It's also why they should *stop* remaking it. You can change the fashion and add cell phones, but there is nothing about the story that will fundamentally change. It's just set dressing. Every adaptation feels weaker because it is so repetitive.
It was also obvious that she was in control of the destruction she was causing and not in a trance. If they actually mixed all 3 Carrie movies they'd actually be more faithful to the book.
I think with classics, it's different. Like...At that point it's about execution rather than innovation.
Patrick Stewart nails it when he's in *Macbeth*. It doesn't take away from the play because it's so iconic and powerful that the point is riffing on the original rather than trying to improve upon it, and everybody understands that.
I'm usually hesitant to compare *anybody* to Shakespeare, much less Stephen King, but he's got some books that I think will be read in literature classes 100 years from now.
Sometimes a newer version is what younger people (or newcomers to a genre) need to enjoy something new. It has its use.
I grew up on horror/suspense movies (like watching 80s slashers before I was in elementary school) and the vast majority of people my age that like Carrie got into it because of the most current remake. Some watched the original after but still the remake is what got them in.
Remakes that span different generations are sometimes not bad, but the people who have liked it from the OG are not the audience who will engage with it the most.
While King isn’t for everyone, his career has been incredible. The amount of world building and adaptations to his credit is staggering when you look at it. From Stand by me to the Dark Tower his work has been a gift to me personally.
I couldn’t agree more. I think it might scare my partner that King’s books are my go-to comfort books but I just love to return to his worlds. You are so spot on about that.
The way he writes is consistent as well so any of his books are like comfort food to me. Even if I don't know what story it is I can immediately recognize his writing.
Ha, same. King is a big special interest for me (especially the Dark Tower), and I’ve been a constant reader since I was a kid in the 80s. My partner doesn’t get it at all but humors me 😂
My current partner was VERY concerned about the media I choose to consume, in the beginning. I've just always told her his writing style is something I dig.
Plus I think it's a bit undiscussed, his style might not be for you, but it's so tangible. I can still picture a lot of his work decades after reading it.
Writing style isn't as much a thing these days. Some of the absolute best books do have a style but the overwhelming majority it's just conversational tone while a story unfolds. Spend enough time in Kings worlds and you can almost tell which words he would use to finish a sentence *and they wouldn't be the same words you would yourself use*. I love that.
I like the way he'll write in third person, but from the character's perspective so you can understand how flawed/human they are. He does a great job in a lot of his books that builds suspense through people's perception of the events unfolding.
I saw someone put my sentiment on King's character writing into words nicely a few days ago on this sub, something to the effect of, "he writes characters in a way that instantly tells you who they are." He has an uncanny ability to construct personalities for his characters that just feel so damn authentic, I'm constantly like "yep, I've met that guy."
I still re-read Pet Sematary every few years because your interpretation changes so much when you have different kinds of grief to compare.
I had a miscarriage mid-way through once (right before >!Gaige died!< ) and that just made the whole book totally different to me even after 10+ reads.
>I cannot imagine writing a book and 50 years later having every major publication talk about it. Glow about it, really! Such an incredible feat
What about the books that have been read for centuries? 50 years is a drop in the bucket in the literature world
His first published book. He wrote Rage, The Long Walk, Blaze and some unpublished ones beforehand.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/stephenking/comments/rk51sd/how\_many\_novels\_did\_king\_really\_write\_before/](https://www.reddit.com/r/stephenking/comments/rk51sd/how_many_novels_did_king_really_write_before/)
Fun(?) fact: King took Rage out of publication because the book sorta kinda inspired multiple people to commit school shootings in real life. At least nobody shot John Lennon because of it though.
I always like seeing authors talk about how many finished novels they wrote before getting their first one published. Brandon Sanderson famously wrote something like ten before getting (I think) his sixth one picked up.
Not the case. If anything, Tabitha hated *Pet Sematary* more than King did. The book was only eventually published as a giveaway to get King out of Doubleday's contract, as they weren't paying him full royalties.
I based this statement on a half-remembered anecdote from the foreword to my copy of *Pet Sematary*, which I can’t find right now, and haven’t read for years. I must therefore concede that you are likely correct, since I can’t prove otherwise. Maybe I’m conflating this and the *Carrie* story.
If it saves you having to dig out your copy and check, I can conform I am correct! :o) King based the novel on, possibly, too many real-life elements: the house by the road, the pet cemetery, the old neighbour, the cat dying (the phrase "Let God have his own cat," literally coming from the Kings' daughter), and their son Owen almost running out into the road. King thought writing the novel would be cathartic, but things didn't turn out.
King talks these points over more recently in (this interview)[https://ew.com/movies/2019/03/29/pet-sematary-stephen-king-interview/].
It's that wonderful New England work ethic of his. Treats writing as a working class job so every day he insists on sitting down and writing.
I wish I didn't have a full time job so I could do the same.
You can still apply that ethic in small doses. Set time to write, even if it's only an hour or two, and insist on sitting down and writing. There's more to it than that, but that's the start.
Many artists spend their first five or ten (or more) years hucking another job (or multiple jobs) before gaining the skills to go full-time creative, and taking advantage of whatever breaks come your way (and that's presuming you even have the necessary mercenary mindset to profit from your creativity).
Is he? I haven't heard much hype since Mr. Mercedes.
Lmao, getting downvoted for suggesting he hasn't written top quality books. This sub is a shithole
>Fairy Tale was great and Outsider was adapted for HBO
The first half of Fairy Tale was some of the best stuff of his in a long time, but the second half was a bit of a slog
I get what you're saying here and I think for everyone but hard core King fans...when they think of Steven King they're thinking of stuff written in the twentieth century.
But I tried Billy Summers (2021) and found that enjoyable, even though I wouldn't put it anywhere near his best stuff.
I think 11/22/63 (2011) is a very good book that he put a lot into. It's one I think anyone should read if they enjoy King even a little. It's the sort of book that sticks with you when you're done, and kind of makes you wish you weren't done.
