Book #1: Carrie (1974)
Carrie is an oddity, and I realise that by saying that, I’m sort of breaking my own rules, but having gone from King’s latest (Under The Dome) to King’s first, I just can’t help but make a comparison. Although, turning that around for a moment, by knowing where King is at now, by going back to read the rest of his catalogue in publication order it should be interesting to see if I can see the evolution of his style, themes, plots, etc, over 35 years.
Although Carrie was the first King novel out the gate, like many published writers, it wasn’t the first novel he wrote, it was his fourth. This actually fits the apparent industry average of a debut novel being the fourth or fifth actually written by an author. Carrie is also famous for being the novel that King abandoned at an early stage, only for his wife to fish out of the waste paper basket and insist he carry on. King got an advance of $2,500 on the book, which sold 13,000 copies. But then the paperback rights were bought for $400,000, and in this format Carrie sold more than 1 million copies in the first year of release. Stephen King had arrived.
So what makes Carrie an oddity? Well, it’s horror, certainly, but on the face of it, the subject matter is a little strange and not, I would have thought, particularly interesting. A strange girl kept under the thumb of her oppressive mother experiences her first period, undergoes embarrassment and public humilation at her high school and exacts her revenge by massacring nearly everyone at her prom and then blowing up the entire town with telekinesis.
Okay, put it like that, it does sound pretty cool. But I think the real success of Carrie, what makes this relatively slim book work (it’s only 242 pages), is the epistolary style, and the fact that it’s set in the future.
Of course I don’t know if King ever went back to the epistolary structure, but in Carrie he swings from newspaper reports to quotations from various texts, even autobiographies of the survivors, from many years after the events of the story. In a stroke of genius, even tiny scraps of school graffiti are included. Between these excerpts we follow the main story of Carrie White, told mostly from her point of view in a standard third-person form.
The fact that Carrie is set in the “future” still works when reading the book today, even though the fictional references works such as The Shadow Exploded and My Name Is Susan Snell were apparently published in the 1980s (at least 6-7 years after Carrie was actually published) and are themselves now in our past. But that just seems to add something - King was only looking ahead by a few years, but in that world, telekenesis is real and experts discuss whether or not it is a danger, given the terrible events that occured in Chamberlain, Maine, several years before.
Last year I talked to Hugo-nominated, New York Times bestselling author Gail Carriger. When discussing how and why a book becomes a success, she tried to describe an almost indefinable quality of some writing that takes it from merely good prose into something that people really want to read and which they really enjoy. She called this X-factor “commerciality”, and despite it being almost impossible to consciously perceive, it’s very clearly present in Carrie. It may also be some wild talent that people are born with, the reason why some writer’s soar to dizzing heights of fame, fortune and popularity while others - who write very well indeed, with great prose, great characters, great splots - can only seem to reach a certain level.
Stephen King was, I think, born with this innate talent, this “commerciality” which enables him to write very well indeed and write stories that people identify with and lap up in their millions. I felt this with Under The Dome, where I simply had to keep on turning the pages, despite the intimidating size of the novel (which, I must say, really put me off to begin with). The one thing that strikes me about Carrie is that, 35 years before Under The Dome, that quality is there, living within the prose, push me to turn the pages and keep on reading.
Ranking Carrie against Under The Dome is perhaps unfair, one book representing a debut author and the other representing one of the most successful writers in history with 35 years of experiencing behind him. Having said that, Carrie stands up very well, and is an enjoyable, fast read. It’s quite surprisingly horrible and horrific, with a lot of shock and a sense of terrible inevitability about the whole thing. Again, this is where the epistolary structure really works, letting us see discussion and debate about the events surrounding Carrie White years after they happened, before throwing us right back into the main story as it unfolds.
Quite a nasty little book. Four stars, and second in my King rankings after Under the Dome.
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