As the year 2022 begins, we are still within an extended Golden Age of Stephen King adaptations. The last decade saw some relative duds (the remakes of Pet Sematary and Carrie) but also brought superlative adaptations of King’s novel It from director Andy Muschetti, along with Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, King’s follow up to his classic The Shining, which Flanagan molded into a stellar sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film version.

Despite his frequent threats of retirement, King — now 75 years old — still cranks out at least two books per year, with nearly all of them slated for an upcoming adaptation of some sort.

As we look forward to what’s to come, let’s take a retrospective into one decade of his output. Here are Stephen King’s ‘90s novels, ranked.

12. Bag of Bones

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King’s 1998 Bag of Bones starts off strong, following bestselling novelist Mike Noonan as he shuffles through his days. A widower, Mike continues to grieve four years after his pregnant wife Jo suddenly died of a brain aneurysm. A paralyzing bout of writer’s block tied to a spate of wretched nightmares compels him to visit his vacation home, which seems to be the setting of these nightmares.

What begins as a sharply-written portrait of a grieving husband becomes an intriguing supernatural mystery. King then veers into a spate of overly-complicated plot machinations, as Mike forms a relationship with a young single mother while investigating the history of the area. Bag of Bones culminates in an unfortunate scene of extreme sexual abuse which is used to explain a ghost’s decades-old rage.

11. The Regulators

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Published under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman, The Regulators continues King’s recurring fascination with suburban horror. One fine morning, brightly colored vans roll through a quiet neighborhood and open fire. The terror mounts, as does the body count. This is all revealed to be the work of a creature named Tak, which took control of an autistic boy, magnifying already-existent psychic powers.

The sister novel to King’s Desperation, The Regulators might have a more streamlined setup, but it’s more disturbing and ultimately less compelling. Both books feature different incarnations of the same characters, but this proves to be more of a gimmick than any kind of meaningful narrative experiment.

10. Rose Madder

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Rosie Daniels suffers horrific abuse at the hands of her monstrous police officer husband, Norman. Years after Norman beat her badly enough to cause a miscarriage, Rosie summons the courage to escape. She begins a new life, becoming fixated on a painting of a woman in a rose madder gown. As the evil Norman inexorably hunts her down, Rosie discovers she can enter the painting, and becomes entangled in the woman (called Dorcas) and her quest to retrieve her baby from a labyrinth guarded by a Minotaur-type creature.

In his nonfiction quasi-memoir On Writing, King describes Rose Madder as a “stiff, trying-too-hard novel.” Indeed, this horror-fantasy is one of his least convincing books. Rosie Daniels is a well-drawn character, but the magical painting is an odd, creaky plot device.

9. The Green Mile

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In the Depression-era South, prison guard Paul Edgecombe oversees the death row inmates of Cold Mountain State Penitentiary, who walk the titular green mile (the hallway to the electric chair, covered in faded green linoleum), to their final judgement. He and his crew receive a gentle giant named John Coffey, who is accused of raping and murdering two little girls. Coffey has certain gifts, however, and when he heals Paul’s urinary tract infection, Paul decides to find out what else the man can do.

The Green Mile was originally serialized as six novella-sized paperbacks, in a nod to Charles Dickens, and was generally well-received at the time. During this decade, King tried to fuse his deft hand at horror and suspense with a type of magical realism that did not necessarily come naturally to him. The Green Mile suffers from a reliance on the much-maligned “magical Negro” trope, even if his customarily masterful stylistic touches make Coffey as lovable and believable as possible.

