Rereading Stephen King: week one – Carrie

Carrie is Stephen King's first novel. A large part of its fame comes from the fact that it was actually the fourth novel he wrote and submitted to publishers – a story that people love to tell when discussing the roads to publication of big-name authors. "Did you know King wrote three books before he was accepted?" goes the common confidence-boosting phrase. And, nearly as famously, he actually threw his only draft of it away at one point, until his wife convinced him to rescue it from the rubbish. The rest is, as they nearly say, a 70ish-strong publication history. (The first three books King wrote, incidentally, were Rage, The Long Walk and Blaze, all of which found publication in later years, and all of which will be covered soon enough.)

Carrie ended up being quite a zeitgeisty novel: published in the same rough timeframe as Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist, and when cinemas were showing Don't Look Now and The Wicker Man. The public were beginning to fall in love with the weirder, more human side of the paranormal – moving away from ghosts and hauntings, which used to preoccupy horror fiction.

The book itself is the story of Carrie White, a high-school student with latent – and then, as the novel progresses, developing – telekinetic powers. It's brutal in places, affecting in others (Carrie's relationship with her almost hysterically religious mother being a particularly damaged one), and gory in even more. By the end of the novel, there's a pretty impressive body count, and it's a body count you don't necessarily see coming given the general tone of the novel. Or, bluntly, given the character of Carrie herself.

Structurally it's a really weird one, with a standard Kingian third-person narrative voice interspersed with extracts from other media: newspaper reports, autobiographies of characters, transcripts of police interviews, that sort of thing. It's not a structure that entirely works, as the extracts are still slightly too close to King's standard narrative voice, and are often the worst (read: slowest) parts of the novel. While still reeling from the excitement of some of the third-person sections – particularly the classic prom scene – being dragged somewhere else entirely and presented with an often less-interesting viewpoint isn't always ideal. (In particular, there's a series of extracts from Susan Snell's fake biography; none are very interesting. Apart from anything else, they don't read like biography: they read like monologues.)

But, it's a really good story. Carrie herself is a fascinating character: an archetype (the damaged girl with powers beyond her sphere) to which King would return later in his career, and the book drags the reader along at a fair-old whack. King himself has described the novel as being "a cookie baked by a first grader – tasty enough, but kind of lumpy and burned on the bottom". And that's a pretty fair assessment, I'd say. As a debut novel, it's a fairly good piece of juvenilia. As a statement of intent – that intent being to write stories that deal with the weird, twisted and human in equal measure – it's exceptional.

Kingisms

In every review, I'm going to look at the tropes and common stylistic touches that appear in King's novels. Carrie's obviously interesting as it was the first, and it throws up a few ideas he would repeat throughout his career. The big one in Carrie is the internal monologue. King has a habit

(habit? habits are formed, this is something innate)

of indenting brackets or dropping the italicised thoughts of his characters into his third-person narratives. (See what I did there?) It's an easy way to bypass "She thought", and actually pretty elegant. In Carrie, it's a stylistic device that's still new to him, and whereas he now uses it sparingly, here, it's everywhere. By the end of the novel, some pages are almost more internal monologue than not.

Carrie is also a relative tone-setter of a novel: the narrative is distinctly King's, covering themes he would revisit again, and to greater effect; and some of the dialogue – particularly in Carrie's conversations with her mother – is delivered in voices he would also return to in later novels (Misery, the Dark Tower series, Dolores Claiborne).

Flagg-raising

One last thing. King has a character who has officially appeared in nine novels: Randall Flagg (aka Walter O'Dim, the Dark Man, the Man in Black, the Walkin' Dude). He's not a nice chap, and I'll take a much closer look at him in later novels – starting, if memory serves, with 1978's The Stand. But there are plenty of arguments to be made for his appearance in other King texts, and Carrie is no different.

Carrie's mother, in her religious fervour, frequently refers to – either directly, or through Carrie's prior indoctrination – "the black man … his cloven feet striking red sparks from the cement". Now, while it's meant to be the devil in this instance – or, rather, a more direct suggestion of the devil than Randall Flagg's usual appearances – that particular being is never mentioned by name. And "the black man" is awfully close to the Man in Black and the Dark Man, I'd say …

Next up

1975's Salem's Lot, a story of vampires, small towns and another of King's common themes – writers.