If you don't count John Saul, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker or H.P. Lovecraft then the undisputed King of Horror is obviously Stephen. The man behind such spine-tingling monster stories as Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption has been so prolific that Saturday Night Live once did a skit where he was typing two separate novels on separate typewriters with each hand while trying to train his feet as well.
King was a low-paid starving teacher in the early 70s when he threw away the manuscript for Carrie. His wife Tabitha rescued it from the waste bin and after reading it encouraged Stephen to get it published. History defines the rest.
Supposedly the topic of the book is a young teenager's discovery of telekinetic powers and the armaggedon-like judgement she pronounces on her classmates after a particularly heinous and cold-blooded (literally) practical joke. All that is there, but that's not the freaky part. For a man entering the field of Horror Novels Stephen King picked a surefire subject to scare the bejesus out of men: Menstruation. This Lunar blood was cruelly force-fed the male readership after tantalizing them with a jailbait school shower scene.
The story is told from numerous points of view after the fact. We know that a tragedy destroyed the Senior class of a small town in Maine, that Carietta White was somehow responsible, and that survivors insist there were supernatural happenings. Most of the book is "excerpts" from other publications on the event, juxtaposed with King's third-person narration that sometimes points out the inaccuracies of the chroniclers and answers questions "we'll never know the answer too."
The story takes place in the late 70s with the other publications being printed in the early 80s. It's always risky for fiction to take place in a future not so far away. One need only to look at Space: 1999, 2001: A Space Odyssey or read the Mission Earth series of L. Ron Hubbard to see for themselves. Fortunately this didn't horribly date the story as the only anachronism shows Bob Dylan being described as a famous rock poet of the 60s when most publications would either not bother explaining who he is or would give him a more lionized status.
Most critics refer to this book as one of Stephen King's more juvenile efforts while acknowledging that it was his first and that his writing matured. I, however, find this to be among my favorite King works for the simple fact that it's only 252 pages. He may be the King of Horror, but Stephen oftentimes types way too many words. More than one novel has exceeded 1000 pages. There will be too much description, too much character development, too many side plots and more stream-of-conscious meandering than necessary. A big deal was made when King's "masterpiece" The Stand was reissued with over 400 pages restored. What that succeeded in doing was taking a promising story with a strong start that would eventually convert into a bullshit Heaven vs. Hell war with a cheap Deus ex Machina ending and bloat it with empty caloric filler. The new epilogue was the only addition worth having. I can't fault King or his publishers for releasing it, after all when money can be sniffed in the wind only a fool wouldn't follow his nose, but I had a new respect for editors afterword.
The actual plot of Carrie starts when the heroine, a social outcast and daughter to a raving lunatic Christian, ends up on her inaugeral rag at the end of Gym. Having been sheltered from reality her whole life Carrie believes she is hemorrhaging and the situation isn't helped when the rest of the class, like sharks on the scent, go for the kill with taunts while peppering her with plugs and pads. One participant isn't as mean as the rest and honestly feels remorse for her actions. She plans a way to make amends for Carrie with the help of her boyfriend but everything ends up ruined by the end.
It was made into a great movie directed by Brian de Palma (any movie that opens with a naked Sissy Spacek is classified as great, even if it does have John Travolta in it.) It's fitting that a movie that explores the cruelties of cliques would inspire someone to hypocritically hold a ruler to his dinky while passing judgement on other dick waggers. Perhaps if he had been born without the Y chromosome he'd have been chanting "Plug it Up, Plug it Up" with the rest.
No comments:
Post a Comment