RELATED: From 'Gunslinger' to 'Wizard and Glass': Stephen King's 'Dark Tower' Books, Ranked

8. Insomnia

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Some time after his wife dies, senior citizen and retiree Ralph Roberts begins to suffer from a strange type of insomnia. Eventually, he starts seeing colorful auras around people and things, along with tiny, bald men dressed like doctors. They appear to cut the stems drifting up from peoples’ auras, marking the end of their lives. These little men call themselves Clotho and Lachesis, after the Fates of Greek mythology. In the myths, Clotho spun the thread of someone’s life, and Lachesis measured its span. They recruit Ralph in a mission to thwart a third of their kind, the nasty Atropos, an agent of the “Random,” who can run around slicing anyone’s “cord” at any time. One very important person must be spared, and it’s up to Ralph to stop him.

Along with Rose Madder, King considered Insomnia to be stiff and overly outlined. This may be true at times, but the book is also much more entertaining. King also links this novel to his larger narrative in overt, fan-pleasing ways. Like It, Insomnia is set in the fictional small town Derry, Maine, and is crucial to his Dark Tower über-tale. Ralph Roberts is an endearing, old duffer everyman, and his mature love story with his neighbor Lois Chiles (who also sees the auras), is deftly rendered.

7. Desperation

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As they drive through a particularly desolate stretch of Nevada, the Jackson family passes through the town of Desperation. The local sheriff, Collie Entragian, pulls them over and essentially takes them hostage. The Jacksons join a whole cast of characters who have been similarly railroaded. They discover that an ancient, evil entity known as Tak has taken possession of the sheriff. The possession deteriorates human hosts, so Tak needs a fresh batch of bodies at the ready.

Desperation is a “mirror” novel to The Regulators, sharing character names but different settings and using these characters in different ways. Where The Regulators was pulpy and somewhat cheeky, Desperation becomes an exercise in sustained, disturbing horror. Eagle-eyed readers will spot the Dark Tower connections in the creature called Tak, but the novel’s themes of sacrifice and redemption are what linger long after the last page.

6. Needful Things

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In the small Maine town of Castle Rock, various citizens perk up at the arrival of a new business. A shop named Needful Things opens up, run by a strange man named Leland Gaunt. The townsfolk discover amazing things: a signed Sandy Koufax baseball card coveted by a young boy; a genuine fox tail which reminds a burnt-out alcoholic of the one he hung from his hot rod’s antenna during his glory days; an amulet which magically eases the pain of a young woman’s early-onset arthritis. There’s a price for each of them, of course, and if you can’t guess that Mr. Gaunt is up to no good, welcome to your first novel.

Needful Things is King’s last major story set in Castle Rock, which had been the main locale for his novels and short stories for decades. Needful Things followed a long period of drug and alcohol addiction. While he never directly connected his recovery to this book, Needful Things deals with addiction on several levels, from the literal cocaine addiction the town’s First Selectman develops while in thrall to Leland Gaunt, to the metaphoric hold the coveted items have on the townspeople who wander into the store. In the end, King blows up much of the town. The explosive end is one of King’s most convincing denouements: a farewell to his comfortable setting and to his uncomfortable personal past.

5. Gerald’s Game

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To spice up their marriage, Jessie Burlingame and her husband Gerald take an impromptu trip to their vacation house in the off-season. Gerald handcuffs Jessie to the bed, and while she has gone along with this game in the past, this time she tries to call it off. When Gerald pretends it’s all part of the game, she kicks him and triggers a heart attack. Gerald dies in front of her, leaving Jessie cuffed to bed, isolated and exposed.

Like Desperation and The Regulators, Gerald’s Game is a twin (to Dolores Claiborne). After nearly two decades of overturning every moldy horror trope and then making them his own, in the ‘90s King delved into more overt psychological thriller territory. Gerald’s Game dives deep into Jessie’s mind, and King deftly peels away layer after layer of repression Jessie had built up over time. She uncovers a history of shattering abuse that she had forgotten, but facing this drives her to be resourceful and survive a situation she had thought was hopeless. It marked a big swerve for King out of his horror comfort zone and remains utterly compelling, as is the very good 2017 film adaptation starring Carla Gugino.

