The 15 Best Stephen King Characters, Ranked

Stephen King is happy to describe his stories like they’re a burger-and-fries combo meal. It’s a fair self-assessment; King’s writing is cozy and approachable in how it tells us about horror and mystery, saving the rare moments of his more lyrical art for the pages where it punches the most. His characters are often familiar to the middle class of the past decades, everyday folk put at odds with something beyond their experience. Many of them do what they must, then fade. King is best at ideas and structure, but his endings — and even the characters that carry them — are sometimes weighed down with flaws.

That never stops one of his books from being great fun to devour, and sometimes, some of King’s characters get a shine to them that makes them stand out. We’re going to have a palaver with 15 of his best, a ka-tet of men and women — and one notably wolfish young fellow — who are more than their blue chambray workshirts and bittersweet endings. They’re the ones we remember most, and for good reasons.

Introduced in “Mr. Mercedes,” Holly Gibney gradually steps up and harnesses her mental health issues and her fears into deductive tools that work for her, and it’s a neat thing to watch her grow. She starts somewhere between a reclusive Carrie White, sans vengeful telekineses, and the nearing-breakdown Charlotte Vale at the start of the classic Bette Davis movie, “Now, Voyager.” Yet she’s got teeth hiding behind that shy face and constantly bitten lips, and once she starts to figure that out for herself, watch out.

For some King fans, there’s a minor drawback in that when Holly appears, the story is probably not going to be a full-bore supernatural horror. Instead, Holly occupies a version of King’s world where the supernatural is a recurring character alongside the all-natural horrors humanity can inflict on each other. They’re terrific stories, and Holly shines as one of King’s best, most rounded female characters to date.

One of the multitude of characters that bring “The Stand” together, Nick Andros becomes a guiding light by its end when not even tragedy can hold him down. As Captain Trips begins to ravage the world, Nick is walking the roads in silence. Deaf and mute, he’s got his ways of making himself heard, and he’s a lot tougher than he looks because he needs to be to survive. But under that all is a good heart, one that sees him befriend the cop who arrested him because others can see that goodness in him too.

It’s that heart that brings Tom Cullen not just to the safety of Boulder, Colorado, but also helps him become a helping hand when some holy force’s roaring grasp of fire consumes Las Vegas. Nick isn’t a stereotypical guardian angel after a bomb ends his life. He’s the one with dirty knuckles and a desire to help out those who try to do their best for others. Larry Underwood might have the most dramatic character arc in “The Stand,” but Nick’s is about the smaller ways of bringing kindness back to the world.

“The Running Man” is not one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s best films, but it is a ton of cheesy fun. There’s a remake on the horizon, however, featuring the handsome breakout star Glen Powell, and just by the numbers, it’s possible this game show victim might have a lot more in common with his original version.

The novel’s Ben Richards is no strongman. King’s embittered, blue-collar pseudonym, Richard Bachman, provided protagonists flawed to near their breaking point, and Richards is the standout of this era. He’s coal-miner poor in a dystopian future, weakened by the capitalistic ruination of the environment, and driven toward what may well be televised suicide for entertainment just to pay for his kid’s medicine. As he goes on the run — as a proper fugitive in dirty streets, no corny gladiators here — he turns the game of his life into a series of black-hearted laughs and cynical gutshots that end in one final, fatalistic gag. 

Ben Richards is no hero; he’s just a guy who got pushed too far and saw an opportunity. He’s one of King’s bleakest but best bastards.

Rob Reiner’s terrific adaptation of the novella “The Body,” “Stand By Me,” may be the gold standard for coming-of-age films, and it helped prove that Stephen King isn’t just a horror writer. He also writes nostalgia for a long-gone childhood, making it real and recognizable even for those of us who never grew up in times like these. Gordie LaChance, both narrator and emotional lead, represents one of King’s recurring character tics created in its purest form. LaChance, like his creator, is a writer, now with a family of his own.

The art of writing is explored through LaChance’s childhood. Even as a young boy, he’s trying to write stories to pull emotions out of others, and to explore his internal traumas. It’s a little meta, but LaChance — like Bill Denbrough in “It,” later — feels like a ghost in his own home after the death of his brother. His friends make him feel real, and for that, he tries to give them stories. It’s relatable to anyone who’s tried to write a story. LaChance is one of King’s best because he’s all of us, a transient spirit looking for the right words to explain to others what only we can see.

Regardless of Stephen King’s mixed but understandable opinions on Stanley Kubrick’s version of “The Shining,” it’s almost impossible today to read the novel and not see the meek silhouette of Shelley Duvall as Wendy Torrance on every page. It’s a benefit to the novel, which gives Wendy a lot more time to become the frightened but steady mother figure her son needs. Yet there’s still some of that meekness to the novel’s Wendy, and the brief acknowledgments of her flaws help set the stage for who Danny becomes, years later, in “Doctor Sleep.”

