After reading Salem’s Lot I’ve decided to go back and read my way through Stephen King’s novels until they stop being engaging. Since Salem’s Lot was his second, I’ve returned to Carrie, his first, which I read many years ago, in high school. It’s incredible. It’s also quite different, in some ways, from how I remembered it and from my general sense of King. For one thing, it’s often more lurid and grotesque than scary. Carrie White comes from an ultra-Christian household and the novel is full of religious kitsch, almost as if King is already imagining it as a film. That also ties with the condensed focus – it basically consists of three successive mise-en-scenes, each of which is highly visual and cinematic.

I’d also forgotten how experimental and expansive King’s style was here. While the book is written in third person he continually shifts between different characters and periodically interrupts the action with fragmented streams of consciousness. This works brilliantly to capture Carrie’s fractured view of the world but also the way that her telekinetic powers collapse her into the minds of those around her. In the later parts of the novel, when she has embarked upon her vengeful rampage at her high school prom, she becomes a kind of lexical pulse that continually contours the narrative voices that King attributes to the the characters. At times she also ruptures King’s own voice, bringing him to a limit of what he can describe.

I was equally surprised by the scale of the novel. When I think of Carrie I immediately picture the Brian De Palma film, which has a kind of cosmic claustrophobia, evoking the whole universe collapsing in on Carrie’s shame and humiliation. By contrast, King not only interrupts his narrative with fractured streams of consciousness but with “secondary sources,” including memoirs and interviews from those who survived Carrie’s night of rage and academic texts on telekinesis, notably a fictional study called The Shadow Exploded. These sources look back on the 1970s from the vantage point of what appears to be the early 1980s, as if King is envisaging a future state where telekinesis has become a legitimate object of academic study. At one point, a sources suggests a genomic explanation is about to be uncovered.

That sense of periodising the 70s also plays into the scale of the narrative. We find out, from King’s assorted sources, that Carrie’s apocalypse at the prom, and her near destruction of her home town of Chamberlain, Maine, has received national attention – so much that it has led to the White Commission, a federal investigation into telekinesis, which King’s various sources compare to the Warren Commission in terms of its impact on American culture. One of these writers directly compares Carrie’s actions to the JFK assassination as one of the defining moments of the post-war era in terms of signalling the irrevocable end of something and the beginning of something new. It reminded me of the echo of the assassination, which took place on Elm Street, that finds its way into Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street; the failure of American liberalism finding its way back, in repressed form, to horror literature.

Speaking of Carrie’s home town, when I wrote about Salem’s Lot a while back I incorrectly assumed it was the first of King’s novels to be set in Maine. That’s not true. But the Maine of Carrie also feels quite different from the Maine of Salem’s Lot. Of course, there are some clear similarities here. Both novels are about the utter destruction of a small town, except that where the Marsten House reduces Salem’s Lot to a quiet languishing and wasting, Chamberlain goes up in a bang and propels Maine to the centre of the American consciousness. But Carrie is also much less topographically focused than Salem’s Lot, at least when it comes to the textures of the town and to the rhythms of small town life. The only time we get a sprawling sense of Chamberlain is when Carrie is in the midst of destroying it.

To some extent you could put that down to this being a debut novel. Each of King’s novels at this early point in this career would see him hone his craft exponentially. But I don’t think that’s the whole story. For one thing, Carrie is a much more introspective novel than Salem’s Lot or even The Shining. It only takes places across a few key spaces – mainly Carrie’s house and school – so that King can devote most of his attention to delving into his protagonist’s psyche through his fractured stream-of-consciousness approach. It also feels as if the destruction of Chamberlain has in some sense already happened before the catastrophe at the prom – as if Carrie’s telekinetic outburst simply clarifies what is already implicit around the edges of the narrative; a wasting-away of the textural vitality of small town America.

Perhaps that’s why the novel is so astute and acute at capturing the dynamics of high school life – this has become the ersatz public sphere in an otherwise decaying town. King is brilliant here. He has a real empathy for the bullied, the outcast, and the freakish – again, the “Losers’ Club” of It springs to mind – and you have to wonder whether large parts of the novel are autobiographical. But he also has a deep countercultural sense of the emptiness and even trauma of popularity. Nowhere is that clearer than in the character of Sue, who imagines a life of popular conformity in all its crushing tedium in one of the most extraordinary paratactic sequences in the book. Moreover, she only encourages her boyfriend to take Carrie to the prom so she can reinvest the empty signifier of Prom Queen, which she would have surely won, with significance. In a way, she’s worse than the most brutal and overt bullies.

And Carrie is, ultimately, one of the great aesthetic visions of the American Prom as a dialectic between joy and horror, conformity and exclusion, the chosen and unchosen, the clean and clean in the culture of the United States. It’s in his vision of the prom that King’s prose style reaches its apex too. The descriptions of the buildup to the big night are full of diaphanous and mercurial textures while the aftermath, in its descriptions of electricity and liquid snaking through the air, transmute this gorgeous imagery into a more threatening register. At one point a teacher recalls to Carrie that her own prom date was underwhelming and yet the atmosphere of the night has never left her. That’s true of the novel too – its driving aesthetic principle is the ambience of the prom as it gathers, intensifies, sours and disperses, leaving behind the strange and alluring residue that is so familiar from King’s later masterworks.