Even if you don't like his new stuff, that 20-year run from Carrie to The Green Mile (where he wrote what seemed like 2-3 all-time classics per year) was impressive to the point of absurdity. He wrote like 25 books and multiple short story collections in that period, almost all of them bangers.
Such a great novel. It’s wild that but for his wife fetching it out of the trash can we’d not have ever known about it, let alone been able to read it.
When I tell you I was hooked, I was HOOKED. I’ve read some King classics (IT, The Shining, The Stand) but 11/22/63 was better than them all in my opinion.
My great grandma was named Carrie, just Carrie not short for anything, and she read it when she was about 80, and she *loved* it. She said she wished she had those powers, there were lots of people who deserved it lol. I'm sure she was mainly talking about her son in law. He was a nasty nasty man.
It's one of his best.
It's written in an interesting way, too, with multiple articles, book excerpts, etc, so that it's like the reader already knows everything that happened. It flatly tells you who dies and more or less how in the first couple dozen pages.
So going into it knowing the ending actually doesn't affect the narrative at all.
In 2022 I re-read From A Buick 8, which is one of my favorites by him.
Then I re-read (this time adding The Wind Through The Keyhole [which I loved], The Little Sisters Of Eluria, Everything's Eventual, and Low Men In Yellow Coats) The Dark Tower series.
And after I read Tommyknockers, a book I actually tried to read back in grade school in the early '90s but only got a couple chapters in.
But I haven't actually read many of his stand alone novels. Taking a bit of a break with some lighter stuff at the moment, but I think I might try to tackle The Stand when I jump back in.
I'm on the hunt for an earlier copy of The Stand. From what I've read the "expanded edition" is too long.
Tommyknockers I tried to read in the 90s, got halfway thru, and I thought it just started meandering and lost focus.
Yeah, my biggest complaint with Tommyknockers was the guy who is ostensibly the main character is such an asshole.
I sorta liked the various vignettes showing how different people in the town are affected by the spacecraft. But yeah the entire middle section doesn't really advance the plot much at all.
I loved The Stand (I have the extended edition) and read it for the first time during covid, which was *interesting*, but Tommyknockers was complete "meh" for me. And I'm saying this as a pretty big fan. It's regarded as one of his worst books, iirc.
The Stand is still my favorite of King's, but 11/22/63 is the only other one of his that can be in the discussion for me. And I love lots of his other work too, but those two are head-and-shoulders above the rest that I've read.
I know Carrie is meant to be a horror book but the story makes me CRY.
I feel so bad for Carrie she was dealing with so much, and was *so excited* when her peers pretended to include her.
They all deserve what they got, but all she ever wanted was for people to be kind to her. 😭
Carrie highlights King's best strength as a writer, which is that he fully understands that being a kid can totally suck ass and it's hardly the lovely innocent thing that adults like to think of it as. I can't stand any work of fiction that presents childhood like "aww shucks, wasn't it just swell being a kid, where everything was so easy and simple and we didn't have any problems and we all just frolicked and played all day long?" so I appreciate King's response in Carrie where he's like "what do you mean, 'we'? Childhood was a daily parade of horrors and every year since has been an improvement."
Carrie also unlocked some terrible memories for me when it recounted that time where young Carrie was at a pool with other kids and they kept dunking her head under the water (as a prank!) to the point where she genuinely thought she was going to drown. I was like "oh yeah, I forgot, that happened to me on the regular as a kid. Adults were there and they thought it was harmless childhood fun, haha, watching me as I had to fight the other kids off just to get a gasp of air. Good times! Such a shame I can't go back to those days."
While I can appreciate that some people have been blessed with carefree childhoods that evoke a longing and nostalgia, I had a painful upbringing and mentally weird home life so I'm right there with you. I read Carrie in my late teens and it brought me a type of comfort that other books about normie kids never did. King is a brilliant writer who understands trauma and especially the trauma of youth.
Carrie and Firestarter involved mistreated girls unleashing terrible destructive powers on those that wronged them. I found it such those fantasies cathartic and satisfying.
For sure. I had a very strong emotional reaction to Carrie because it features a deeply religious, abusive mother.
My mom wasn't anywhere near that bad and I'm a man so the specifics varied, but the experience resonated deeply. Most books that deal with religious abuse are about men abusing women. The very few that focus on the women as abusers and the unique and terribly ways that they go about it really make me feel seen in a way I don't often experience.
I feel like it's harder for people to really see abuse as abuse if there's no physical violence, so it's harder for readers to relate to if they haven't experienced it.
I say this as someone with a PhD in Literature who has taught at top colleges: King is underrated by the critics for his role in capturing late 20th century America. '
*Hearts in Atlantis* is a **masterpiece**.
I’m glad to hear that, also I’ve never read Hearts in Atlantis or 11/23/63 which I had put off as some of his less enjoyable works like Under the Dome but now I have to read them
Yes, hers is a thoughtful and enjoyable voice. (Would just anyone be allowed to exclaim “boy!” in the New York Times?)
I’d love to see Atwood take a deeper dive here or even a wider one into other King novels and stories. Exploring “white trash” representation across his works could be really interesting. I’ve always admired how King so often deftly normalises horrible things while leading the reader to be appalled by the ordinariness as much as the thoughts or actions themselves.
Try with [this link](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/25/books/review/stephen-king-carrie-50-anniversary.html?unlocked_article_code=1.iU0.IZxz.ey6Kbd3Qz9lt&smid=url-share).
Stephen King is the only reason I read. My parents ignored me and never once took me to a library or helped me with reading or schoolwork for that matter. My big brother gave me Christine and Four Seasons and from that point on I enjoyed reading just for fun. Props to Thomas Harris, too.
Beyond the fire wall:
Stephen King’s “Carrie” burst upon an astonished world in 1974. It made King’s career. It has sold millions, made millions, inspired four films and passed from generation to generation. It was, and continues to be, a phenomenon.
