The Stephen King Companion

by George Beahm

  The Doubleday dust jacket for Carrie.

  The “Carrie” cover to Cinefantastique (1977).

  17

  CARRIE

  1974

  I remember once years ago seeing the author of The Third World War on a TV chat show in England. And when the interviewer asked John Hackett about his book, the first thing he said was, “Oh yes, it’s just some old trash I put together.” I do think of Carrie that way.

  —STEPHEN KING, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, JANUARY 24, 1991

  Harlan Ellison, looking back at some of the big mistakes in his life, pondered why he had committed them and came up with an explanation: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  It explains why Stephen King signed a one-sided contract, without the benefit of agent representation. One of the clauses, involving subsidiary rights, gave the publisher fifty percent of the proceeds on a paperback sale. Never having had that much money in their lives, the Kings welcomed the $200,000. But back in those days, when a literary agent sold the writer’s work, he or she got 10 percent of the proceeds. So why should the publisher, doing the same job for the author, get paid five times as much? At the time, did it even cross King’s mind? Agency representation would have been the wisest move he could have made. King could have asked his editor for a recommended literary agent or found one himself. And with a contract in hand from Doubleday ready to be negotiated, King would have had no problem finding a reputable agent to take him on as a client.

  At the time, it was a nonissue because King had other concerns. He was writing and publishing his short fiction and writing more novels; simultaneously, his publisher became actively involved in promoting and positioning him, building and billing him as the King of Horror, a title King realized was good for marketing but not so good for his literary reputation: Once a bogeyman, always a bogeyman…

  In the five years spanning 1973 to 1978, King’s main novels—Carrie, ’Salem’s Lot, The Shining, and The Stand—and a collection of short fiction, Night Shift, firmly cemented him as a horror writer. Had King never published anything else in his life, his fortune and reputation would forever be secure: Those four novels became classics, and all four would be adapted into movies for the silver screen or for television. (Carrie saw multiple adaptations; and The Shining would also see King’s own version, after the famous Kubrick version, which he disavowed.) Even Night Shift, a collection of stories from Cavalier, shined: Many of the stories were adapted for motion pictures, including “Trucks,” which was a major motion picture titled Maximum Overdrive, directed by King himself. As King pointed out in numerous interviews over the years, when signing copies of the book for fans, he’d write, “I hope you enjoy these one-reel movies.”

  Had King begun publishing the nonhorror novels first—the books later published under the pen name of Richard Bachman—his career may have gone down a different path. But, as he pointed out in a foreword to Night Shift, eventually the monsters would have come out.

  Whether King is writing about monsters—the human or the inhuman kind—he’s always focused on the people. As readers, once we’re invested with the people in the story, we’re interested and concerned about their fictional lives. It’s all about story, as John D. MacDonald wrote in his introduction to Night Shift; and King, also in Night Shift, reaffirms it:

  All my life as a writer I have been committed to the idea that in fiction the story value holds dominance over every other facet of the writer’s craft; characterization, theme, mood, none of those things is anything if the story is dull. And if the story does hold you, all else can be forgiven.

  PAPERBACK WRITER

  Carrie is a straightforward story about Carrie White, a high school student who’s the butt of everyone’s jokes. She reaches her breaking point after she’s set up for a final humiliation that triggers her latent telekinetic power, with devastating consequences: 409 people in Chamberlain are killed, and 49 are missing in the wake of her destructive path.

  At its dark heart, Carrie is a horror story, but there’s more to the novel than simply being a frightening tale. The book is really about high school hell, about the outsider who stands inside a glass dome through which she can see the rest of the world—one in which she will never be accepted. It’s the horror of loneliness, of not being accepted, of being different, and the hell of not being able to do anything about it. High school is four years of misery for the ones who, for whatever reasons, don’t fit in, like Carrie: “Graffiti scratched on a desk of the Barker Street Grammar School in Chamberlain: Carrie White eats shit.”

