I have started a new blog, where I’ll be reading and writing about every Stephen King book that’s been published in chronological order. Here’s the first entry.
CARRIE is, famously, Stephen King’s first novel. I say famously, because it’s actually his fourth written novel, a story that people love to tell when discussing the roads to publication of various 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 it away at one point, until his wife convinced him to rescue it from the rubbish. The rest is, as they nearly say, a 60ish-strong publication history. (The first three written books, 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.)
And it’s quite a zeitgeist-y novel: published in the same approximate 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 personal side of paranormal. And it worked out for him, clearly.
The book itself is the story of Carrie White, a high-school student with latent - and then 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 quite the body count, and it’s a body count that you wouldn’t necessarily see coming given the general tone of the novel - and Carrie White herself.
Structurally it’s a really weird one, with a standard King-ian 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 something that entirely works, as the extracts are still in King’s voice, and are often the worst part of the novel. When reading the excitement of the third-person sections, being dragged somewhere else and presented with an often less-interesting viewpoint wasn’t always my ideal. (In particular, there’s a series of extracts from the character Susan Snell’s fake biography, and none of them are very interesting. Apart from anything, they just don’t read like biography; they read like monologues.)
But, it’s a good story. Carrie herself is an interesting - if basic - character, and the book drags the reader along at a fair-old whack. King’s 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 pretty good piece of juvenalia. 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.
KING-ISMS
In every review, I’m going to look at any tropes and common stylistic touches that appear through King’s novels. CARRIE’s obviously interesting as it was the first, and it throws up a few ideas that 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 innate)
of indenting bracketed or italicised thoughts made by characters in amongst 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 new to him. Where now he’ll use it sparingly, in CARRIE it’s everywhere. By the end of the novel, there was a page where there was more internal monologue than not, I’d reckon.
It’s also a relative tone-setter of a novel: the narrative is distinctly his; and some of the dialogue - particularly in Carrie’s conversations with her mother - delivered in voices he would revisit in later novels and characters (in MISERY, in the DARK TOWER series, in DOLORE 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 deal a lot more with him when looking at later novels - starting, if memory serves, with 1978’s THE STAND. But there’s plenty of arguements 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
Next up is 1975’s SALEM’S LOT, a story of vampires and another of King’s common themes - writers.
