King equates Carrie’s sexual flowering with the maturing of her telekinetic ability. Carrie avenges her mock baptism telekinetically, destroying the school and the town, leaving Susan Snell as the only survivor.Īs in most folk cultures, initiation is signified by the acquisition of special wisdom or powers. They arrange to have Tommy and Carrie voted king and queen of the ball, only to crown them with a bucket of pig’s blood. Carrie’s conflict with her mother, who regards her emerging womanhood with loathing, is paralleled by a new plot by the girls against her, led by the rich and spoiled Chris Hargenson. (The blood bath and symbolism of sacrifice will recur at the climax of the novel.) As atonement for her participation in Carrie’s persecution in the shower, Susan Snell persuades her popular boyfriend Tommy Ross to invite Carrie to the Spring Ball. In the opening scene, in the school shower room, Carrie experiences her first menstrual period her peers react with abhorrence and ridicule, “stoning” her with sanitary napkins, shouting “Plug it up!” Carrie becomes the scapegoat for a fear of female sexuality as epitomized in the smell and sight of blood. The novel is also about the terrors of passage to womanhood. Carrie concerns the horrors of high school, a place of “bottomless conservatism and bigotry,” as King explains, where students “are no more allowed to rise ‘above their station’ than a Hindu” above caste. Her mother, a religious fanatic, associates Carrie with her own “sin” Carrie’s peers hate her in a mindless way and make her the butt of every joke. Sixteen-year-old Carrie White is a lonely ugly duckling, an outcast at home and at school. Stephen King’s first published novel, Carrie, is a parable of adolescence. King’s paranormal horrors have similar cathartic and educative functions for adults they externalize the traumas of life, especially those of adolescence.
In The Uses of Enchantment (1976), psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argues that the magic and terrors of fairy tales present existential problems in forms children can understand. In the neoprimitivism of the late twentieth century, this ancient role and the old monsters have taken on a new mystique. In an anxious era both skeptical of and hungry for myth, horror is fundamentally reassuring and cathartic the tale-teller combines roles of physician and priest into the witch doctor as “sin eater,” who assumes the guilt and fear of his culture. He hints at their derivations from the gothic novel, classical myth, Brothers Grimm folktales, and the oral tradition in general. As with his fiction, his sources are the classic horror films of the 1930’s, inherited by the 1950’s pulp and film industries. In Danse Macabre, a study of the contemporary horror genre that emphasizes the cross-pollination of fiction and film, he divides his subject according to four “monster archetypes”: the ghost, the “thing” (or human-made monster), the vampire, and the werewolf. King’s imagination is above all archetypal: His “pop” familiarity and his campy humor draw on the collective unconscious. This reality, already mediated, is translated easily into preternatural terms, taking on a nightmarish quality.
King applies naturalistic methods to an environment created by popular culture. From such premises, they move cinematically through an atmosphere resonant with a popular mythology. The characters have the trusted two-dimensional reality of kitsch: They originate in clichés such as the high school “nerd” or the wise child. King’s fictions begin with premises accepted by middle Americans of the television generation, opening in suburban or small-town America-Derry, Maine, or Libertyville, Pennsylvania-and have the familiarity of the house next door and the 7-Eleven store. Even a zombie lurching through the night” is a “cheerful” thought in the context of a “dissolving ozone layer.” As a surrogate author in The Mist explains King’s mission, “when the technologies fail, when… religious systems fail, people have got to have something. From the beginning, his dark parables spoke to the anxieties of the late twentieth century.
STEPHEN KING GENTLE READER MAC
September 21, 1947) may be known as a horror writer, but he calls himself a “brand name,” describing his style as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s.” His fast-food version of the “plain style” may smell of commercialism, but that may make him the contemporary American storyteller without peer.
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