  In “Harlan Ellison’s Watching,” a film-review column for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, he wrote about Carrie, explaining its popularity and enduring appeal:

  That first scene bit hard. It was the essence of the secret of Stephen King’s phenomenal success: the everyday experience raised to the mythic level by the application of fantasy to a potent cultural trope. It was Jungian archetype goosed with ten million volts of emotional power. It was the commonly-shared horrible memory of half the population, reinterpreted. It was the flash of recognition, the miracle of that rare instant in which readers dulled by years of reading artful lies felt their skin stretched tight by an encounter with artful truth.

  Stephen King, in one apocryphal image, had taken control of his destiny.

  The movie Carrie, directed by Brian De Palma, was released two years after the hardback book was published. Starring Sissy Spacek in the title role and Piper Laurie as her religion-obsessed mother, both were nominated but neither won Academy Awards for their stellar performances. Grossing more than $33.8 million domestically at the box office, Carrie helped carry King’s name to monstrous heights. As King himself observed, “I made Carrie, and Carrie made me.”

  Carrie, a $5.95 hardback, sold a modest 13,000 copies. But New American Library’s $1.50 paperback edition, published in April 1975, blew out of the stores with over a million copies sold. As King explained in “On Becoming a Brand Name,” the publishers must orchestrate book releases so that they work in tandem: “[T]he writer produces a series of books which ricochet back and forth between hardcover and softcover at an ever-increasing speed.” When the kinetic energy reaches critical mass, then boom! The writer becomes a brand name, which is what happened to King.

  Carrie the movie, released on November 3, 1976, helped bring a large, mainstream audience into King’s camp. These were not book readers but moviegoers, teenage boys with their dates, who would scream their heads off and clutch their boyfriends in dark theaters—the perfect date movie, insofar as boys were concerned.

  The iconic image of a bucket filled with pig’s blood is now an indelible part of the pop culture landscape, just like Carrie. Mention her name, and anyone will make the connection: Yeah, she’s the girl in the Stephen King movie who had pig’s blood dumped on her. Glad it wasn’t me.

  For millions of young girls who feel victimized like Carrie, the book and the movie struck deep, responsive chords. They may not have been set up as she had been, or had pig’s blood dumped on them, but they had been dumped on in other ways in junior high school or high school and empathized with Carrie’s tragic situation, which triggered her cataclysmic rage and claimed hundreds of lives, including hers.

  A timeless story of bullying, Carrie will forever live on. There was a film sequel in 1999 (The Rage: Carrie 2); a made-for-TV film in 2002; an ill-fated musical on Broadway, on which the critics dumped the equivalent of pig’s blood in their reviews; and yet another theatrical release in 2013 starring Chloë Grace Moretz in the title role. But none of those could hold a candle to the original movie, and fans and purists who want to see a faithful adaptation of the book are advised to seek the 1976 film, though its grave (heh heh) ending was to my mind a bit of an overreach. (But then, you gotta hand it to De Palma; he knew exactly what he was doing.)

  Michael Collings, the first major critic who wrote about King’s work in a book series for Starmont House, observed in The Films of Stephen King that


  As a film translation of King’s prose, Carrie ranks among the best. Since the novel was itself spare and concise, the film comes closer to the major narrative threads. The documentary sense of the novel helps the film in determining and developing characters, while the casting led to strong and believable characters. Sissy Spacek [as Carrie] and Piper Laurie [as Carrie’s mother] do not physically resemble King’s Carrie and Margaret White but bring an intensity to their roles that penetrates beneath the physical and re-creates the psychological.… As the first film of a King novel, Carrie brought King to public awareness. De Palma made the film, King once commented, and the film made him. After the appearance of Carrie, Stephen King was well on his way to becoming a household name in horror.

