Carrie (novel)

• 1. Introduction

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  Carrie, Stephen King's debut novel, opened with a scene its author did not know how to write. King was living in a trailer in Hermon, Maine, teaching English at Hampden Academy. A friend had suggested he try writing a story with a female protagonist. King sat down and imagined a teenage girl experiencing her first period in a locker room shower. Her classmates mocked and pelted her. After three pages, he threw the manuscript in the garbage. The next day, his wife Tabitha retrieved those pages from the trash. She persuaded him to continue. What Tabitha saved would eventually net King $200,000 and allow him to quit teaching entirely. It would also help pull the horror genre back into the cultural mainstream after decades on its margins.

• 2. From Discomfort to Draft

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  An article in Life magazine about telekinesis gave King the second part of his concept. He folded it into the opening he had already drafted and continued writing. King had completed five unpublished novels before starting Carrie, including The Long Walk. But the material alienated him almost immediately. He did not know how a woman would react to the shower scene and felt he had no basis for imagining it. Tabitha understood what King could not see in the material himself. She gave him specific input that helped him find an emotional connection to the character. That connection came through two girls he had known in high school. One had been relentlessly mocked at school because her family's poverty left her wearing the same outfit every day. The other came from a devoutly religious family and was genuinely timid. King wove both into the character of Carrie White.

  When he finished writing, King had a 98-page novella he personally detested. In December 1972, he chose to expand it into a full novel rather than abandon it. He added fabricated documents written to imitate the styles of real publications, including Esquire and Reader's Digest. King found that part of the process genuinely entertaining. The original draft ended with Carrie growing demon horns and destroying an airplane thousands of miles above Chamberlain. Editor Bill Thompson later convinced King to replace that ending with something more restrained.

• 3. Themes and Form

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  Carrie uses an epistolary structure: the narrative is assembled from multiple narrators, along with reports, excerpts, and documents purported to come from real publications. Scholars have argued that this format serves a specific purpose. No single viewpoint, scientific or otherwise, can fully explain what happened in Chamberlain. The structure enacts that impossibility by design.

  John Kerrigan classified the novel as a revenge tragedy, and Ray B. Browne described it as a "revenge fantasy." Novelist Charles L. Grant wrote that King "uses the evil/victim device for terror." Linda J. Holland-Toll read the novel as a study in "disaffirmation." Society, in her argument, creates the monster and then fails to control it. It simultaneously denies that such monsters are possible while treating humans as monsters themselves.

• 4. The Road to Publication

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  King's manuscript reached Bill Thompson in November 1973. Thompson brought it to Lee Barker, Doubleday's executive editor, and argued for acceptance. The resulting advance was $2,500, negotiated up by Thompson from an initial offer of $1,500. For an American debut novel at the time, that figure was considered moderately high. King learned the news by telegram.

  The hardback edition of Carrie appeared on the 5th of April 1974, with a print run of 30,000 copies. Doubleday had marketed it as an "occult" novel, but trade reviewers labeled it horror, an unusual designation for the era.

  On the 3rd of May 1974, the British publisher New English Library received a copy, and its president, Bob Tanner, read it overnight. He forwarded it to the parent company, New American Library, which offered Doubleday $400,000 for the mass-market paperback rights. New American Library published Carrie under its Signet Books imprint in April 1975. New American Library designed the cover to carry neither a title nor an author's name on the front. It showed the face of a girl in front of a silhouette. Behind it lay a two-page image of New England on fire. The printers refused to produce the scored cover as originally planned, so the final version was plainer than intended. The paperback entered stores with few signs of what was about to happen to it commercially.

• 5. Sales and Reception

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  The hardback edition sold between 13,000 and 17,000 copies, with sources differing on the exact figure. The paperback's first year looked nothing like that. Under the Signet Books imprint, it sold one million copies. A film released in 1976 pushed the total to four million. By December 1976, Carrie appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. It peaked at number 3 and remained on the list for 14 weeks.

  Writing as Newgate Callendar for The New York Times, Harold C. Schonberg described King as unusually assured for a debut author. Schonberg's assessment: King "writes with the kind of surety normally associated only with veteran writers." The Daily Times-Advocate's Ina Bonds called Carrie "an admirable achievement" for a first novel. Kirkus Reviews found that King handled it "with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum." Library Journal called it "a terrifying treat for both horror and parapsychology fans." Publishers Weekly praised the novel's sympathetic portrayal of its central character. Booklist noted that the novel required a "willing suspension of disbelief and taste."

  Michael Collings, writing retrospectively, attributed the novel's staying power to its focus and conciseness. Adam Nevill pointed to the characterization and structure. Rocky Wood, in his literary analysis, called the plot "remarkably short but compelling." Michael Berry of Common Sense Media praised the epistolary structure, arguing it "lends a sense of realism to the outlandish proceedings." Grady Hendrix praised the story while finding the writing awkward in places. Harold Bloom, despite reservations about the style, concluded that the prom scene was "a marvelous culmination of melodrama."

• 6. Legacy and Adaptations

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  In the six months following Carrie's publication, King drafted both Blaze and 'Salem's Lot. The latter was published in 1975, becoming his second novel to reach readers. Both that book and Carrie's 1976 film adaptation together brought King into the mainstream as a genre author.

  Sarah Pinborough, James Smythe, and Sarah Lotz each acknowledged Carrie as a direct influence on their own fiction. Joanne Harris described her 2023 novel Broken Light as "an homage to Carrie." The prom scene has been referenced in popular culture repeatedly. Examples include Monsters University, My Little Pony comics, It Follows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Treehouse of Horror.

  The 1976 film was directed by Brian De Palma and starred Sissy Spacek. It opened on the 3rd of November 1976 to critical acclaim and commercial success. A sequel, The Rage: Carrie 2, followed in 1999 to mixed reviews. A 2002 adaptation received negative reviews. A 2013 adaptation received mixed reviews.

  The Royal Shakespeare Company staged a musical at the Virginia Theater in May 1988. Five performances ran from the 12th to the 15th of May before the production closed. It lost more than $7 million, ranking it among the most expensive failures in Broadway history. An off-Broadway revival ran from the 1st of March to the 8th of April 2012. The television series Riverdale based an episode on the musical in 2018, titled "Chapter Thirty-One: A Night to Remember."

  On the 26th of March 2024, Hodder & Stoughton published a 50th anniversary edition with a new introduction by Margaret Atwood. That same year, Mike Flanagan was announced as the director of a television adaptation for Amazon MGM Studios.