Stephen King, who wrote Carrie, at New York Comic Con in 2007. Photo Pinguino Kolb, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. No free image of the novel's own cover art exists.
Carrie (Stephen King)
What it took directly
- statedCarrie's opening shower scene took from the girls' showers King scrubbed one summer as a janitor at Brunswick High"One day I was supposed to scrub the rust-stains off the walls in the girls' shower. I noticed that the showers, unlike those in the boys' locker room, had chrome U-rings with pink plastic curtains attached." Stephen King, “How I wrote Carrie”, The Guardian, April 4, 2014 (abridged from On Writing and his introduction to Carrie)
- statedCarrie White's telekinesis took from an article in LIFE magazine on poltergeists and telekinesis"I'd read an article in LIFE magazine some years before, suggesting that at least some reported poltergeist activity might actually be telekinetic phenomena" Stephen King, “How I wrote Carrie”, The Guardian, April 4, 2014 (abridged from On Writing and his introduction to Carrie)
- statedCarrie White took from two girls from King's childhood, both dead (he calls them Tina White and Sandra Irving)"the ghosts of two girls, both dead, who eventually combined to become Carrie White. I will call one of them Tina White and the other Sandra Irving." Stephen King, “How I wrote Carrie”, The Guardian, April 4, 2014 (abridged from On Writing and his introduction to Carrie)
- statedMargaret White's crucifix took from the crucifix over the couch in the Irving family's living room, seen while King helped move furniture"I was struck by the crucifix hanging in the living room, over the Irving couch." Stephen King, “How I wrote Carrie”, The Guardian, April 4, 2014 (abridged from On Writing and his introduction to Carrie)
- statedCarrie (1974 novel) took from Tabitha King, who fished the first three pages out of the wastebasket"The next night, when I came home from school, my wife Tabby had the pages. She'd spied them while emptying my waste-basket" Stephen King, “How I wrote Carrie”, The Guardian, April 4, 2014 (abridged from On Writing and his introduction to Carrie)
- documentedCarrie (1974 novel) comes from Doubleday, which bought it in 1973 for a $2,500 advance while King was teaching high-school English"Life in the trailer ended in 1973 when Doubleday bought one of his novels, “Carrie,” for a $2,500 advance." Carol Lawson, “Behind the Best Sellers: Stephen King”, The New York Times, September 23, 1979
What it learned to do
- statedCarrie (1974 novel) learned from Tabitha King's help with writing high-school girls"I told her I didn't know jack-shit about high school girls. She said she'd help me with that part" Stephen King in On Writing, quoted by Alison Flood, The Guardian, April 4, 2014
- documentedCarrie (1974 novel) learned from the short stories King wrote for men's magazines (it began as one, meant for Cavalier)"In his spare time he wrote short stories for men’s magazines, and the eventual novel was originally intended to be one such submission for Cavalier." Stephanie Kaloi, TheWrap, April 4, 2024
The tradition it sits in
- documentedCarrie (1974 novel) answered the M. R. James and Lovecraft mode of horror: parchment, shadowy alleys, half-seen horrors"a lot of horror and weird fiction was still in a kind of post-MR James/Lovecraft mode of parchment and shadowy alleys and half-seen horrors, and here was King dropping buckets of blood over everything" Jeff VanderMeer, novelist, to Alison Flood, The Guardian, April 4, 2014 (his reading of where the book sits, not King's)
Where the whole form comes from
- documentedCarrie (1974 novel) comes from the Cinderella fairy tale, twisted"Part of the underlying impulse for Steve's writing Carrie was to take the Cinderella fairy tale and twist it by its tail" Philippa Pride, King's UK publisher at Hodder & Stoughton, to Alison Flood, The Guardian, April 4, 2014
- inferredCarrie (1974 novel) comes from the Ugly Duckling tale"it draws on popular myth – in its case surely a nightmare version of Cinderella's transformation for the ball, or indeed a twisted Ugly Duckling tale." inferred — horror writer Ramsey Campbell's reading (“surely … or indeed”), to Alison Flood, The Guardian, 2014; King is not quoted naming it
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