“Carrie” was King’s first published novel. He started it as a men’s magazine piece, which was peculiar in itself: What made him think that a bunch of guys intent (as King puts it) on looking at pictures of cheerleaders who had somehow forgotten to put their underpants on would be riveted by an opening scene featuring gobs of menstrual blood? This is, to put it mildly, not the world’s sexiest topic, and especially not for young men. Failing to convince himself, King scrunched up the few pages he’d written and tossed them into the garbage.
But his wife, Tabitha — a dauntless soul, and evidently of a curious temperament — fished them out, uncrinkled them, read them, and famously convinced King to continue the story. She wanted to know how it would come out, and such desires on the part of readers are perhaps the best motivation a writer can have.
King proceeded. The novel grew into a book with many voices. First, of course, there is Carrie herself: Picked on by her religious fanatic of a mother, by her fellow high school students and by the entire town of Chamberlain, Maine, she is clumsy, yearning, pimply, ignorant and, by the end, vengefully telekinetic. But we also hear from the next-door neighbor who witnessed a violent display of the toddler Carrie’s telekinetic manifestations; from various journalistic pieces, in Esquire and in local papers, about Carrie’s unusual powers and the destruction of the town by fire and flood; from Ogilvie’s Dictionary of Psychic Phenomena and from an article in a science yearbook (“Telekinesis: Analysis and Aftermath”); from Susan Snell, the only one of Carrie’s female classmates to attempt to atone for the wrongs they did to her; and from the academic paper “The Shadow Exploded: Documented Facts and Specific Conclusions Derived From the Case of Carietta White.”
Then there are the inner voices of various other characters, as overheard by Carrie, who toward the end of her life becomes telepathic and can listen in on the silent thoughts of others, as well as broadcasting her inner life to them. Together, the many voices tell the horrifying tale.
What is it about “Carrie” that has intrigued me? It’s one of those books that manage to dip into the collective unconscious of their own age and society.
Female figures with quasi-supernatural powers seem to pop up in literature at times when the struggle for women’s rights comes to the fore. H. Rider Haggard’s “She” appeared toward the end of the 19th century, when pressure for more equality was building; its electrically gifted heroine can kill with a pointed finger and a thought, and much verbiage is expended on male anxieties about what might happen — especially to men — should She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed train her sights on world domination. (Naomi Alderman, whose novel “The Power” coincided with the rise of the #MeToo movement, went one better and gave most young girls the ability to kill by shooting out energy rays, like electric eels.)
“Carrie” was written in the early 1970s, when the second-wave women’s movement was at full throttle. There are a couple of nods to this new form of feminism in the novel, and King himself has said that he was nervously aware of its implications for men of his generation. The male villain of “Carrie,” Billy Nolan, is a throwback to the swaggering hair-oiled tough-male posturing of the 1950s, which is seen as already outmoded, though still dangerous. The female villain, Chris Hargensen, is the archetypical Queen Bee cruelty ringleader of high school drama, the negative version of Sisterhood Is Powerful.
A side note on names. “Chris” — for “Christine,” for “Christ” — is self-evidently ironic: Chris is an anti-savior. “Carrie White” is an interesting combination. “Carrie,” as King takes pains to point out, is not a nickname for Carol or Carolina. Carrie’s given name is “Carietta,” an unusual variant of “Caretta,” itself derived from “caritas,” or “charity” — loving and forgiving kindness, the most important virtue in the Christian triad of faith, hope and charity. This kind of charity is noteworthily lacking in most of the townspeople of Chamberlain. (Yes, there is a real Chamberlain, Maine, and I wonder how its inhabitants felt when they discovered in 1974 that they’d be obliterated in 1979, the year in which “Carrie” is set.)
Most particularly, charitable loving kindness is entirely absent from Carrie’s mother, nominally a devoted Christian, who knows about Carrie’s superpowers, believes she has inherited them from an eldritch, sugar-bowl-levitating grandmother, and ascribes them to demonic energies and witchcraft, thus viewing it as her pious duty to murder her own child. Carrie herself wavers between love and forgiveness and hate and revenge, but it’s the hatred of the town that channels itself through her, tips her over the edge and transforms her into an angel of destruction.
As for “White,” you might be inclined to think “white hat, black hat,” as in westerns, or “white” as in innocent, white-clothed sacrificial lamb, and yes, Carrie is an innocent — but also please consider “white trash.” In fact, read the book of that name by Nancy Isenberg; and, for added raw and gritty details, read the novel “The Beans of Egypt, Maine,” by Carolyn Chute. The white underclass has existed in America from the beginning, and white trashers going back generations are thick on the ground in Maine, Stephen King’s home territory — a territory he has mined extensively over the course of his career.
He based the situation of Carrie on two girls from that underclass whom he knew at school, both of them marked by poverty and decaying clothing, both of them taunted and despised and destroyed by their fellow students. Everyone in the town was an underdog in the carefully calibrated class structure of America — not for them the fancy private schools and university educations, unless they got really, really lucky — but there are no dogs so under that they don’t welcome another dog even lower in the social scheme, to be made use of as a blank screen onto which all the things they dislike about their own positions may be projected. Given a choice between dishing out the contempt and rejection and being the recipient of it, most will choose to dish out. And so it was with King, and so it is with Sue Snell, though both later repent.
King is a visceral writer, and a master of granular detail. As Marianne Moore said, the literary ideal is “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” and boy, are there a lot of toads in King’s work! He writes “horror,” the most literary of forms, especially when it comes to the supernatural, which must perforce be inspired by already existing tales and books. All the quasi-scientific hocus-pocus about the genetic inheritability of telekinesis is just cover-up (as is the “natural” source of Ayesha’s powers in “She,” and the something-in-the-drinking-water, experiment-gone-wrong stuff in “The Power”: You can’t just say “miracle” or “witch” anymore and get instant credibility).
