Stephen King

Carrie, published in 1974, did what a first novel almost never does: it settled the rest of the career. King was filed under horror within a year of arriving, and has spent the five decades since both feeding that label and picking at it, writing suspense, crime, science fiction, fantasy and mystery under the same byline along with roughly 200 short stories, most of them collected. The Bram Stoker awards piled up. The nickname, King of Horror, stuck harder than any of them.

What he is unusually good at is the ordinary half. The frights in his best books are structural rather than decorative: he builds a plausible small town, a believable marriage, a dull job, and only then takes something out of it. 'Salem's Lot runs on a gossip network before it runs on vampires. Cujo is a stalled car and a bad afternoon. Misery is a writer alone with his most attentive reader. The prose is loose and the endings are famously uneven, but the setup work is close to unmatched in popular fiction.

Running alongside all of it is The Dark Tower, a western-fantasy serial begun with The Gunslinger and continued across decades, which is where he put the ideas that would not fit anywhere else. The other constant is the screen. Adaptations of his work have never stopped, he has written directly for television, and he keeps casting himself in the results: a doomed farmer in Creepshow, a minister in Pet Sematary, a pharmacist in Thinner, a truck driver, a cemetery caretaker, a shopkeeper in It Chapter Two. He is not a good actor. He clearly does not care, and the cameos have become their own small tradition.