Wendy isn’t King’s strongest female character, and it’s true that King can go through some big streaks of not quite nailing a woman’s voice in a story. But there’s still something compelling, even haunting, about how Wendy tries to cope with the revelations that her partner cannot overcome the demons he brought with him and that she’s not going to be able to save him from himself, much less the Overlook. Nonetheless, she manages what Donna Trenton (“Cujo”) could not. Her son makes it out of Hell alive, if not unmarked.

“The Talisman,” written with Peter Straub, is a delight of varied, often flawed characters — as cool as Parker/Parkus is, King has recurring issues avoiding the well-meaning but tiresome ‘magical Black person’ trope — though Jack himself doesn’t really grow a personality beyond Hero Boy until “Black House.” The foil he needs to shine isn’t the son of his enemy, it’s the innocent (almost to the point of holy) young Wolf.

Wolf is sort of a werewolf, which becomes key later on. But this gentle young man with enough fur to have made Robin Williams blush is mostly a church-going day laborer pulled into a proxy war of good and evil. He handles this about as well as any of us would, but his loyalty to his friend helps him keep it together until there’s no longer a way for him to be a nice Wolf to their enemies. His vengeance is a tragedy, showing the way this hero’s journey is stealing all innocence until only sorrow is left. Losing Wolf is the moment we know that this victory will only ever be bittersweet because there’s no way to save what’s already been lost.

Long before Eminem rapped out the fandom-altering “Stan,” there was “Misery” and its terrifying ultra-fan Annie Wilkes. Originally written as a metaphor for Stephen King’s own difficulties with substance abuse, it’s easy to adopt Annie as one of today’s symbols for when parasocial fan-to-creator relationships go dangerously wrong.

Wilkes is obsessed with the series of Misery Chastain novels by Paul Sheldon, who winds up in a car crash. When he wakes up, he’s not in a hospital. He’s in the care of dangerous superfan Annie, who’s a bit upset about Sheldon’s tragic last novel, “Misery’s Child,” and demands the return of her blorbo heroine in a way Arthur Conan Doyle had nightmares about. “Misery” is one of King’s best books in its own right, but like most of his best characters, it’s hard to not picture the film adaptation, where Oscar-winning Kathy Bates (as Wilkes) stands, menacingly, at the foot of the bed James Caan (as Sheldon) is lying in. It’s even harder to not picture what happens to his feet a moment later. All together, Annie Wilkes is one of King’s most unforgettable antagonists — and one of the most human.

Greg Stillson, the vile political nominee rotting at the core of “The Dead Zone,” stopped being funny by 2016. He’s an even uglier joke today, a horror of a character that might as well have stepped off the page and picked up a copy of Project 2025 on his way to McDonald’s. It’s unfortunate that reality has made Stillson more vibrant and poignant than the protagonist, Johnny Smith, an everyday guy whose life is defined by his psychic abilities.

Stillson, played by the slickly handsome Martin Sheen in David Cronenberg’s adaptation (after reworking Stephen King’s initial script for “Dead Zone”), is cruel, cunning, and relentless in his push to become president. The only thing that saves King’s fictional world from a potential future nuclear war is his cowardice. If only these flaws and internecine dramas would have saved our real world. Even King was less than thrilled with his own unhappily prescient novel after the rise of Donald Trump, but like many of us, he’s also unsurprised. Stillson isn’t a character we want to love, but he’s one of the best because of how cleanly so many of us ignored his warnings.

As noted previously, Stephen King has good intentions when he creates Black characters who become the heart, soul, and sometimes magical spirit of his stories. In the long run, however, it’s not great to focus only on magical people of other ethnicities, which means King’s attempts are a little cringe sometimes. It’s better to let people be people, flawed and whole.

All that in mind, John Coffey, the innocent heart of “The Green Mile,” is hard to forget and easy to love. Inspired by the youngest child to be executed in the United States and other tragedies of the legal system, Coffey takes on the traumas of the white people around him, granting salvation while he seeks his own peace. But this Jesus analogue is a tragedy because the racism and selfishness that lurks in the human heart isn’t the only thing that sends Coffey to the electric chair. It’s his own weariness at the amount of hurt in the world, and that’s a heartbreaking thing to experience. Portrayed by Michael Clarke Duncan on the big screen, John Coffey is a true gentle giant, and one we can’t help but weep with.

Every child at the heart of “It” holds traces of someone we probably knew as a kid. Bill the writer and Ben the chunky but soulful outcast are sometimes echoes of ourselves too. But Richie is both joy and tragedy in one; the class clown hiding a lot of human love and care, and possibly the tragedy of feeling too alone.