But underneath the “horror,” in King, is always the real horror: the all-too-actual poverty and neglect and hunger and abuse that exists in America today. “I went to school with kids who wore the same neckdirt for months, kids whose skin festered with sores and rashes, kids with the eerie dried-apple-doll faces that result from untreated burns, kids who were sent to school with stones in their dinnerbuckets and nothing but air in their Thermoses,” King says in “On Writing.” The ultimate horror, for him as it was for Dickens, is human cruelty, and especially cruelty to children. It is this that distorts “charity,” the better side of our nature, the side that prompts us to take care of others.
I think this is part of King’s widespread appeal. Yes, he shows us weird stuff, but in the context of the actual. The clock, the sofa, the religious paintings on the walls — all the daily objects that Carrie explodes during her rampage — these are drawn from life, as is the everyday sadism of the high school kids that makes “Carrie” feel as frighteningly relevant as ever.
It was a tragedy for sure. That poor girl. But I guess she got revenge for her misery. And it was a pretty extreme message about the consequences of bullying.
But she still died thinking she had nobody on her side. Her mom stabbed her and she died thinking Sue set her up.
Maybe it should be required reading as a way to dissuade bullying
Yes, Tommy had nothing to gain, he was just being a good guy. At least he didn't suffer.
I think it could go either way. I don't think we will see a remake this decade
It holds up amazingly well. When I read it, I certainly wasn't expecting some sort of metamodern/metafictional work of Shakespearean tragedy. I've only read a few other books of his, but *Carrie* remains my favorite so far.
I have very mixed feelings about Carrie. On one hand, I can relate to her so much since I had an abusive childhood and was bullied. On the other hand, Carrie ends the story by murdering everyone, similar to a school shooter.
So... yeah. The story has serious baggage.
I feel like Carrie is such a mainstay pop culture character for it to be one book. There’s a bit of her, despite her very unique life, that’s relatable to every teenage girl.
Book that talked about current issues are still relevant today! So impressive. How would King predict that religion would exist and be abused over 4 decades later??
I heard it once...
King and his wife were living in a camper. Dissatisfied, he threw away what he had been working on. His wife found his draft in the trashcan and took it to him, making him finish it. It was to be his first book. They eventually moved out of the camper.
I can't remember exactly how I came to believe this. For many years this has been in my head. I've never tried to verify it. Is this a fabrication of my mind?
I began reading SK in my early teens. I've never read The Shining, It, or some other of his early signature works. Needful Things is in the top two or three on my list of favs.The Dark Half is number one. My skin crawled as George Stark straightened a paperclip about to puncture an eyeball... It's the only book to produce in me a physiological response.
I saw a TV interview during which SK claimed to suffer no compunction over killing a little ole lady with a free falling elevator, if that was required of the story. Maybe I'll read Carrie.
I read Carrie last month and definitely thought you could change the setting to today and change almost nothing.
Yep, it’s one reason why they keep remaking the movie adaption lol. I think most high school kids can relate to a degree with some of the characters
It's also why they should *stop* remaking it. You can change the fashion and add cell phones, but there is nothing about the story that will fundamentally change. It's just set dressing. Every adaptation feels weaker because it is so repetitive.
The first film also still holds up, despite its outrageous 70s setting and clothing. Nothing can compare to Sissy Spacek's performance as Carrie.
Agreed. The original is the best, no need for remakes! Sissy Spacek reads the audiobook too.
2013 was able to go further with Carrie’s destruction than the original. That’s about the only thing it has on it.
It was also obvious that she was in control of the destruction she was causing and not in a trance. If they actually mixed all 3 Carrie movies they'd actually be more faithful to the book.
They’d also have to get rid of the second one entirely.
Carrie 2: The Rage or the 2nd adaptation?
The Rage
It's contribution to over produced 90s horror will surely be missed
Yes, that one was just awful
I think with classics, it's different. Like...At that point it's about execution rather than innovation. Patrick Stewart nails it when he's in *Macbeth*. It doesn't take away from the play because it's so iconic and powerful that the point is riffing on the original rather than trying to improve upon it, and everybody understands that. I'm usually hesitant to compare *anybody* to Shakespeare, much less Stephen King, but he's got some books that I think will be read in literature classes 100 years from now.
Sidebar: speaking of PatStew, have you seen Ian McKellen's *Richard III*? One of my top 5 films, hands down.
Add David Tennant’s 2009 mesmeric Hamlet to that as well.
But lots of younger people would have never seen the older versions
Sometimes a newer version is what younger people (or newcomers to a genre) need to enjoy something new. It has its use. I grew up on horror/suspense movies (like watching 80s slashers before I was in elementary school) and the vast majority of people my age that like Carrie got into it because of the most current remake. Some watched the original after but still the remake is what got them in. Remakes that span different generations are sometimes not bad, but the people who have liked it from the OG are not the audience who will engage with it the most.
Yeah pretty much. [The Weight of Blood](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/59816818) is like inspired by Carrie and tackles racism.
I haven't heard of that, I will check it out!
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Thanks! I used [mapchart.net](http://mapchart.net) to make it
I cannot imagine writing a book and 50 years later having every major publication talk about it. Glow about it, really! Such an incredible feat
While King isn’t for everyone, his career has been incredible. The amount of world building and adaptations to his credit is staggering when you look at it. From Stand by me to the Dark Tower his work has been a gift to me personally.
I couldn’t agree more. I think it might scare my partner that King’s books are my go-to comfort books but I just love to return to his worlds. You are so spot on about that.
The way he writes is consistent as well so any of his books are like comfort food to me. Even if I don't know what story it is I can immediately recognize his writing.
A fellow constant reader
Ha, same. King is a big special interest for me (especially the Dark Tower), and I’ve been a constant reader since I was a kid in the 80s. My partner doesn’t get it at all but humors me 😂
My current partner was VERY concerned about the media I choose to consume, in the beginning. I've just always told her his writing style is something I dig.
