The One Author The $500 Million King of Horror Stephen King Actually Feared

Here is a publishing rivalry I did not have on my 2025 bingo card resurfacing: Stephen King vs. Tom Clancy. It is part ego, part corporate shuffle, and very much two titans jockeying for the same shelf space in the 90s. And yes, King had some blunt things to say.

The short version: King did not love being No. 2

King's longtime agent told Rolling Stone that the only author King ever really worried about was Tom Clancy. Back when both writers were under Penguin, King was essentially treated like Clancy's understudy. He did not enjoy that. According to the agent, King is fine with his place now, but at the time, being seen as 'second banana' to the Rainbow Six and Jack Ryan guy clearly stung.

How the 90s turned into a scoreboard

After a big merger put them under the same roof at Penguin Putnam, Reactor reported that King and Clancy spent the decade trying to top each other's sales. At the peak of that stretch, Clancy was often moving more units, which made him the bigger priority for the publisher.

'I never really cared for Tom Clancy's books, but it wasn't because he was a Republican guy. It was because I didn't think he could write.'

That is King in Rolling Stone, not exactly mincing words. And then he voted with his feet: he left for Scribner (home to Ernest Hemingway and Edith Wharton), where he published 'Bag of Bones.'

'I wanted to knock Tom Clancy out of the No. 1 spot.'

That line comes from a 1998 interview with The New York Times. Competitive? Just a bit.

Where it landed

King has sold hundreds of millions of books and is reportedly worth around $500 million. More importantly for our corner of the world, his stories keep getting adapted for screens big and small, decade after decade. Vox has credited King with inspiring everyone from Haruki Murakami and Sherman Alexie to the producers of Lost. He also broke out of the horror lane in a way Clancy largely did not, with cross-genre crowd-pleasers like 'The Shawshank Redemption' and 'The Green Mile.' Clancy certainly ventured into nonfiction, but it stayed close to the military sphere with titles like 'Shadow Warriors' and 'Battle Ready.'

To put it another way: whatever anxiety King once had about being in anyone's shadow seems to be ancient history.

King's 2025 on screen

Setting aside the 'IT: Welcome to Derry' prequel, King had a stacked 2025 slate. Yes, the below is very much the sort of behind-the-curtain publishing-to-Hollywood pipeline that shows how these things actually move:

• The Monkey — short story from 'Skeleton Crew' — film — February 21, 2025 — directed by Osgood Perkins — Rotten Tomatoes: 77% — IMDb: 5.9/10
• The Long Walk — novel (as Richard Bachman) — film — September 12, 2025 — directed by Francis Lawrence — IMDb: 6.8/10 — Rotten Tomatoes: 88%
• The Running Man — novel (as Richard Bachman) — film — November 7, 2025 — directed by Edgar Wright — IMDb: 6.7/10 — Rotten Tomatoes: 64%
• The Institute — novel — TV series — 2025 — developed by Jack Bender — IMDb: 6.7/10 — Rotten Tomatoes: 64%

And Clancy?

Clancy's Jack Ryan brand has had serious staying power, especially on TV, but right now nothing is generating the same sustained heat that King's adaptations routinely do. If the 90s were Clancy's moment to out-sell, the long game has looked a lot more like King's territory.

Final thought

The whole saga is a very publishing-world version of a box-office rivalry: two mega-authors under one corporate roof, a merger turning sales into bragging rights, and one of them openly saying the other could not write. Time has mostly answered the question, but it is still a fascinating chapter in how hits are made, marketed, and remembered.