Carrie [Paperback]

Why read Carrie? Stephen King himself has said that he finds his early work "raw," and Brian De Palma's movie was so successful that we feel like we have read the novel even if we never have. The simple answer is that this is a very scary story, one that works as well--if not better--on the page as on the screen. Carrie White, menaced by bullies at school and her religious nut of a mother at home, gradually discovers that she has telekinetic powers, powers that will eventually be turned on her tormentors. King has a way of getting under the skin of his readers by creating an utterly believable world that throbs with menace before finally exploding. He builds the tension in this early work by piecing together extracts from newspaper reports, journals, and scientific papers, as well as more traditional first- and third-person narrative in order to reveal what lurks beneath the surface of Chamberlain, Maine.

News item from the Westover (ME) weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1966: "Rain of Stones Reported: It was reliably reported by several persons that a rain of stones fell from a clear blue sky on Carlin Street in the town of Chamberlain on August 17th."

Although the supernatural pyrotechnics are handled with King's customary aplomb, it is the carefully drawn portrait of the little horrors of small towns, high schools, and adolescent sexuality that give this novel its power, and assures its place in the King canon. --Simon Leake

‘Not since Dickens has a writer had so many readers by the throat...King’s imagination is vast. He knows how to engage the deepest sympathies of his readers... one of the great storytellers of our time' (Guardian )

'One of the few horror writers who can truly make the flesh creep' (Sunday Express )

'King is one of the most fertile storytellers of the modern novel' (The Sunday Times )

'One of the few horror writers who can truly make the flesh creep'

Carrie White is no ordinary girl. Carrie White has the gift of telekinesis. To be invited to the Prom by Tommy Ross is a dream come true, and a step towards social acceptance by her high school peers. But events take a macabre turn on that horrifying and endless night.

Stephen King is the bestselling author of more than thirty books of which the most recent are THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON, HEARTS IN ATLANTIS and his non-fiction book ON WRITING. He lives with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King, in Bangor, Maine.