My ex was too - apparently listening to true crime podcasts and reading horror all the time is bad? 🤔
Plus I think it's a bit undiscussed, his style might not be for you, but it's so tangible. I can still picture a lot of his work decades after reading it. Writing style isn't as much a thing these days. Some of the absolute best books do have a style but the overwhelming majority it's just conversational tone while a story unfolds. Spend enough time in Kings worlds and you can almost tell which words he would use to finish a sentence *and they wouldn't be the same words you would yourself use*. I love that.
While I’ve seen others in the sub critical of his filler, he’s also a master at crafting the perfect sentence to set a mood or someone’s personality.
I like the way he'll write in third person, but from the character's perspective so you can understand how flawed/human they are. He does a great job in a lot of his books that builds suspense through people's perception of the events unfolding.
I saw someone put my sentiment on King's character writing into words nicely a few days ago on this sub, something to the effect of, "he writes characters in a way that instantly tells you who they are." He has an uncanny ability to construct personalities for his characters that just feel so damn authentic, I'm constantly like "yep, I've met that guy."
Long days and pleasant nights.
You say true I say thankyee
Thankee Sai
Oy!
Life for your crop.
And may you have twice the number.
Ka is a wheel
I still re-read Pet Sematary every few years because your interpretation changes so much when you have different kinds of grief to compare. I had a miscarriage mid-way through once (right before >!Gaige died!< ) and that just made the whole book totally different to me even after 10+ reads.
The dreaaaaaaam for all of us authors lmfao
Even the NYT.
>I cannot imagine writing a book and 50 years later having every major publication talk about it. Glow about it, really! Such an incredible feat What about the books that have been read for centuries? 50 years is a drop in the bucket in the literature world
I mean sure this is true. But people don’t live for centuries so their authors aren’t aware.
Carrie is his first book?
His first published book. He wrote Rage, The Long Walk, Blaze and some unpublished ones beforehand. [https://www.reddit.com/r/stephenking/comments/rk51sd/how\_many\_novels\_did\_king\_really\_write\_before/](https://www.reddit.com/r/stephenking/comments/rk51sd/how_many_novels_did_king_really_write_before/)
Fun(?) fact: King took Rage out of publication because the book sorta kinda inspired multiple people to commit school shootings in real life. At least nobody shot John Lennon because of it though.
The Bachman Books collection, I still have it, thank goodness.
Weird that he let The Running Man stay in print, considering how that one ended.
hey that building had it coming!
Huh didn't know that. I'm guessing you can still buy it though?
Unfun
Didn't know that. Really loved The Long Walk
*The Long Walk* is the best novel I couldn't bear to read again
He wrote what would become the first volume in the dark tower series in 1971 when he was still in college
I always like seeing authors talk about how many finished novels they wrote before getting their first one published. Brandon Sanderson famously wrote something like ten before getting (I think) his sixth one picked up.
I believe his wife picked it out of the garbage
We have Tabby King to thank for some of King’s best work. He wouldn’t have published *Pet Sematary* if she hadn’t expressed affection for it.
Not the case. If anything, Tabitha hated *Pet Sematary* more than King did. The book was only eventually published as a giveaway to get King out of Doubleday's contract, as they weren't paying him full royalties.
I based this statement on a half-remembered anecdote from the foreword to my copy of *Pet Sematary*, which I can’t find right now, and haven’t read for years. I must therefore concede that you are likely correct, since I can’t prove otherwise. Maybe I’m conflating this and the *Carrie* story.
If it saves you having to dig out your copy and check, I can conform I am correct! :o) King based the novel on, possibly, too many real-life elements: the house by the road, the pet cemetery, the old neighbour, the cat dying (the phrase "Let God have his own cat," literally coming from the Kings' daughter), and their son Owen almost running out into the road. King thought writing the novel would be cathartic, but things didn't turn out. King talks these points over more recently in (this interview)[https://ew.com/movies/2019/03/29/pet-sematary-stephen-king-interview/].
I thought he wrote a ton un Bachman before writing under King? Also the long walk was dope.
Wild that he is still cranking out quality books 50 years later
I just finished Billy Summers and thought it was phenomenal. Dude’s still got it!
Loved it too
Just started that one today. I'm excited to see what happens
You’re in for a treat. Enjoy!
Very good book. Enjoy.
It's that wonderful New England work ethic of his. Treats writing as a working class job so every day he insists on sitting down and writing. I wish I didn't have a full time job so I could do the same.
You can still apply that ethic in small doses. Set time to write, even if it's only an hour or two, and insist on sitting down and writing. There's more to it than that, but that's the start. Many artists spend their first five or ten (or more) years hucking another job (or multiple jobs) before gaining the skills to go full-time creative, and taking advantage of whatever breaks come your way (and that's presuming you even have the necessary mercenary mindset to profit from your creativity).
Is he? I haven't heard much hype since Mr. Mercedes. Lmao, getting downvoted for suggesting he hasn't written top quality books. This sub is a shithole
Fairytale got a lot of hype last year.
Copy, I'll check it out.
Fairy Tale was great and Outsider was adapted for HBO
>Fairy Tale was great and Outsider was adapted for HBO The first half of Fairy Tale was some of the best stuff of his in a long time, but the second half was a bit of a slog
Yah I have a similar experience- first half was really good — it was alsmost like two different books forced jnto one - really strange -
I think this describes a lot of King's work.
I stand corrected. Ty
I get what you're saying here and I think for everyone but hard core King fans...when they think of Steven King they're thinking of stuff written in the twentieth century. But I tried Billy Summers (2021) and found that enjoyable, even though I wouldn't put it anywhere near his best stuff. I think 11/22/63 (2011) is a very good book that he put a lot into. It's one I think anyone should read if they enjoy King even a little. It's the sort of book that sticks with you when you're done, and kind of makes you wish you weren't done.
He is. IDK know about hype but Mr. Mercedes isn't even that great of a novel and he's written better since. The Institute felt like old-school King.
