An Overview of Stephen King's Carrie
The Horror Master’s First Novel Was Published in 1974
Nov 10, 2009
Carrie White was different, an outcast, both things that spell doom for a high school student. When the girls in the locker room pelt her with sanitary napkins and tampons, something inside her slips. When she is doused with pig’s blood at the prom, she cracks, using her telekinetic power to destroy everything and everyone in her path including her religious fanatic mother.
What Stephen King Has to Say About Carrie White
In his book, On Writing, King admits that Carrie would never have been written without his wife, Tabitha’s, influence. She was convinced he had something worth pursuing. “Tabby somehow knew it, and by the time I had piled up fifty single spaced pages, I knew it too.”
Apparently so did Doubleday, who published Carrie in 1974. It became a best seller and launched King’s career. It was the precursor to works like Salem's Lot, The Stand, The Shining and Under the Dome.
But King didn’t like his main character, Carrie White. In On Writing, which was published in 2000, twenty six years after Carrie hit the book shelves, his feelings for her hadn’t changed, “I never liked Carrie, that female version of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, but through Sondra and Dodie, (two girls from his life on whom Carrie was partially based), I came at last to understand her a little.”
Critical Reviews of Carrie, the Novel
- Amazon says, “It is the carefully drawn portrait of the little horrors of small towns, high school and adolescent sexuality that give this novel its power."
- In their critical essay, "The Perversion of the Female Principle in Stephen King's Fiction," Gail Burns and Melinda Kanner talk about the relationship between women and evil in King’s work. They assert that, “on a complex and subtextural level, women are represented in ways that reveal male fear and envy of female sexuality and reproductive biology.”
- Publisher’s Weekly found it “Eerie, haunting – sheer terror.”
- The New York Times asserted Carrie was “guaranteed to chill you.”
- On its website, All Readers.Com finds it “one of the most barrier breaking and shocking novels of all time.”
Not everyone was impressed by Carrie. It has been one of the most frequently banned books in schools and libraries across the country since its publication for promoting sex, violence and obscene language.
Carrie, the Movies and Carrie, the Musical
Carrie was adapted twice for the movies. Bryan De Palma directed the first and most heralded version in 1976. It grossed thirty million dollars and received rave reviews. Sissy Spacek, in the title role, and Piper Laurie, as Carrie’s mother, both received Academy Award Nominations.
In 2002, David Carson directed a made for television mini series of Carrie. It is considered to be inferior to the De Palma film.
In 1988 Carrie wastranslated to the stage as a musical. It opened to negative reviews and closed shortly after. At the time, “The New York Times” referred to it as "the most expensive flop in Broadway history."
Stephen King’s Novel, Carrie
It is impossible to say how many copies of Stephen King’s first published novel have sold, but the years have proven that it has not lost what King once referred to as, “its power to hurt and horrify.”
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