  Years later, in a book review for Stephen King Companion (1995)1, Collings wrote:

  Rereading it after twenty years, and with the experience of the intervening forty-odd novels and collections, dozens of short stories, decades of film versions, and constant streams of imitators and parodists, it may be rather surprising to see how well the novel holds up, particularly since it’s a “first novel.” Carrie is a precise, focused, controlled exercise in narrative, as compelling for its story as for its brutal images of death and wholesale destruction and its examination of wild-card psychic talents as metaphors and symbols for things deeply wrong with American society and life. In its stark portrayal of the bleakness, the terror, the emptiness of the life of an adolescent outsider, it is difficult to surpass. And given the fact that one of King’s primary audiences consists of precisely that age group that the novel anatomizes and in part pillories (that is, high school students), it is almost perfect in its ambitions and its effects. It presents the world of its characters—and of a large group of its readers—with clarity, skill, and appropriate brutality.

  Against the crispness of a “real” world, he juxtaposes the dark places that lie beneath the intellect, beneath reason and logic, beneath coherence and motivation and probability—these are the areas King has taken for his own and begins to map in Carrie.

  King’s first professional sale, to Startling Mystery Stories (Spring 1967), was a short story, “The Glass Floor.” (Note that King’s name was not listed on the cover, because he was not then a brand name.)

  1 Ed. note: Throughout this edition of The Stephen King Companion (2015), I’ve quoted at length from Michael Collings’s reviews of King’s books published in 1995, in the second edition of The Stephen King Companion.

  18

  CAMPUS COLUMNIST PUBLISHES NOVEL

  BY BURTON HATLEN

  The logo to King’s campus newspaper column (the editor’s title), “Garbage Truck.”

  The first major, serious review of Carrie appeared in Alumnus (Spring 1974), a publication of the University of Maine at Orono. Written by one of King’s college professors, the review takes King and his work seriously.

  Carrie is the first published novel by Stephen King, a 1970 UMO graduate. Steve will be remembered by some readers of the Campus as the author of a notorious column called “The Garbage Truck.” During the hectic years of campus radicalism, Steve was one of the most radical of them all—in hair length and in life-style at least. Even then he was committed to a career as a writer, and in the quiet moments between the strikes and demonstrations, he worked at developing his skills as a novelist. When I met him as a sophomore, he had completed two novels. By my count, Carrie is not his first novel, but his sixth. So if the $200,000 he has received for paperback rights to Carrie looks like easy money, remember this guy developed his talents by sheer hard work.…

  However, when we turn from Steve’s life to his book, we find not the American Dream but the American nightmare. Steve seems to have learned early what it feels like to be the outsider at the orgy of American affluence. His sympathies are always with Lazarus, crouched at the rich man’s gate. He knows, too, how many Lazaruses there are in America—not only the Blacks and the Indians and the Chicanos, but also the poor white living on the back roads of rural Maine. These people—the mill workers, the pulpwood cutters, the service station attendants—are Steve’s people. Like them, he dreams of wealth. (“The first thing I’ll do when I sell a novel,” he once told me, “is buy a purple Cadillac convertible with a tape deck and quadraphonic sound.”) But he also knows the desolation of rural Maine—the dreams gone sour, the bodies and souls twisted by lives of deprivation. And he knows the emotion which rules these lives is neither envy nor longing, but hate—a hate which, if it is ever unleashed, will bring down all the dream castles crashing down on our heads.

  Carrie, the central character, is a classic outsider. She is “a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks,” a “frog among swans.” The symbolic pattern emerges in the first two pages of the novel. Carrie is the “sacrificial goat.” She has been appointed by the community to serve as the scapegoat, the one that “everyone picks on.” As we watch this born loser, we gain a horrifying vision of how our society demands losers, victims, and outsiders—scapegoats. If there were no losers, how could there be any winners?…

  Few of our writers have such a clear sense of the demons that lurk within the American psyche. And if Steve’s ability to project this vision continues to develop, he has every promise of becoming a major American writer.