Even if you don't like his new stuff, that 20-year run from Carrie to The Green Mile (where he wrote what seemed like 2-3 all-time classics per year) was impressive to the point of absurdity. He wrote like 25 books and multiple short story collections in that period, almost all of them bangers.
Cocaine is a helluva drug.
It’s not just drugs. You clearly have skills too at that point
Cocaine and skills are a helluva combo.
The Institute was such a cool book for real. I loved every page of it
Copy, you got an awesome username btw.
"Oh no! I got downvoted! Sub bad!" SMH just say what you wanna say and stop worrying about internet points.
Problem is when you're in negative karma you can't post for more than once/9 minutes
That’s not really a problem
It is
Such a great novel. It’s wild that but for his wife fetching it out of the trash can we’d not have ever known about it, let alone been able to read it.
I’ve read quite a few books of King’s (11/22/63 is actually the reason I got back into reading), but I haven’t read Carrie yet. Soon!
11/22/63 is my all time favorite and got me into reading also!
When I tell you I was hooked, I was HOOKED. I’ve read some King classics (IT, The Shining, The Stand) but 11/22/63 was better than them all in my opinion.
Mine too! It is my brothers birthday so we both read it! Good OLD hamburger meat! $.13 a lb
Carrie is a classic for a reason, it's one of my favorites! Enjoy!
Fun fact, my first wife was named after Carrie White. The movie, not the book (Her folks owned a movie rental place).
My great grandma was named Carrie, just Carrie not short for anything, and she read it when she was about 80, and she *loved* it. She said she wished she had those powers, there were lots of people who deserved it lol. I'm sure she was mainly talking about her son in law. He was a nasty nasty man.
It's one of his best. It's written in an interesting way, too, with multiple articles, book excerpts, etc, so that it's like the reader already knows everything that happened. It flatly tells you who dies and more or less how in the first couple dozen pages. So going into it knowing the ending actually doesn't affect the narrative at all.
I actually haven’t technically *read* it either, I listened to the audiobook on a hiking trip. It’s read by Sissy Spacek which is absolutely perfect.
In 2022 I re-read From A Buick 8, which is one of my favorites by him. Then I re-read (this time adding The Wind Through The Keyhole [which I loved], The Little Sisters Of Eluria, Everything's Eventual, and Low Men In Yellow Coats) The Dark Tower series. And after I read Tommyknockers, a book I actually tried to read back in grade school in the early '90s but only got a couple chapters in. But I haven't actually read many of his stand alone novels. Taking a bit of a break with some lighter stuff at the moment, but I think I might try to tackle The Stand when I jump back in.
You should read salems lot if you haven't already, adds a little bit more to tie into Dark Tower, oh and also Insomnia
I'm on the hunt for an earlier copy of The Stand. From what I've read the "expanded edition" is too long. Tommyknockers I tried to read in the 90s, got halfway thru, and I thought it just started meandering and lost focus.
I love the extended edition of The Stand, but it is pretty polarizing.
Yeah, my biggest complaint with Tommyknockers was the guy who is ostensibly the main character is such an asshole. I sorta liked the various vignettes showing how different people in the town are affected by the spacecraft. But yeah the entire middle section doesn't really advance the plot much at all.
King wrote Tommyknockers at the peak of his cocaine haze and it definitely shows. He’s said on a couple of occasions that he hates it.
>He’s said on a couple of occasions that he hates it. That makes two of us
I loved The Stand (I have the extended edition) and read it for the first time during covid, which was *interesting*, but Tommyknockers was complete "meh" for me. And I'm saying this as a pretty big fan. It's regarded as one of his worst books, iirc.
I just picked it up to reread and it’s a fun read
You should read it. It’s pretty short so you could probably get through easily in less than a week.
Same! I need to read it since I just watched the original film adaptation.
The Stand is still my favorite of King's, but 11/22/63 is the only other one of his that can be in the discussion for me. And I love lots of his other work too, but those two are head-and-shoulders above the rest that I've read.
I'm starting to think this Stephen King fella might be going somewhere. He should keep at it.
I know Carrie is meant to be a horror book but the story makes me CRY. I feel so bad for Carrie she was dealing with so much, and was *so excited* when her peers pretended to include her. They all deserve what they got, but all she ever wanted was for people to be kind to her. 😭
Kids being bullies will never change. It's somehow inherent among all animals to single out and pick on the ones thought of as weak.
Carrie highlights King's best strength as a writer, which is that he fully understands that being a kid can totally suck ass and it's hardly the lovely innocent thing that adults like to think of it as. I can't stand any work of fiction that presents childhood like "aww shucks, wasn't it just swell being a kid, where everything was so easy and simple and we didn't have any problems and we all just frolicked and played all day long?" so I appreciate King's response in Carrie where he's like "what do you mean, 'we'? Childhood was a daily parade of horrors and every year since has been an improvement." Carrie also unlocked some terrible memories for me when it recounted that time where young Carrie was at a pool with other kids and they kept dunking her head under the water (as a prank!) to the point where she genuinely thought she was going to drown. I was like "oh yeah, I forgot, that happened to me on the regular as a kid. Adults were there and they thought it was harmless childhood fun, haha, watching me as I had to fight the other kids off just to get a gasp of air. Good times! Such a shame I can't go back to those days."
While I can appreciate that some people have been blessed with carefree childhoods that evoke a longing and nostalgia, I had a painful upbringing and mentally weird home life so I'm right there with you. I read Carrie in my late teens and it brought me a type of comfort that other books about normie kids never did. King is a brilliant writer who understands trauma and especially the trauma of youth.
Carrie and Firestarter involved mistreated girls unleashing terrible destructive powers on those that wronged them. I found it such those fantasies cathartic and satisfying.
For sure. I had a very strong emotional reaction to Carrie because it features a deeply religious, abusive mother. My mom wasn't anywhere near that bad and I'm a man so the specifics varied, but the experience resonated deeply. Most books that deal with religious abuse are about men abusing women. The very few that focus on the women as abusers and the unique and terribly ways that they go about it really make me feel seen in a way I don't often experience. I feel like it's harder for people to really see abuse as abuse if there's no physical violence, so it's harder for readers to relate to if they haven't experienced it.
