I recently ranked the 10 best Stephen King books ever, and had an absolute blast. I've been a huge Stephen King nerd for almost my entire life, and I loved revisiting some of his best works as I researched the list. Since I got the best of King's books out of the way, the next logical step was to go ahead and rank the 10 best Stephen King short stories. However, this proved to be a far more daunting task. King has a lot of short stories, folks, and the bulk of them are pretty damn great. Which meant whittling the list down to 10 specific titles was a little tricky for me, but I did my best!

And just to make this more difficult on myself, I went ahead and laid down some ground rules that I almost immediately regretted. I wanted to specifically focus on short stories here, which means I...