Well, we've got to get at least one Stephen King book on this list. King's ubiquitous influence on horror is neigh impossible to escape. If you've read this blog before, then you'll no doubt know that I am in no way a fan. But I'll admit he has good ideas, and I'll respect anyone who keeps people reading.
Of course, admitting you don't like something that is popular is asking for trouble. People act as though I'm some kind of sourpuss contrarian, who can't get hard unless I'm lording myself other everyone else. They're right.
In 1973, Stephen King was a broke high-school teacher shilling short stories to mens' magazines. Someone challenged him to write a short story from a female protagonist's perspective, which King decided to do. King sat down and started to write the story which would become Carrie - the book that launched his career. Famously, he threw it away after a few pages due to realising it would be a novella not a short story. Apparently, there's no market for novellas. Sorry, Sam. It was King's wife, Tabitha, who fished it out of the trash and told him to finish it. The novella eventually became a novel.
I quite like that story: it's a life-affirming tale for all budding writers who, like King, struggle to get their work out there whilst grappling with shit jobs.
Carrie concerns Carrie White, a 16-year-old girl from Chamberlain, a town in...(let me use my Scanners style psychic abilities)...Maine. A friendless misfit, Carrie is merciless bullied at school and tormented at home by Christian fundamentalist mother, Margaret, who feeds her diseased views of the world. Margaret is one of those sort of people who thinks shit is concentrated evil.
This cocktail of an unhealthy home and school life plays out at the same time as Carrie is discovering her latent telekinetic abilities. Oh I see what you did there King, you wily devil. [Insert commentary on feminism and womanhood].
The novel literally begins with Carrie having her first period, something of which she has no concept. She freaks out and her classmates mock her with chants of "Plug it up!" as they throw tampons at her. Carrie's mother is no better, referring to the period as "woman's curse" - which is what I also call my knob.
It's this initial...err, period, which instigates the entire plot of Carrie. Carrie's semi-sympathetic teacher, Miss Desjardin, requests the bullies be banned from the upcoming prom. As an act of revenge, lead bully Chris Hargensen and her greaser bully (sigh...) boyfriend Billy plan to soak Carrie - who, as an act of remorse from Sue Snell, is attending the prom with Sue's boyfriend Tommy - with pigs' blood.
Sure enough, at the prom Carrie and Tommy are voted Prom Queen and King (an election as rigged as the last US Presidential one), and just as Carrie finds herself on top she is absolutely humiliated. Understandably, Carrie uses her telekinetic powers to burn her fellow students alive and goes home and kills her mother. Not before her mother tells Carrie she was the product of marital rape: that's how these things work in horror, if you don't get consent your sperm turns evil.
Carrie is King's shortest novel, and his rawest. King wrote this at a time when he suffered from anger and depression, as well as a drinking problem. You can tell. It's a novel about being angry at the world, whilst seeking validation from it; it's about possessing an innate gift which makes you special, and the frustration that comes from being made to feel continually inadequate. Such is the writer's lot.
On the flip side, there's a lot of clumsy writing on display. In the book's opening, King describes the showering girls as possessing 'a light and eager morning sweat'. What does that even mean, King? You big weirdo. King has an obsession with teenage girls in this book, particularly their tits. I'm sure that scene of Carrie rubbing her own breasts is vital for the vital for the feminist subtext. He was a fucking high school teacher when he wrote this.
This line, about Carrie's menstruation, isn't much better: "Boys. Yes, boys come next. After the blood the boys come. Like sniffing dogs, grinning and slobbering, trying to find out where that smell is. That...smell!" Eww.
The clumsiness just keeps on coming: King describes a skirt ripping as “the sound of a huge wind-breakage.”
And look at this:
"Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It's what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you're bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love."
Bravo, King, bravo. Truly you are a poet amongst men.
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