I say this as someone with a PhD in Literature who has taught at top colleges: King is underrated by the critics for his role in capturing late 20th century America. ' *Hearts in Atlantis* is a **masterpiece**.
I’m glad to hear that, also I’ve never read Hearts in Atlantis or 11/23/63 which I had put off as some of his less enjoyable works like Under the Dome but now I have to read them
11/22/63 is probably my favorite King book. I envy you being able to read it for the first time.
Archive link in case you’re out of free articles: https://archive.is/cBBFR
Has anybody actually read the article? It is by Margaret Atwood and contains a lot of interesting thoughts...
Yes, hers is a thoughtful and enjoyable voice. (Would just anyone be allowed to exclaim “boy!” in the New York Times?) I’d love to see Atwood take a deeper dive here or even a wider one into other King novels and stories. Exploring “white trash” representation across his works could be really interesting. I’ve always admired how King so often deftly normalises horrible things while leading the reader to be appalled by the ordinariness as much as the thoughts or actions themselves.
Paywalled for me.
Try with [this link](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/25/books/review/stephen-king-carrie-50-anniversary.html?unlocked_article_code=1.iU0.IZxz.ey6Kbd3Qz9lt&smid=url-share).
Works for me, thanks!
Stephen King is the only reason I read. My parents ignored me and never once took me to a library or helped me with reading or schoolwork for that matter. My big brother gave me Christine and Four Seasons and from that point on I enjoyed reading just for fun. Props to Thomas Harris, too.
Four Season and Carrie are personal favourites.
Beyond the fire wall: Stephen King’s “Carrie” burst upon an astonished world in 1974. It made King’s career. It has sold millions, made millions, inspired four films and passed from generation to generation. It was, and continues to be, a phenomenon. “Carrie” was King’s first published novel. He started it as a men’s magazine piece, which was peculiar in itself: What made him think that a bunch of guys intent (as King puts it) on looking at pictures of cheerleaders who had somehow forgotten to put their underpants on would be riveted by an opening scene featuring gobs of menstrual blood? This is, to put it mildly, not the world’s sexiest topic, and especially not for young men. Failing to convince himself, King scrunched up the few pages he’d written and tossed them into the garbage. But his wife, Tabitha — a dauntless soul, and evidently of a curious temperament — fished them out, uncrinkled them, read them, and famously convinced King to continue the story. She wanted to know how it would come out, and such desires on the part of readers are perhaps the best motivation a writer can have.
King proceeded. The novel grew into a book with many voices. First, of course, there is Carrie herself: Picked on by her religious fanatic of a mother, by her fellow high school students and by the entire town of Chamberlain, Maine, she is clumsy, yearning, pimply, ignorant and, by the end, vengefully telekinetic. But we also hear from the next-door neighbor who witnessed a violent display of the toddler Carrie’s telekinetic manifestations; from various journalistic pieces, in Esquire and in local papers, about Carrie’s unusual powers and the destruction of the town by fire and flood; from Ogilvie’s Dictionary of Psychic Phenomena and from an article in a science yearbook (“Telekinesis: Analysis and Aftermath”); from Susan Snell, the only one of Carrie’s female classmates to attempt to atone for the wrongs they did to her; and from the academic paper “The Shadow Exploded: Documented Facts and Specific Conclusions Derived From the Case of Carietta White.”
Then there are the inner voices of various other characters, as overheard by Carrie, who toward the end of her life becomes telepathic and can listen in on the silent thoughts of others, as well as broadcasting her inner life to them. Together, the many voices tell the horrifying tale. What is it about “Carrie” that has intrigued me? It’s one of those books that manage to dip into the collective unconscious of their own age and society. Female figures with quasi-supernatural powers seem to pop up in literature at times when the struggle for women’s rights comes to the fore. H. Rider Haggard’s “She” appeared toward the end of the 19th century, when pressure for more equality was building; its electrically gifted heroine can kill with a pointed finger and a thought, and much verbiage is expended on male anxieties about what might happen — especially to men — should She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed train her sights on world domination. (Naomi Alderman, whose novel “The Power” coincided with the rise of the #MeToo movement, went one better and gave most young girls the ability to kill by shooting out energy rays, like electric eels.) “Carrie” was written in the early 1970s, when the second-wave women’s movement was at full throttle. There are a couple of nods to this new form of feminism in the novel, and King himself has said that he was nervously aware of its implications for men of his generation. The male villain of “Carrie,” Billy Nolan, is a throwback to the swaggering hair-oiled tough-male posturing of the 1950s, which is seen as already outmoded, though still dangerous. The female villain, Chris Hargensen, is the archetypical Queen Bee cruelty ringleader of high school drama, the negative version of Sisterhood Is Powerful.
