Owen King Books in Order

Owen King was born in Bangor, Maine, in 1977 and grew up in a household where writing was part of everyday life. His parents, Tabitha and Stephen King, are both novelists, but the useful lesson was less about fame than routine: writing was work, and work meant showing up.

He started writing when he was young, then began to see it as a possible career in high school. He also played on Bangor High School’s baseball and basketball teams, but writing increasingly held his attention. His first published piece was a poem in his school’s literary magazine.

King studied English at Vassar College and later earned an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. By the time he arrived at Columbia, he had already built a habit of working on long manuscripts. That steady, practical approach has stayed with him, even as his books have moved between realism, satire, horror, fantasy, and comics.

His first book, We’re All in This Together: A Novella and Stories, arrived in 2005. The title novella follows George, a Maine teenager caught between his single mother, his politically fired-up grandfather, and the messy loyalties of family life after the 2000 election. The collection also shows King’s interest in people whose certainty starts to crack under pressure.

Then came Double Feature, his first full-length novel. It centers on Sam Dolan, a frustrated filmmaker whose damaged relationship with his former B-movie-star father keeps pulling him back into old anger. Readers who enjoy funny, crowded family stories will find a lot to like in its movie references, awkward encounters, bad decisions, and real affection beneath the jokes.

King has also worked in collaboration. He wrote the graphic novel Intro to Alien Invasion with Mark Jude Poirier, with art by Nancy Ahn, turning a hurricane-stranded college campus into the site of a strange and messy alien attack. In Sleeping Beauties, written with Stephen King, a worldwide sleeping illness leaves women enclosed in cocoons and forces a small Appalachian community to confront fear, violence, and power.

His novel The Curator takes a different route. Set in an invented city called the Fairest, it follows Dora, a former servant who seeks answers about her brother’s death through a damaged museum and finds herself caught in a revolution. It has mystery, dark humor, odd institutions, and just enough magic to make the city feel both unreal and uncomfortably familiar.

Across formats, King tends to write about flawed people trying to make sense of family, ambition, guilt, and the stories they tell themselves. He is also the coeditor of the superhero-fiction anthology Who Can Save Us Now? and has published shorter work in literary magazines.

He lives in upstate New York with his family.