An apocryphal definition of horror fiction is “when bad things happen to good people,” and it’s tempting to think that Stephen King kept this firmly in mind when writing Carrie . Bridging Roman Polanski's adaption of Ira Levin's novel Rosemary's Baby and the film of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist , King's debut novel sold millions and allowed him to give up his teaching position.
Carrie White is an outsider. Born into a deeply religious (and strange) family, the novel opens with Carrie having her first menstrual period. Ignorant of the facts of life, Carrie thinks that she is bleeding to death and panics. Disgusted by her openly bleeding in front of them, her unsympathetic classmates pelt her with sanitary towels, and her class teacher slaps her – ostensibly to stop her hysteria. When the teacher learns the truth, she sends the ringleaders to the Principal's Office. The Principal suspends ring-leader Chris Hargenson, who with boyfriend Billy, plans to be revenged at the prom she's been banned from...
Carrie
Almost all of the characters who could be dismissed as ‘monsters,’ Carrie herself, her religious fundamentalist mother, and classmate Sue Snell, and even spoilt lawyer’s daughter Christine Hargenson are rendered sympathetic. Christine's boyfriend Billy is the real villain, “I woulda done it to you, you know that?” (p.212) he tells Chris, but there is a sense that they are catalysts for each other, swept up in the moment, rather than truly evil.
Carrie has been described an epistolary novel, but that is over-simplistic; the novel has a central core of narrative, which is not exempt from fragments of non-narrative fiction, but Carrie herself is central to it. In total, almost one quarter of Carrie is written in first person autobiography, quasi-legal testimonial, etc. In the last thirty pages the style becomes more disjointed with prose in brackets, across several lines (reflecting a very 1970s stream of consciousness) and without punctuation, an effect which heightens the ‘crescendo’ effect of the last part of the book, reflecting the emotional intensity of the Chamberlain Holocaust.
Much of the narrative’s language is matter-of-fact, even earthy, which intensifies Carrie’s ‘meltdown.’ King uses an enormous amount of detail to outline character; Chris Hargenson’s attraction to Billy is depicted across three and a half pages (pp.126 – 130); his sinister car and how dangerous riding in it is, Billy’s animal nature and his crudity (the way he tears a hole in her nylons), which reaches a climax with her arousal.
The Prom
Central to the narrative is the sense of foreboding which is first specifically articulated as ‘the final climactic events” only on page 64, but even before that is hinted at in all the journals. King never wavers from his plot goal, and from the moment that Chris Hargenson targets the prom on page 76, King is unrelenting in his focus, but heightening intensity by delaying the climactic denouement.
And there is a final moment of cruelty, when the prom votes are tied, and for the recount Carrie tells 'boyfriend' Tommy not to vote for them; she almost escapes her fate; “Don’t vote for us,” she said finally. (p.157)
The final climatic events of the Prom, when Billy (played by John Travolta in Brian de Palma's film of the same name) and Chris drench Carrie in a bucket of pig's blood, and the horrific aftermath have passed into horror folklore.
Stephen King
King was working as a teacher when as described in the 1999 edition, he wrote a story based on two girls, both outsiders, whom he had known when younger, one of whom "had one change of clothes for the entire school year...all the other kids made fun of her. [One] day she came to school with a new outfit...she'd changed the...white blouse (which was all anybody had ever seen her in) for a bright...checkered blouse with puffed sleeves...and everybody made worse fun of her."
A failed short story turned into a novel which earned US$2500 for the hardback edition, and despite selling only 13000 copies as a hardback, the paperback advance came in at US$400,000 (split between King and Doubleday) and sold a million copies in its first year alone, allowing King to give up work as a teacher and become a full-time writer.
Kind has subsequently sold a string of best-sellers, including The Stand, The Shining, The Dead Zone, Cujo and Pet Sematary, all of which have been filmed.
Colin Harvey - Author six novels, and editor of four anthologies; professional reviewer since 2003, including six years at Strange Horizons. Member of ...
