Stephen King’s Needful Things, published in 1991, has been the object of various literary and liguistic analyses, sometimes touching upon the criticism of “Reaganomics” which King himself indicated as an implicit but fundamental issue raised by the novel. This “satire” (King again) of the ethics of neoliberalism has however hitherto failed to attract the attention of economists and sociologists, despite the unusual but promising opportunity that Needful Things offers to analyse the evolution of consumption in a consumer society, and the tensions between the market as institution (and norm), on one side, and social relationships on the other. With a focus on the four main elements of the market society as portrayed in Needful Things, i.e. seller, commodities, buyers and bargaining, we retrace in the sociological literature the main lines of the evolution that brought us towards forms of consumer societies wherein consumers constitute their own identity through the symbolic world of consumption. Decommodified, personal and rather radically idiosyncratic “needful things” appear thus to represent the individuality of consumption at its extreme, a paradoxical form of mandatory individuality whereby such apparently “freeing” things, helping consumers to satisfy their profound (and unfulfilled) needs, become “needful”. The pattern of addiction into which consumers fall reveals the falseness of the premises on which their consumption rests. This line of reasoning is then employed to stress the limits of purely or mainly economic analyses of consumption behavior. We preliminarily illustrate how King’s Needful Things can be of help to conceptualize the difficulties conventional economics faces in the attempt to grasp the criteria guiding evaluation of goods in a consumer society, where both consumption choices and consumed goods themselves (the issue is currently explored using “identity economics” approaches), are clearly of a multidimensional nature. Then, we enlarge the perspective to take into account the social dimension (that is, the main omissis of the economics discipline). We here use insights from economic anthropology, and in particular from the debate triggered by Marcel Mauss’ The Gift on the political and moral foundations of human societies, to interpret the curious end of “needful things’” life cycle. Goods sold by Gaunt finally prove to be junk, while the seller reveals himself as an arms dealer: the end of civilization in King’s dystopia perfectly symbolizes the final disruption of social relationship produced by the mandatory individuality of consumer societies.