  Stephen King: American Gothic

  It also seems to me important to recognize that Steve is writing within a distinctly New England literary tradition. There is some deep affinity between our dark woods and the Gothic mode in fiction. As a student, Steve was addicted to the Dark Shadows television series, a Gothic soap opera set in a crumbling mansion on the Maine coast. One of his favorite writers, even in his student days, was Shirley Jackson, who lived and wrote in Vermont and whose The Haunting of Hill House remains to my mind the most chilling of all American Gothic novels. Another favorite of his student days was H. P. Lovecraft, who was based in Providence, Rhode Island, and who evoked a haunted landscape of rural New England. And then there’s the Gothic granddaddy of them all, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

  —Burton Hatlen, from joshuamaine.com

  19

  ’SALEM’S LOT

  1975; ORIGINAL TITLE: SECOND COMING

  The town knew about darkness.… The town cares for devil’s work no more than it cares for God’s or man’s. It knew darkness. And darkness was enough.

  —STEPHEN KING, ’SALEM’S LOT

  The Marsten House from ’Salem’s Lot, by Glenn Chadbourne.

  SECOND COMING

  In Different Seasons, a collection of four novellas that by consensus is Stephen King’s best, King’s afterword sheds light on what he would publish after Carrie. He had submitted two novels. The first was a suspense novel titled Blaze, which he described as “a melodrama about a huge, almost retarded criminal who kidnaps a baby, planning to ransom it back to the child’s rich parents … and then falls in love with the child instead.” The second, titled Second Coming, which he described as “a melodrama about vampires taking over a small town in Maine.”

  As King tells it, he and Bill Thompson were standing on a street corner in New York, and Bill had to decide which book to publish. Bill voted for Second Coming, which was also King’s choice. But the discussion brought up a growing concern of Bill’s that King was going to be “typed” as a horror writer.

  “I don’t want there to be a time when I think that Steve King should be exclusively a horror writer,” King told The New York Times (September 1981). “The temptation is great, though. You say to yourself, if I don’t produce horror stories, I won’t have any more Number Ones—and it’s very satisfying to have Number Ones.”

  Years later, though, King’s horror affiliation would come back to haunt him when he sought to cross the bridge over from popular fiction to literature. Critics of his work made no bones about their contempt for King’s body of work. Insofar as they were concerned, he was simply a popular novelist with literary pretensions, whose work was summarily dismissed.


  Nonetheless, Thompson and King made the right call. Second Coming, which would be published as ’Salem’s Lot, was the better choice because it’s an imaginative retelling of the vampire myth in a small Maine town where the Old World vampire could draw new blood without arousing suspicion—until it was too late: By then, a goodly number of the townsfolk would be infected, becoming vampires themselves, looking for more victims to feed upon, the vicious cycle continuing.

  BLAZE

  Blaze, on the other hand, was a crime suspense novel, and at odds with Carrie, which if published second would have had horror fans scratching their heads and wondering why he didn’t write another horror novel, which was what they wanted and expected.

  Blaze eventually saw publication under King’s pen name, Richard Bachman, in 2007. In its foreword, King wrote that when he went looking for the manuscript, with an eye toward republishing it with Hard Case Books, he couldn’t find it and had no idea where the original manuscript was. I’m surprised he didn’t make a phone call to the special collections department at the University of Maine at Orono’s library, which would have cleared up the mystery, because it’s been listed in their card catalog since 1988, which I consulted before sitting down and reading the manuscript of Blaze along with “The Aftermath” and “Sword in the Darkness.” (I wrote about all three in the 1989 edition of The Stephen King Companion.)

  The manuscript of Blaze is 173 double-spaced pages, with twenty chapters, totaling approximately fifty thousand words. There was also a partial rewrite of 106 double-spaced pages. The first draft, it should be noted, had editorial suggestions; I’m of the mind that the suggestions were by Thompson, who read the manuscript with an eye toward publishing it, as discussed in King’s afterword to Different Seasons.