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Originally Posted by gmw
I sort of like the idea of "self-contained" vs "stand-alone", but it runs into practical difficulties...
Many of Stephen King's early books were clearly meant to be stand-alone despite sharing some of the same characters and settings. Certain obsessive people might tell you they must be read in publication order so that you fully understand the references to past events - but the truth is that there are references to many past events in these books that never appeared in any previous work, so there's nothing much to be missed in the few references that do.
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Using the descriptions in post #125, I would consider almost all Stephen King books to be stand alone. The fact that he hides Easter eggs for fans is not the same as books being a series. Even experiments like Dolores Claiborne/Gerald's Game or Desperation/The Regulators don't count. You can read any of those without reading any other Stephen King and you're fine.
There are the Dark Tower books and recently his Bill Hodges trilogy, but those are exceptions rather than rule.
King is like H. P. Lovecraft who wrote stand alone short stories based on his own invented mythology. I don't consider those to be a series because they don't really rely on each other in any way.