A Brief Guide to Stephen King by Paul Simpson Read Free Book Online

start of the tale but then consigned the pages to the garbage, considering he had ‘written the world’s all-time loser’. She was certain that it had a lot of potential, even if he didn’t want to spend time developing an idea which would need more space than a short story could provide. Her advice was sound: the book was bought by Bill Thompson for Doubleday for $2,500; the paperback rights sold for $400,000 enabling King to give up teaching and concentrate on writing.
    According to King’s recollections in
On Writing
, the idea for
Carrie
had been sparked by cleaning the showers when he was working as a janitor at his old high school, and reading an article in
Life
magazine about telekinesis possibly being triggered by the onset of puberty in young girls. The character herself was inspired by two girls he knew while growing up: one was raised in a house with a nearly life-sized, realistic depiction of the Crucifixion; the other was taunted by her high school peers because she didn’t have a change of clothing, and then teased morewhen she did try to wear a new outfit. Both had died before King wrote the book.
    Although King would experiment with different formats over the years,
Carrie
is unusual for its epistolary form – the text is made up of excerpts from letters, books, diaries and official reports rather than a strictly linear approach. Some of the places mentioned would reappear in King’s later stories – the laundry where Carrie’s mother works is the same one that possesses the Mangler in the short story of that title. King himself potentially makes an appearance – one of Carrie’s teachers is an Edwin King – and there’s even a possibility that King’s greatest villain, Randall Flagg, is lurking somewhere near: after all, Carrie’s mother refers to the ‘Black Man’ as an embodiment of evil.
    King’s own description of it as a ‘young book by a young writer’ is accurate: there are elements and themes to which he would return regularly over the years (notably in
Firestarter
and
Christine
), but its raw power still reverberates forty years later.
    Carrie
has lived on in many different media. Brian De Palma’s 1976 film is justly famed for its shock ending; it is a moderately faithful translation of King’s text, with some surprisingly lyrical moments, and good roles for Sissy Spacek as Carrie and John Travolta as Chris’s boyfriend Billy. A belated sequel –
The Rage: Carrie 2
– appeared in 1998, with Amy Irving reprising her role as Sue Snell; based on the idea that Carrie’s father carried the gene that caused her problems, it wasn’t a success. A TV movie followed in 2002, designed as a pilot for an ongoing series; unsurprisingly, Carrie therefore survived. However, no show was commissioned. A further movie was released in 2013, with
Kick-Ass’s
Chloë Moretz cast as Carrie. When it was announced in May 2011, King told
Entertainment Weekly
, ‘Who knows if it will happen? The real question is why, when the original was so good? I mean, not
Casablanca
,or anything, but a really good horror-suspense film, much better than the book.’
    One of the more unusual versions of a King text was the musical adaptation of
Carrie
, which has gone down in Broadway history as one of the great disasters. In fact, there is much to recommend in it – the revival in 2012 spawned a cast album showing the potential of the music – but the original production was undoubtedly doomed when the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Terry Hands misunderstood the creators’ instructions to use
Grease
as a template. Instead of the 1950s-set musical, he looked to the ancient Greek civilization . . .
    ’Salem’s Lot
(Doubleday, October 1975)
    They say you can’t go home again, but writer Ben Mears is determined to try, returning to the sleepy Maine town of Jerusalem’s Lot after twenty-five years. When he was younger, he had a bad experience in the old Marsten House, currently owned by Kurt Barlow, and he’s