Tracing The Trails Of The King : Carrie
At some point last year, I made the decision to start making a journey, a tower quest if you will, a long, but rewarding journey. It came from my passion for books, and for my desire to return to the kind of reading that hooked me in the first place, so many years ago. Stephen King has always been one of my favorite authors, one who in recent years seems to have had a resurgence in output. It doesn’t seem like it has been very long since his near fatal accident in 2001, when he started talking about retiring from the craft. This never happened, but from my perspective at the time, it did seem like he was slowing, fading into the cultural background, possibly angling down for an eventual landing that would conclude a long and decorated career.
But, starting several years ago, the books started to come again in a flurry. He wrote a sequel to The Shining, one of his first novels as well as a new book in his much loved Dark Tower series. In the past nine months, he has published two books and by this time next year, he will have released two more, including the conclusion to a trilogy which he began last year, as well as a new collection of short stories.
I can’t say where my idea came from, but at some point I decided that I wanted to read all of his books, and in order of publication. I have read quite a few already, slightly more than half at my last count, but I have been intrigued at the idea of taking a journey along with the writer, peeking over his shoulder as he pens book after book after book. I decided to read (or re-read) the books and then record my thoughts on each as I did so. These are not intended to be reviews necessarily, but rather random feelings and notions that come to mind as I read. It’s a journey that will, at best take years to finish, if I ever do. But how could I not be intrigued at the notion of going down that path, looking along the sides of the road for any tidbits of wisdom I might pick up along the way.
There is a story about Hunter S. Thompson that I have always been fascinated with. The way I heard it was that, early on, he would transcribe entire Hemingway novels by hand because he wanted to know what it felt like to write something great. I suppose that it is in this spirit that I began this endeavor.
That’s about as much of a preamble as I think is necessary. One thing I would point out at the start, is that I made the decision to not include the Richard Bachman books, a long used pseudonym of King’s. The one exception I will likely make is the book, Regulators, which is sort of a companion piece to the book Desperation. There is no specific reason that I can articulate, it just felt right for me to do it this way. Maybe, at the end, I will come back and read them all in one stretch.
Carrie was the first full length novel published by King. I have always loved the story of how he had originally dumped the manuscript into the garbage, only to have it saved by his wife upon discovering it. Imagine how the fate of the publishing industry could have changed on the back of that one event. They were living in a double wide trailer and apparently times were so hard, that he couldn’t even afford his own typewriter. As a new author myself, whenever I start to get down on myself for somewhat lackluster sales, I try to imagine the sight of this giant of the industry, huddled over a typewriter in the laundry room of his trailer, no idea of what kind of a brand he was in the process of creating.
I think that Carrie is one of the finest examples of efficient storytelling. The idea of a young, socially withdrawn teenager, driven by the scorn and bullying of her peers into some horrible act of ultimate revenge has certainly been done before, and after, but King executes it brilliantly.
From a pure mechanical perspective of storytelling there are several aspects to this book that I am particularly fond of.
The first would be Kings use of foreshadowing. I won’t go into a ton of detail regarding the end of the book, although I feel like this story has become so ingrained in our cultural consciousness, that I shouldn’t really need to worry about that. Suffice to say, Carrie is pushed just a little bit too far, and reaches that final emotional breaking point, at which things end badly for pretty much everyone involved. In the universe of the book, the prom stands as the nexus, or the center of everything. The story is told in several different narrative voices, some of which take place before the prom and some take place after. The story is broken up at several points with interludes, excerpts taken from books and periodicals, written after the fact about the tragedy at Carrie’s prom. Some take the form of transcripts of interviews of characters who were present during the event. Others are writings of the characters themselves, describing and discussing their feelings and roles in what happened at prom.
The technical term that a lot of writers use for devices like this is an info dump. Basically the idea is to communicate information as effectively as possible to the reader. As a practice, we as writers often discourage it, because it is difficult to make something like that feel natural within the flow of the story. It’s one of those rules that we just love to point out in other people’s stories, reminding them that they should try and do it in a different way.
Regardless of our “rules”, King uses this device masterfully. At no point does the story feel disrupted or slow, because of these interludes and the continued inclusion of more and more details around this event which you don’t really understand yet, serves to provide an amazing amount of suspense and anticipation to find out what happened at the prom that was so horrible. The varying perspectives and the layering of the time frame of each particular narrative is a beauty to behold.
Another aspect of this book is the moral ambiguity of all the characters. It’s a lot easier to write a book in which the characters are either really bad or really good. And that’s not to say that those books aren’t entertaining, they certainly have their time and place. But what I really, especially enjoy are books like this, where really there aren’t any characters in the book that have any redeeming qualities. It sort of feels like everyone, at least to some degree is the “bad guy”, it’s just that some of them are more sympathetic than others. I also like how King will play with your expectations from certain characters based on your assumptions. Throughout the whole book, Carrie definitely is worthy of sympathy for the situation she has to deal with at school and at home, but by the end when she is orchestrating a walking bloodbath through most of the town, that sympathy definitely starts to wane. And the other student, the female classmate of Carrie’s who plans the entire prom night prank is portrayed with pretty much no redeeming qualities throughout the book. Then, at the end, when her boyfriend who helped carry out the prank starts to turn abusive towards her and she becomes somewhat of a victim herself, it’s hard to not feel just a little sorry for her. This is what I love to see in fiction, because real life is rarely as simple as the hero winging the gun out of the bad guys hand with a perfectly placed shot from the hip.
Is Carrie White to blame for what she ultimately does? Does the sympathy of her situation excuse her for committing so many horrible, violent acts against not just the classmates who hounded her, but the entire town in which she lived? I have to be honest and say that I’m not really sure, and that’s kind of how I like it. Each time I have read this book, part of me goes into it thinking that maybe this time I’ll get some more insight, see something different that sheds light on the whole affair. Did her victims deserve what happened to them because of the shitty life lived by the protagonist of the book? It’s hard for me to answer that, mostly because I’m sitting there with the book in my lap, a place of relative safety. All I know is that I love it when a book makes you just a little unsure about the certainties in life and your ability to accept the actions of a character.
It’s the difference between a book that I enjoy, but never feel compelled to read again and a book that I can’t get out of my mind, and just want to turn around and go right back. It’s the books that make me feel like a rubbernecker that make me excited to be a reader.
It’s an impressive feat to have a book like this stand as your entrance into the industry, your first novel for the world to see and judge you by. Sometimes I wonder what life must have been like for King in those first months after releasing this. Nowadays, someone like myself can log onto the Internet and check my book sales and get immediate gratification (or in my case, disappointment), but for King, that wasn’t available. It’s hard to imagine how a writer could stay sane, sitting their in their trailer late at night, worrying about how they are going to support their family and just stewing in the juices of self-doubt and fear.
It is often said that the first book or album or movie is easier, because you’ve had your entire life (up until that point) to create it. For your sophomore effort, however, you need to step up to the plate and produce something in substantially less time, that will still speak to the audience and be just as popular.
No problem, right?
Fortunately for us, Stephen King seemed to have gotten through that in fine form.
I hope that you have enjoyed this and are maybe intrigued to continue on in this journey with me. I’m not going to promise to hold to any particular schedule with putting these out, maybe once a month, maybe every other month. It will all depend on what happens to be going on with me at the time. The next essay in this series will be on my thoughts on Salem’s Lot, and what would happen if Count Dracula were to decide to uproot, and buy a small, quaint little house in small town, Maine.
My name is Chad Clark, and I am proud to be a Constant Reader.
