JAMES SMYTHE'S EVERYTHING

CARRIE is, famously, Stephen King’s first novel. I say famously, because it’s actually his fourth written novel, a story that people love to tell when discussing the roads to publication of various big name authors. (“Did you know King wrote three books before he was accepted?’ goes the common confidence-boosting phrase.) And, nearly as famously, he actually threw it away at one point, until his wife convinced him to rescue it from the rubbish. The rest is, as they nearly say, a 60ish-strong publication history. (The first three written books, incidentally, were RAGE, THE LONG WALK and BLAZE, all of which found publication in later years, and all of which will be covered soon enough.)

And it’s quite a zeitgeist-y novel: published in the same approximate timeframe as ROSEMARY’S BABY and THE EXORCIST, and when cinemas were showing DON’T LOOK NOW and THE WICKER MAN, the public were beginning to fall in love with the weirder, more personal side of paranormal. And it worked out for him, clearly.

The book itself is the story of Carrie White, a high-school student with latent - and then developing - telekinetic powers. It’s brutal in places, affecting in others (Carrie’s relationship with her almost hysterically religious mother being a particularly damaged one), and gory in even more. By the end of the novel, there’s quite the body count, and it’s a body count that you wouldn’t necessarily see coming given the general tone of the novel - and Carrie White herself.

Structurally it’s a really weird one, with a standard King-ian third person narrative voice interspersed with extracts from other media: newspaper reports, autobiographies of characters, transcripts of police interviews, that sort of thing. It’s not something that entirely works, as the extracts are still in King’s voice, and are often the worst part of the novel. When reading the excitement of the third-person sections, being dragged somewhere else and presented with an often less-interesting viewpoint wasn’t always my ideal. (In particular, there’s a series of extracts from the character Susan Snell’s fake biography, and none of them are very interesting. Apart from anything, they just don’t read like biography; they read like monologues.)

But, it’s a good story. Carrie herself is an interesting - if basic - character, and the book drags the reader along at a fair-old whack. King’s described the novel as being “a cookie baked by a first grader — tasty enough, but kind of lumpy and burned on the bottom”. And that’s a pretty fair assessment, I’d say. As a debut novel, it’s a pretty good piece of juvenalia. As a statement of intent - that intent being to write stories that deal with the weird, twisted and human in equal measure - it’s exceptional.

KING-ISMS

In every review, I’m going to look at any tropes and common stylistic touches that appear through King’s novels. CARRIE’s obviously interesting as it was the first, and it throws up a few ideas that he would repeat throughout his career. The big one in Carrie is the internal monologue. King has a habit 

                                                    (habit? habits are formed, this is innate)

                                                                                           of indenting bracketed or italicised thoughts made by characters in amongst his third-person narratives. (See what I did there?) It’s an easy way to bypass ‘She thought’, and actually pretty elegant. In CARRIE, it’s new to him. Where now he’ll use it sparingly, in CARRIE it’s everywhere. By the end of the novel, there was a page where there was more internal monologue than not, I’d reckon. 

It’s also a relative tone-setter of a novel: the narrative is distinctly his; and some of the dialogue - particularly in Carrie’s conversations with her mother - delivered in voices he would revisit in later novels and characters (in MISERY, in the DARK TOWER series, in DOLORE CLAIBORNE). 

FLAGG-RAISING

One last thing. King has a character who has officially appeared in nine novels: Randall Flagg (aka Walter O’Dim, the Dark Man, The Man in Black, the Walkin’ Dude). He’s not a nice chap, and I’ll deal a lot more with him when looking at later novels - starting, if memory serves, with 1978’s THE STAND. But there’s plenty of arguements to be made for his appearance in other King texts, and CARRIE is no different.

Carrie’s mother, in her religious fervour, frequently refers to - either directly, or through Carrie’s prior indoctrination - “the black man… his cloven feet striking red sparks from the cement.” Now, while it’s meant to be the devil in this instance - or, rather, a more direct suggestion of the devil than Randall Flagg’s usual appearances - that particular being is never mentioned by name. And “the black man” is awfully close to The Man In Black and The Dark Man, I’d say…

NEXT

James Smythe is the writer of The Testimony (out now, published by Blue Door/HarperCollins) and The Explorer (due out at the start of 2013, published by HarperVoyager). He’s also a writer/narrative designer for a variety of video games. Here’s his Bookish Half Dozen:

Favourite books? Let’s go with stuff I’ve loved from the last couple of years, otherwise you’ll be here in ten paragraphs time, begging me to stop. Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed; Richard Gwyn’s The Vagabond’s Breakfast; Ross Raisin’s Waterline; Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad; Holly Howitt’s Desk; Colson Whitehead’s Zone One; David Vann’s Caribou Island; Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot; John Harding’s Florence & Giles; Charles Yu’s How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe; Will Wiles’ Care Of Wooden Floors. Each is pretty brilliant, I think. I know this because I swell with envy when I read them. Also, I’ve just finished reading Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker, and really: wow.

Favourite authors?

Now or at one point, and in no particular order: Michael Chabon; Jonathan Coe; Iain Banks (both with M and without); F Scott Fitzgerald; JD Salinger; Austin Wright; Margaret Atwood; Paul Auster; William Golding; Brett Easton Ellis; George Orwell; George RR Martin; Angela Carter; JG Ballard; Stephen King; Toby Litt; Shirley Jackson; Kazuo Ishiguro; William Boyd; Douglas Coupland; Richard Yates. Also, add everybody that I mentioned for the previous answer, as I’ll read anything that any of them write from this point forwards. 

Books that you wish you’d written?

Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In The Castle. Because - and I can’t say too much as it’ll give it away - it does something narratively that other stories have done, but it probably did it first and definitely does it best. It’s pretty wonderful. Shirley Jackson was a brilliant writer full-stop, actually: powerful, story-focussed, and able to write the most beautifully succinct-yet-powerful sentences. (Incidentally, if there was a Best Short Story question, she’d win that with The Lottery, because I really believe that you cannot write a more perfectly structured few-thousand words than it.)

Books that you just don’t get? Simple one: I don’t like it when people write novels that seem designed to show off how intelligent/well-read/worldly they are. There have been a few in recent years, all ballyhooed, and I am almost always disappointed by a sheer lack of genuine story, character and feeling. But I won’t mention any names, naturally. I’m too much of a chicken for that.

Guilty pleasure book?

Music biographies. There’s no real guilt here, but I’ve spent time reading some dreadful ones when I could have been knee-deep in something that people might not shake their heads at. It’s better if they’re by or about bands I have at one stage or another truly loved - Paul Trynka’s book on Bowie, for example, is great, as is Dean Wareham’s autobiography, and Motley Crue’s The Dirt is the best book about awful, awful people you’ll ever read - but I can pretty much read anything. Best of the recent lot? Everybody Loves Our Town by Mark Yarm. A history of Seattle from the late 80s to the mid-90s. Soundgarden, Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, Melvins, Mudhoney, all in their own words. It’s brilliant. Apparently Morrissey has finally gotten around to finishing his autobiography. I’m actually drooling at the thought.