Warning: This article contains spoilers for Stephen King's short story "The Jaunt".I've been reading Stephen King since I was a kid, and one scene is the scariest and most haunting in any book of his I've ever read. It still haunts me today, in fact. The scene is in "The Jaunt", which actually isn't a book, but a short story from King's 1985 collection Skeleton Crew. That collection has a handful of classic Stephen King stories, including "The Mist," "The Monkey," and "Survivor Type," among others. Skeleton Crew, in my opinion, is tied with 1978's Night Shift for the best Stephen King short story collection. Like a great album in which there are no bad tracks, Skeleton Crew and Night Shift have no weak entries; every story is a banger.

Maybe it's for that reason that Stephen King's scariest short stories have always hit me harder than his novels.