Recommendations of the Editorial team
Stephen King – the ranking
37. Carrie (1974) ★★★ ½
King’s debut novel is actually fourth. However, the first published. The pubescent Carrie White should become one of the most typical figures in Kings Universum. An outsider that grows beyond her enemies with supernatural skills.
Carrie served – ugly, thick and probably not very intelligently – at least as a reasonably adequate decal image of those teenagers in the seventies who did not think too much of Love, Peace and Happiness. And the nevertheless demonized their parents, their moral fence and exaggerated religiousness.
King himself emphasized that William Peter Blatty’s novel “The Exorcist” and his film adaptation of 1973, who also depict the rebellion of the youngsters, would not have influenced it.
All of this makes “Carrie” a novel, the importance of which is probably even higher for his time than its actual literary quality. The German film title “Carrie-the Satan’s youngest daughter” has a genitive film title, which is very neglected in industry. However, he fails to recognize the topic. Carrie has nothing to do with Satan. She is a victim. It is her adolescence, the period that leads to the fluctuations. King worked as a teacher before his writer career. He noticed what classmates can do to other classmates.
Hermit from the novel and documentary fiction
In any case, Carrie kills her insane mother here, who would like to preserve her daughter as a virgin. The evil end of the matriarch was both King and director Brian de Palma, who was to bring “Carrie” to the cinema two years later. In the film, Margaret White (Piper Laurie) is pierced by crucifixes that Carrie fires telepathically. The novel is no less brutal. In it, the daughter talks to Mama-like and slows down her heartbeat to a standstill.
In contrast to the Hollywood version, in which Carrie (Sissy Spacek) aroused at least compassion, one remains to be a romance character in astonishing distance. Perhaps because she hardly focuses on herself and hardly knows how to use the few help of her classmates. Instead, Sue Snell and Tommy Ross become identification figures.
Stephen King may not be aware of how he should best tell “Carrie”. He opted for a sometimes bulky hermaphrodite from the novel and documentary fiction. Using newspaper reports that report on the murderous hustle and bustle of the supernatural Carrie.
In his debut, however, King turns the story so that it is not only individual people, but an entire community from which the poor possession has taken. In the end, the neighboring towns of Derry (“IT”) and Haven (“The Tommyknockers”) should be similar later, almost the whole city of Chamberlain in the air.
One year after publication, the 28-year-old had sold more than a million paperbacks from his novel. The man who was at home in a caravan was now a made writer. However, he never made his peace with Carrie. He did not like her, he wrote in his memoirs “On Writing” that she was from the same blow as the Amoers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.