New Look at an Old Book is a new feature in which readers try out a genre classic they’ve heard all about—to the extent they could recite the plot from memory—but have never actually sat down and read. Then they let us know whether the book lives up to the hype, the ways it surprised them, and how their knowledge of genre or fandom affected the reading experience. Never read Tolkien, Niven, Anne Rice, or Louis L’Amour? Give them a look, and let us know what you think. Just follow our usual nonfiction submission guidelines, and make sure you put “New Look at an Old Book” in the subject line. If we print your review, it’s a cool $15 – which pays for at least two paperbacks.
I’ve told people for years how great I think Stephen King is, and when I say I think this I am not lying. On Writing is an outstanding, influential book…which I have never actually read cover to cover. The Shining, Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, and Stand By Me are wonderful, haunting…movies. Even my Stephen King guilty pleasures, like Firestarter and Dreamcatcher, are things I’ve watched, not read. And even some of my opinions of Stephen King movies are secondhand—I’ve never seen It or Cujo or Carrie, and I avoided all but the first five minutes of Kingdom Hospital, in spite of (or because of) my great love for Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom. I did read Pet Cemetery on a road trip when I was 13, because it was thick and there was a lot of road to get through—and I have never been so glad to share a motel room with several family members, but I don’t remember much of the book, and read it well before I developed a sense of the difference between good and bad writing.
As a result, I was basically a Stephen King virgin. A virgin who happened to know King’s biography and the plots of all his books. Who closely followed both his literary opinions and critics’ opinions of him. Who loved the Quantum Leap episode in which Sam meets teenage Stephen King. When my aunt died and left me a collector’s edition copy of Carrie, King’s first book, which I have long regarded as a masterpiece but have never, you know, paged through…I knew it was time.
The first thing that struck me about Carrie was how contemporary it feels—experimental and literary, a postmodern collage of straight third person narrative, after-the-fact news stories, academic debates, and later first-person recollections from secondary characters. It isn’t as flashily stylish as House of Leaves, but it has the same daring. It’s immediately obvious why Carrie had trouble finding a publisher; it’s too literary for pulp horror and too genre for publishers of mainstream literature.
One consequence of this backward-looking, World War Z, “this is a part of history which happened in our timeline and which you remember” technique is that the suspense of the book is in characters’ reactions—the details of what they feel and know, when. It doesn’t matter that I knew the plot going in: I’m supposed to. The book tells me the plot within the first few pages, and later refers to the fact that I’ve seen the movie—which hadn’t even been optioned when the book was written. As it turns out, one reason I stayed away—that I knew what happened and couldn’t be surprised by twists—was no reason at all. There are no twists.
There is instead an inexorable playing out of horrible events that can’t go another way, despite characters’ good intentions. This is Greek tragedy. This is a long walk to an execution. If it were a horror movie, it would be one long scene of a woman followed by a killer with the audience screaming “look behind you!” and knowing it wouldn’t make a difference. This isn’t tedious; it’s completely engrossing, perhaps because of King’s deep empathy for his characters, even the most evil of whom are motivated and three dimensional. It is like reading well-written history, or a well-known fairy tale. We know Anne Boleyn will be beheaded after a show trial, just as we know Sleeping Beauty will wake. What matters is the ritual of the telling: the sentence by sentence progression of moments to be considered—to be agonized over—that stops detail from getting lost in a muddy impression of the whole. This is King’s understanding of tragedy, going back and agonizing over specifics, fighting to not forget them, not let them fade, not let death win. We’ve become used to this style of storytelling; we’ve read the 9-11 reports. It still cuts.
There’s no question that this book is the masterpiece it’s said to be; I was stunned by how good it was, even though I’d heard over and over again that it was. The menstrual themes feel insightful rather than kitch, and these teens aren’t exploitative “mean girl” stereotypes—this book was written by a high school teacher whose wife had primary dysmenorrhea. He wrote what he knew, and he knew deeply. If that knowledge feels dated, it is only in the way so few of the kids consider college, and a small stretch of imagination is all it takes to ascribe this to the small-town setting. Carrie is the same gripping book it was thirty years ago.
To buy a copy of Carrie, click here.