4. The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands

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In the third installment of King’s magnum opus, The Dark Tower, Roland Deschain of Gilead, the last gunslinger in a bizarre alternate reality that has “moved on,” has drawn his two companions and sets out on the next leg of his epic journey. Former heroin addict Eddie Dean and his spiritual wife, the parapalegic Susannah Dean, are now well on their way to becoming gunslingers themselves but still do not completely trust this strange man who yanked them from their universe to this one. Roland indeed has secrets: he’s going mad, and trying desperately to hide it as he passes into truly unknown territory for all of them.

The Waste Lands reads like the equivalent of a blockbuster movie. The book is wildly entertaining and features many elaborate, sharply-written set pieces. Roland, Eddie, and Susannah battle a bear the size of King Kong, which leads them to the site of a portal that marks the true beginning to this quest for the Dark Tower. The ka-tet must draw Jake Chambers, the boy Roland sacrificed in the first book, back into his world, through the maw of a giant demon disguised as a house. They make a mad dash through an anarchic, decaying city called Lud to find a kidnapped Jake and awaken a self-aware train with an insane love of riddles. The Waste Lands crackles with wit and energy as it expands King’s Dark Tower mythology.

3. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

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While hiking in the Maine wilderness with her constantly bickering mother and older brother, nine-year-old Trisha McFarland lags behind to answer a call of nature and tune out her family’s incessant arguing. When she tries to catch up, they’re gone. Very soon after, Trisha finds herself hopelessly lost, and must gather her courage and will to survive. Her meager supplies include a Walkman, and when she listens to her hero, Red Sox pitcher Tom Gordon, bring another one home, she imagines him by her side as she braves the unknown.

Balancing the primal terror of the deep, dark woods with another sharp, detailed female protagonist, with The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, King turns his simplest premise — one kid lost in the woods — into a bravura narrative showcase. Trisha’s divorced parents, sullen older brother, and subsequent loneliness make her both brave and fragile. She’s one of King’s finest, strongest creations.

2. Dolores Claiborne

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Told in the form of a confession given to a stenographer, the title character of Dolores Claiborne recounts the events that led to a mailman finding her holding a rolling pin over the body of her wheelchair-bound employer, Vera Donovan. Dolores then spins the story of her life, denying that she killed Vera, but admitting that she designed the death of her abusive husband decades earlier. This occurred during the same solar eclipse which proved crucial in the life of Jessie Burlingame from Gerald’s Game.

Dolores Claiborne is one of King’s most experimental narratives. Told entirely from Dolores’ point of view without formal chapter breaks, we meet and come to love one of King’s most vivid characters. King delves into physical and sexual abuse, and the trauma that comes with it, tracking the way that trauma ripples out to affect everyone within its orbit. This was not exactly welcome subject matter when the novel appeared in 1992, and it remains a gripping story worth revisiting.

1. The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass

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The cliffhanger ending of The Waste Lands resolves with Roland, Eddie, Jake, Susannah, and the creature named Oy, finding themselves in a version of Topeka, Kansas. They have come to a place where the barrier between worlds is very thin indeed, prompting Roland to tell the story of his first major test as a gunslinger, and of his first, lost love, Susan Delgado. As a teen, Roland’s father sends him and his friends Alain and Cuthbert far from the brewing trouble of their kingdom. They arrive in Mejis (sort of like Mexico, but not), and discover the first major battle of this world’s final war is about to begin.

Wizard and Glass finds the middle-aged King conjuring a beautifully-told but nevertheless doomed love story, imbuing Roland’s backstory with unfathomable tragedy and sadness. It’s a confident high fantasy tale, an epic Western, a Romeo and Juliet set against the backdrop of a world that doesn’t know it’s dying just yet. King sets many, many plates spinning in Wizard and Glass, and miraculously brings it all in a smart, satisfying ending. It’s the best novel he wrote in the 1990s, and made the six-year wait for part five, Wolves of the Calla, all but unbearable.