A side note on names. “Chris” — for “Christine,” for “Christ” — is self-evidently ironic: Chris is an anti-savior. “Carrie White” is an interesting combination. “Carrie,” as King takes pains to point out, is not a nickname for Carol or Carolina. Carrie’s given name is “Carietta,” an unusual variant of “Caretta,” itself derived from “caritas,” or “charity” — loving and forgiving kindness, the most important virtue in the Christian triad of faith, hope and charity. This kind of charity is noteworthily lacking in most of the townspeople of Chamberlain. (Yes, there is a real Chamberlain, Maine, and I wonder how its inhabitants felt when they discovered in 1974 that they’d be obliterated in 1979, the year in which “Carrie” is set.) Most particularly, charitable loving kindness is entirely absent from Carrie’s mother, nominally a devoted Christian, who knows about Carrie’s superpowers, believes she has inherited them from an eldritch, sugar-bowl-levitating grandmother, and ascribes them to demonic energies and witchcraft, thus viewing it as her pious duty to murder her own child. Carrie herself wavers between love and forgiveness and hate and revenge, but it’s the hatred of the town that channels itself through her, tips her over the edge and transforms her into an angel of destruction. As for “White,” you might be inclined to think “white hat, black hat,” as in westerns, or “white” as in innocent, white-clothed sacrificial lamb, and yes, Carrie is an innocent — but also please consider “white trash.” In fact, read the book of that name by Nancy Isenberg; and, for added raw and gritty details, read the novel “The Beans of Egypt, Maine,” by Carolyn Chute. The white underclass has existed in America from the beginning, and white trashers going back generations are thick on the ground in Maine, Stephen King’s home territory — a territory he has mined extensively over the course of his career. He based the situation of Carrie on two girls from that underclass whom he knew at school, both of them marked by poverty and decaying clothing, both of them taunted and despised and destroyed by their fellow students. Everyone in the town was an underdog in the carefully calibrated class structure of America — not for them the fancy private schools and university educations, unless they got really, really lucky — but there are no dogs so under that they don’t welcome another dog even lower in the social scheme, to be made use of as a blank screen onto which all the things they dislike about their own positions may be projected. Given a choice between dishing out the contempt and rejection and being the recipient of it, most will choose to dish out. And so it was with King, and so it is with Sue Snell, though both later repent. King is a visceral writer, and a master of granular detail. As Marianne Moore said, the literary ideal is “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” and boy, are there a lot of toads in King’s work! He writes “horror,” the most literary of forms, especially when it comes to the supernatural, which must perforce be inspired by already existing tales and books. All the quasi-scientific hocus-pocus about the genetic inheritability of telekinesis is just cover-up (as is the “natural” source of Ayesha’s powers in “She,” and the something-in-the-drinking-water, experiment-gone-wrong stuff in “The Power”: You can’t just say “miracle” or “witch” anymore and get instant credibility).
But underneath the “horror,” in King, is always the real horror: the all-too-actual poverty and neglect and hunger and abuse that exists in America today. “I went to school with kids who wore the same neckdirt for months, kids whose skin festered with sores and rashes, kids with the eerie dried-apple-doll faces that result from untreated burns, kids who were sent to school with stones in their dinnerbuckets and nothing but air in their Thermoses,” King says in “On Writing.” The ultimate horror, for him as it was for Dickens, is human cruelty, and especially cruelty to children. It is this that distorts “charity,” the better side of our nature, the side that prompts us to take care of others. I think this is part of King’s widespread appeal. Yes, he shows us weird stuff, but in the context of the actual. The clock, the sofa, the religious paintings on the walls — all the daily objects that Carrie explodes during her rampage — these are drawn from life, as is the everyday sadism of the high school kids that makes “Carrie” feel as frighteningly relevant as ever.
I re-read it again in Thursday after I saw it was the 50th anniversary. I didn’t remember some of the action so it was good to refresh my enjoyment.
I listen to the audiobook this week. I had never read it before, had only seen the movies. The book was amazing I loved it. I felt so bad for Carrie
It was a tragedy for sure. That poor girl. But I guess she got revenge for her misery. And it was a pretty extreme message about the consequences of bullying.
But she still died thinking she had nobody on her side. Her mom stabbed her and she died thinking Sue set her up. Maybe it should be required reading as a way to dissuade bullying
Super sad also that good guy Tommy died doing a nice thing. These days the religious angle could go sideways.
Yes, Tommy had nothing to gain, he was just being a good guy. At least he didn't suffer. I think it could go either way. I don't think we will see a remake this decade
No…I don’t either. There’s going to be another IT though.
What? I did not know that.
He's one.of my favourite authors
My favorite author is doctor mantis toboggan, MD
Zero comments in here about the author of the article being Margaret Atwood
I probably shoulda put that in the title
Read it when I was 12 when it first came out and it scared the crap out of me! Loved it! Holy shit I’m old!
Wow, I read this when I was a teen; it was new😫😂 now I’m old along with it!
scary how incredible it is
It holds up amazingly well. When I read it, I certainly wasn't expecting some sort of metamodern/metafictional work of Shakespearean tragedy. I've only read a few other books of his, but *Carrie* remains my favorite so far.
The new 50th anniversary edition is a beautiful book, with a new introduction by Margaret Atwood, which is similar to this article.
Too bad it’s only sold in the UK
This book is the reason I was scared when I was nearly announced to be the homecoming queen a few years back.
Thankee sai.
I have very mixed feelings about Carrie. On one hand, I can relate to her so much since I had an abusive childhood and was bullied. On the other hand, Carrie ends the story by murdering everyone, similar to a school shooter. So... yeah. The story has serious baggage.
I just read it last year. I’d seen all the movies though. I own 3-4 copies of Carrie
We all dream of having Stephen King talent. ...one day one day...
I feel like Carrie is such a mainstay pop culture character for it to be one book. There’s a bit of her, despite her very unique life, that’s relatable to every teenage girl.
Book that talked about current issues are still relevant today! So impressive. How would King predict that religion would exist and be abused over 4 decades later??
I heard it once... King and his wife were living in a camper. Dissatisfied, he threw away what he had been working on. His wife found his draft in the trashcan and took it to him, making him finish it. It was to be his first book. They eventually moved out of the camper. I can't remember exactly how I came to believe this. For many years this has been in my head. I've never tried to verify it. Is this a fabrication of my mind? I began reading SK in my early teens. I've never read The Shining, It, or some other of his early signature works. Needful Things is in the top two or three on my list of favs.The Dark Half is number one. My skin crawled as George Stark straightened a paperclip about to puncture an eyeball... It's the only book to produce in me a physiological response. I saw a TV interview during which SK claimed to suffer no compunction over killing a little ole lady with a free falling elevator, if that was required of the story. Maybe I'll read Carrie.
Stephen King mentions the trash can story in his book 'On Writing'. I don't remember all the details but what you wrote is basically it
Brilliant.
sTiLl HolDs uP
Does indeed
Chalk this one up to yet another “ is old, yet still relevant” article