2-Year Anniversary: CARRIE by SK

This little group started two years ago this month! Come celebrate our anniversary with work from the master..

Carrie is the first novel by American author Stephen King, released in 1974. Set in the town of Chamberlain, Maine, the plot revolves around Carrie White, a friendless high school girl from an abusive religious household who has telekinetic powers.

Exerpt from The Guardian's Rereading Stephen King: week one – Carrie

Carrie is Stephen King's first novel. A large part of its fame comes from the fact that it was actually the fourth novel he wrote and submitted to publishers – a story that people love to tell when discussing the roads to publication of big-name authors. "Did you know King wrote three books before he was accepted?" goes the common confidence-boosting phrase. And, nearly as famously, he actually threw his only draft of it away at one point, until his wife convinced him to rescue it from the rubbish. The rest is, as they nearly say, a 70ish-strong publication history. (The first three books King wrote, incidentally, were Rage, The Long Walk and Blaze, all of which found publication in later years, and all of which will be covered soon enough.)

Carrie ended up being quite a zeitgeisty novel: published in the same rough timeframe as Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist, and when cinemas were showing Don't Look Now and The Wicker Man. The public were beginning to fall in love with the weirder, more human side of the paranormal – moving away from ghosts and hauntings, which used to preoccupy horror fiction.