The Stand

This one starts small and gets enormous. A strain of flu, built as a weapon, gets loose and does what flu does, only faster and far more thoroughly, until the world is mostly empty houses and unanswered phones.

The handful left standing don't just wander off alone. They start dreaming of two figures, one who feels like safety and one who very much doesn't, and something in them pulls towards one or the other. Stephen King wrote it wanting a story with the scale of a whole world ending and starting again, and it shows: the cast is huge and the book takes its time with every one of them.

It's not a jump scare kind of scary, more the sort that settles into your chest early on and stays there. Good for a long, quiet stretch of nights when you've got nowhere to be and a proper reading lamp.

It's also worth knowing as the book where Randall Flagg turns up for the first time, since he goes on to cause trouble in a fair few of King's other stories.