Image via Donald M. Grant, Publisher By Jeremy Urquhart Published Sep 29, 2026, 11:58 PM EDT Jeremy has more than 2800 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. Sign in to your Collider account Add Us Summary Generate a summary of this story Like Like follow Follow followed Followed Thread Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recap Not every book is suited to the audiobook format, because sometimes, reading something is far more rewarding than listening to it. There are also audiobook recordings that feel a little lackluster, and do something of a disservice to the book as a result. You get it with Stephen King audiobooks sometimes, unfortunately, and it sometimes happens with big-name narrators ( James Franco ’s narration of The Dead Zone is kind of disappointing, and the same can be said about the parts of Hearts in Atlantis that William Hurt narrated, honestly).
Spinning things in a more positive direction, though, this does mean that audiobooks done correctly are very much worthy of celebration. The following Stephen King audiobooks are the best (arguably), and they all do justice to the original novels . The narrator will be specified for each example, since some Stephen King books have at least two different audiobook recordings (like The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger , with Frank Muller narrating the original and George Guidall narrating the revised/expanded version).
Image via Charles Scribner's Sons A fair few audiobooks of Stephen King’s are impressive in part because of their length and the notion that keeping a recording consistent for a few dozen hours is harder than, you know, keeping things consistent for “only” about a dozen hours. Raul Esparza ’s narration of Under the Dome is impressive partly for this reason, since the audiobook version of this 1000-ish-page-long novel clocks in at a little under 35 hours all up.
The story concerns a very small town being trapped under a dome, and there are some pretty awful people in that town who were already doing rather awful things, and so everything bad is just exacerbated. It’s very tense for almost its entire duration, and the recorded vers…