It’s a common real-life downer to know that many of our beloved comedians suffer from anxiety or depression, using laughs to armor themselves. It’s a trait that starts when we’re young, and Richie Tozier is that kid to a T. And, like the best ones, he manages to build a career around his coping methods. Tozier becomes a successful shock DJ of the Howard Stern line, but as we eventually find out, it never really cured his loneliness. He’s at his most alive when he’s with his friends. His last laugh is a sacrifice for them, and that is too painfully real to forget. The Loser’s Club has a lot of hearts, and quietly, Richie might’ve had the biggest. Beep beep, kiddo.

As “Carrie” approaches its bloody climax, it’s hard to blame poor Carrie White for what happens. There’s no argument that her vengeance also kills students who never did anything to her, but it’s also hard to avoid thinking that almost nobody, save for one teacher, Sue Snell, and her boyfriend, Tommy, ever did anything to make Carrie feel like a person.

But the blame for what Carrie becomes isn’t all on them. It started at home, with her fanatic mother, who forces this poor kid to repress everything about herself. As Carrie tries, for a little while, to have a life of her own, every one of us who went through a dark time in high school enjoys those few fleeting moments alongside her. And when that’s stripped away and the one boy who was kind to her is hurt by the same brats who want to keep hurting her, there’s more than a little “go girl, it’s your biiiirthdaaay” going on in our souls in the ending of “Carrie” as she tears apart her entire town. 

Portrayed by Sissy Spacek in the original Brian DePalma blockbuster, she’s even more of a ghostly innocent who dies for the sins of small-town cruelties. She’s still haunting us all.

The two hearts of “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” (or “The Shawshank Redemption” for the movie, alone) can’t be separated for the purposes of this heartbreaking story about slow time and the healing of souls. Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding (played by Morgan Freeman) knows he deserves his prison time, and knows enough about American rehabilitation to know it’s a laugh. He’s an old hand at survival when the actually innocent Andy Dufresne (portrayed by Tim Robbins) is interred at his gray bar hotel, and he knows exactly how to narrate to us all the too-real horrors this new fish is about to go through.

Yet Andy’s heart stays alive through most of his years at Shawshank prison, driven by a vision of freedom too secret and real to let him become another one of the prison’s grey old-timers. His vitality brings Red back to life in a way, too, giving him a reason to find rehabilitation and new freedom on his terms. Between them is a story about how to escape — not just from prison, but the true punishment of human despair.

Dolores Claiborne, the star of her titular novel, is easily one of King’s best heroines because of how flawed, normal, and relatable she is. There are hundreds if not thousands of families that have stories like this one in their past: A woman unable to leave or divorce her abusive husband, and the day that husband had a tragic accident. Or straight up disappeared. It’s the way things were back when the boomers thought America was so great, and there are echoes of this kind of story still happening every day, somewhere.

Domestic violence doesn’t need any additional horror, and Dolores becomes numb to it until she finds out it’s evolved into an even worse kind of violence against her daughter. Once that happens, a little nudge from her rich employer Vera and a lot of forward planning leaves her widowed, heartbroken, and eventually estranged from the daughter she saves. Dolores eventually earns her happy ending, though. And like Carrie White, we say good for her.

Not since H.P. Lovecraft’s big green homeboy Cthulhu has there been an eldritch horror as unusually amusing and relatable as Pennywise, the cosmic villain at the heart of “IT.” Oh, sure, when Pennywise is at home, they’re actually a massive space spider who can drive you into insanity when you look into their deadlights. But when they’re dolled up for a kid’s party, they’re a lot of laughs. Bloody, messy, black comedy laughs.

Pennywise isn’t remotely human and their desires go beyond mayhem into some sort of metaphor about devouring the light and joy of existence, but the way they go about it is injected with such verve and intensity that it’s hard not to find it compelling. We never find hard answers about its origins, nor what death means to a thing like it. But we look for its ghosts in other corners of Stephen King’s universe, even asking if Dandelo, one of the horrors of “The Dark Tower,” is one of It’s escaped children. Yeeeegh.

What’s cooler than an Arthurian knight? Not much, but we’ll submit a multiversal gunslinger who’s also an Arthurian knight. Roland Deschain is the troubled heart of the “Dark Tower” saga, a cynical hero who could share a beer and a campfire with Guts from “Berserk.” He’s a hero through and through, especially compared to his nemesis, the equally multiversal man in black, Randall Flagg. But he’s no shining hero.

Roland does care for his ka-tet, from the troubled Eddie Dean to the beloved series mascot, Oy. But Roland cares for his mission more, turning him down the path of obsession and tragedy, all for a quixotic ‘victory’ that buries him in a loop of his own making. He can’t see innocence anymore, and he can’t treasure peace. All he has by the time he reaches the Tower itself are the sacrifices he told himself he was willing to make. It’s not enough to save him from what he’s become, and so he begins again. And again. Until one day he remembers how to truly be the hero we need. 

Of all of Stephen King’s protagonists, Roland is immortal. His life is tragedy, warning, and hope, all in one.