this part of the tale.

The fantastical elements are only utilized in an attempt to connect Stephen King's massive multiverse, as the characters find themselves in the author's own home with a copy of his novel 'Salem's Lot. Thanks to the personal Easter eggs King includes ( including Father Callahan from Salem's Lot ), Stephen King even introduces himself in this book as a character. Song Of Susannah remains slightly better than the first novel in the series. However, it was appreciated by genre fans as it won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel in 2005.

Clayton "Blaze" Blaisdell Jr. is a con artist who plans on kidnapping a wealthy man's son in hopes of making his partner in crime proud. While the story is somewhat cut and dry, it is complicated by Blaze's mental disability , similar to The Stand's Trashcan Man. It impacts the entire storyline and creates a terrifying image of manipulation and coercion.

Blaze , written using the pseudonym Richard Bachman , was a complex story to craft and navigate for the author, which shows through each page as Blaze's character is confronted with the spirit of his partner in crime. King wrote this novel before he wrote Carrie , but published it decades later (via Lilja's Library ). King said at the time that he never got around to writing it because it was a " tearjerker of a book ," and he was writing mostly horror as King, which is why he felt it needed to be a Bachman book, to set it aside from his popular novels.

49 The Dark Tower (Dark Tower Book #7)

September 2004.

The Dark Tower's seventh installment and the final chapter of the story, The Dark Tower, features Stephen King as a secondary character. This time, Jake rescues King from the van that nearly killed him in 1999. By the time that King had made himself a fully-fledged character in his own books, things seemed to grind to a halt for many fans of the Dark Tower series. This is also the novel that King wanted to wrap up the story in, and for people who had followed the journey for over two decades, it would never end how everyone had hoped it would.

It is an interesting read and showcases the author's ability to weave his personal stories into the greater narratives of his fantastical and horrific tales. Despite all of its good aspects, several elements introduced in this book cause the overall series to become a bit more complex than is entirely necessary . The book won the British Fantasy Award in 2005 but was polarizing to many fans of the series.

48 Roadwork

A Richard Bachman book, Roadwork tells the story of Barton George Dawes. While grieving over the loss of his child and divorce, he delves further into mental instability with the news that he will be left homeless and jobless as an interstate makes its way through his Midwestern town. The story is a personal one, as King said he wrote it to come to terms with his mother's death (via The Guardian ), something he also wrote about in the short story, The Woman in the Room .

"I think it was an effort to make some sense of my mother's painful death the year before – a lingering cancer had taken her off inch by painful inch. Following this death I was left both grieving and shaken by the apparent senselessness of it all... Roadwork tries so hard to be good and find some answers to the conundrum of human pain."

The Stephen King book is currently in development to become a full-length movie with Andy Muschietti ( IT: Chapter One and IT: Chapter Two) set to produce it and Pablo Trapero as its director.

47 Bag Of Bones

September 1998.

After author Mike Noonan's pregnant wife unexpectedly dies, he is sent into a state of writer's block that he is desperate to break free from. He isolates himself at a lakeside home in Maine in hopes of bringing back his authorial spark. While there, he meets a young widowed mother and her daughter and develops a psychic connection with the girl. This is where it becomes a riveting paranormal story, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

The book is considered one of King's most literary novels as he tells his own story of the struggle writers go through. It went on to win the 1999 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel. The book was also turned into a television miniseries directed by Mick Garris, who has helmed several of King's works. The movie stars Pierce Brosnan ( James Bond movies) as Mike Noonan, with Annabeth Gish as his wife Jo. The miniseries changed things up from the novel, including changes to the actual ending of the story.

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Beautifully acted 'Shardlake' brings 500-year-old Tudor intrigue into the present day

John Powers

Arthur Hughes plays the title character in Hulu's four-part series, Shardlake . Martin Mlaka/Hulu hide caption

Arthur Hughes plays the title character in Hulu's four-part series, Shardlake .

We live in discordant times, which may be why the turbulent reign of King Henry VIII has enjoyed a revival over the last few years. We've had the gleefully trashy TV series The Tudors , the Tony-winning Broadway musical Six and – at the high end of achievement – Hilary Mantel 's trilogy about Henry's right-hand-man Thomas Cromwell.

Now comes the new Hulu mystery series Shardlake, based on C.J. Sansom's first novel in a series about a crime-solving lawyer in 16th-century England. As a rule, I hate historical mysteries and I feared that Shardlake would serve up the Tudor era's usual cavalcade of castles, codpieces, clopping horses and quasi-Shakespearean lingo – "Prithee, stop, sirrah!" But to my surprise this odd, beautifully acted show pulled me in.

NPR's Book of the Day

Hilary mantel's 'wolf hall' examines the reign of king henry viii through his advisor.

Arthur Hughes stars as Matthew Shardlake, a bitingly intense London barrister known for his brains and for the curved spine that leads the world to undervalue him. One who sees his value is the king's minister Thomas Cromwell – played by a domineering Sean Bean – a dangerous man who's busy stripping the assets of the Catholic church and claiming them for the Crown.

As the action begins, Cromwell has just had his envoy murdered in a coastal monastery. He sends Shardlake to find the killer and, in the process, to find evidence of monkish malfeasance that will justify seizing the monastery's holdings. To keep Shardlake on his toes, he sends along one of his henchmen, brash, impulsive Jack Barak. That's Anthony Boyle, who plays John Wilkes Booth in the current series Manhunt .

Author Interviews

Hilary mantel says now-complete trilogy was 'the central project of my life'.

Because the monastery is filled with Catholic monks who hate the Protestant king, things are tricky there from the get-go. Not only do Shardlake and Jack keep being lied to, but the murders are just beginning. As they investigate, they both grow smitten with a servant – played by Ruby Ashbourne Serkis – and they start to develop one of those classic detective story partnerships between a brilliant misfit and an earthier, ordinary guy.

Now, I don't want to oversell Shardlake . As a historical show, it lacks the sweeping grandeur of Shogun , another period drama that reminds us that Protestants and Catholics were once at each other's throats. Nor does it approach Mantel's richly vibrant vision of Henry VIII's England, with its divisions and hatreds and social climbing.

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Yet it has a strong historical atmosphere, especially in showing how Shardlake and Jack find themselves squeezed by powerful forces around them. Both believe they're doing the right thing in helping Cromwell seize Catholic wealth, thinking it should go to England's countless poor people. At the same time, they come to realize that, in Cromwell, they're working for an utterly ruthless politician, one who may have played a key role in setting up Anne Boleyn, whose beheading figures into the plot here.

The show's finest moments lie in the byplay between its lead actors, played by two of Britain's rising stars. As the cocky Jack – a lad risen from the streets and terrified of sinking back – Boyle deftly straddles the line between likable and not. You see why he's been cast to star as a charismatic IRA leader in the upcoming TV adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe 's book Say Nothing .

Jack's extroversion pairs nicely with the tightly wound Shardlake, whose smile is almost a wince. Hughes was the first actor with a disability to ever play Richard III for the Royal Shakespeare Company – he was born radial dysplasia affecting his right arm – and he doubtless understands Shardlake's pride in the face of what some consider his physical imperfection. "I'm known for my gait," Shardlake says. "It is I, and I embrace it."

Such self-assertion is profoundly modern, and for all its Tudor trappings, Shardlake is filled with present day resonances – not least in its portrait of Cromwell who claims to speak for the people but actually works on behalf of the elite. "The truth must be what we want it to be," Cromwell declares, and though Shardlake knows this is un -true, he also knows that saying so can get a man killed.