Carrie - Stephen King
I'm reading all of Stephen King's fiction in publication order, starting with Carrie. I know there's someone out there already typing a comment to tell me that King published plenty of short fiction before Carrie came out. I'm aware of that. A lot of it was collected later in books like Night Shift and Skeleton Crew, and I'll read those stories when I get to the collections. The stuff that predates Carrie and has never been collected I'm going to try to track down. Much of it is juvenilia, and King has resisted having it republished in the past, so it's not easy to get hold of. If and when I find it I'll read it and write about it here too. The plan is to stick to publication order as closely as I can, but we'll see how that goes.
With Mike Flanagan's adaptation out recently, Carrie felt like the obvious place to start anyway. It's been at least fifteen years since I last read it and I couldn't remember much of it. Goodreads tells me I gave it three stars, though I've no idea what system I was using back then. I have a very in-depth way of rating books these days, and I think it would still land somewhere around a three, maybe a three and a half. I enjoyed it, and I got a lot out of it. I think I liked it more this time than last, but I can't really remember last time, so who knows.
It's a really strong debut, which won't surprise anyone. The story is very simple: Carrie gets bullied at school, she takes her revenge, she burns the town down. There's not a lot going on plot-wise. What I love is the way King takes that skeletal structure and fleshes it out with news reports, articles and interviews with the commission investigating events after the fact. All of this material looks back from the future, trying to make sense of what happened and what it meant for Chamberlain and the world at large. Flanagan gets this right in his version, and it's something that's been missing from other adaptations. As great as Brian De Palma's film is, none of that wider context makes it in, and I think it's exactly the material that gives the book its resonance. Later in his career King gets very good at portraying small, tight-knit towns and the psychology of the people in them, and you can see the beginnings of that here in the way Chamberlain reacts in those interviews and police reports.
Sticking with structure, I also love the decision to show us prom from two angles. First we see it from the outside, in the way people experience it and react to it and talk about it afterwards. Then we jump back in time, get inside Carrie's head, and live through it with her. I loved getting to witness it twice. The Carrie of the book is also much angrier than the Carrie of any of the films.
I don't think King gets enough credit for the way he captures his characters' interiority. Even with the really awful ones, the racist, aggressive, sexually violent men who turn up throughout his work and who are here too, we get a real sense of who they are. We don't sympathise with them, because they're horrible, but we can understand them, and that's a real strength.
He doesn't have much of a reputation as a prose stylist, and he's said himself that he has a tin ear for language. But I've always loved his storytelling voice. There's a rhythm to it that I just sink into, and that's present even this early. He also does some interesting stylistic things that he rarely gets credit for. The narrative is constantly interrupted by characters' thoughts in parentheses, physically breaking the flow of the sentences, as though those thoughts are running alongside what's happening on the surface. He does this a lot, but I'd forgotten it goes all the way back to his debut. It's really effective, and if I had to pin down what makes King's prose feel like King, it's one of the first things I'd point to.
In On Writing King talks about how every important moment in Carrie is marked by blood, and how he went back through while redrafting and deliberately added it in. I don't think I noticed that the first time round, but having read On Writing a few times since, it's impossible to miss now. He's hammering that theme home. Blood keeps appearing, over and over, and every time it does you know something significant is about to happen. Then the climax finally arrives, Carrie gets the pig's blood dumped over her, and she makes the whole town bleed in return. It's so simple, but it works brilliantly.
Towards the end, someone in one of the interviews asks what happens if there are others like her. A lot of King fans have a bad habit of trying to tie everything back to The Dark Tower. I'm a big Dark Tower fan. I love the series, the interconnectedness of it and its metatextual nature. But not every book King has written needs to be wired into it. Flanagan seems to be trying to link Carrie to the Dark Tower with his new series, and that's not a decision I necessarily agree with. Carrie isn't connected to the Dark Tower, and it isn't connected to the Derry setting that becomes so important later either. I'll accept, though, that the nugget of a bigger idea is here. People with telekinetic powers running unchecked, people who've been othered and mistreated by society and who use their abilities to take revenge on those who hurt them: that's a theme King comes back to again and again. One of my favourite things about reading an author across their whole career is spotting those resonances, and it's fun to see one turn up right at the start.
So yes, a really strong debut. I enjoyed seeing so many of the themes and stylistic tics that King will spend the rest of his career refining show up already, and beyond all that it's just a fun, satisfying read. I don't know how long this project is going to take me, but Carrie is a great place to start.