by Alex Cull

Created on: June 02, 2009

Who could ever forget the excellent 1976 movie version of Stephen King's novel Carrie, with Sissy Spacek at her wide-eyed best as the eponymous Carrie and John Travolta as the thuggish Billy Nolan. With its great casting, script and music, Brian de Palma's Carrie remains one of the better screen adaptations of a Stephen King story.

The novel itself is also very good, although it has a documentary style (with newspaper excerpts and letters) which is not quite what I'm generally used to in a King book. It was his first published novel (although the fourth that he actually wrote) and it was thumped out on a portable typewriter while he was living in a trailer with no telephone; although the author was still evidently finding his feet, stylistically speaking, Carrie has a raw impact that would have been even greater back in 1974.

It almost got thrown away. Stephen King actually stopped writing after a few pages and dropped them into the bin. His wife Tabitha fished them out, though; he went on to finish the book and the rest, as they say, is history. I think we owe Tabitha a debt of thanks.

This novel works well on a number of levels. The main character is based on a real-life person, a girl who went to high school at the same time as the author and who later died during an epileptic seizure. For all those of us who were never very popular at school or suffered bullying or harassment, Carrie strikes a nerve. Anyone had violent revenge fantasies about those who tormented them? I certainly did, and can relate to King's heroine that way. But this is certainly not some kind of cosy revenge fantasy - King shows us graphically how events can escalate and spiral out of control. Much like in an ancient Greek tragedy, fate is working inexorably behind the scenes to destroy the protagonists (and many others, besides) and derails the best-laid plans (or makes them work all too well).

On another level, it's a powerful novel about difference. Schools and small towns can be harsh places to be, for anyone who stands out from the crowd. And this is a small town school. In the 1970s. Someone like Carrie - physically unprepossessing, socially unskilled, uncool, unhip, with a religious maniac single mother - what chance does she have? Carrie shows us the truly ugly face of bullying, intolerance and peer harassment. It also, in the guilt-ridden character of Sue Snell, shows us what it means to be aware of injustice but afraid of standing out, and to feel under pressure to go along

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