It would be an understatement to say that Stephen King has had a distinguished career as a popular novelist. The currently 64-year-old American author has sold more than 350 million copies of his 56 published novels and short story collections over the past 37 years. This is a truly prodigious output, and while his writing isn't exactly Hemingway, he makes up for it by the sheer number of stories he pounds out, most of them enjoyable, some of them wretched.

I've read a handful of King novels over the years, but nothing near all of them. I figured it's time to change that. I want to get a look at his entire collection in chronological order, to see how his style and sensibilities and choices evolve over time, and to get a solid grasp and understanding of an author who redefined the term "popular" and who is still going today. His popularity has since been eclipsed by the likes of Harry Potter (450 million copies of only seven books sold), but King was genre fiction's first true superstar.

As I read through each book I'll be writing down my thoughts just for fun. First I'll write about the book and its background, and then I'll write out my feelings and summarize the plot on a section by section basis, since King's books are usually divided into large portions. I don't really expect a lot of discussion or anything, though if you'd like to talk about one of the books I examine, of course I'd love to hear it. These posts, which will come out irregularly as I finish books, will have a lot of spoilers so if you're worried about that for whatever reason, don't read them. I'm mostly writing these for my own benefit, to help me gain an understanding of the author and what he does. But if you've read these books before, or if you never will but might be interested in reading what happens in them, I hope you might find the posts interesting or vaguely entertaining, though there's just as much chance you'll find them a little tl;dr.

Some of these books will be re-reads for me, but even the ones I've read before haven't been touched in about eight to ten years. Since I'm starting at the beginning, of course I am starting with:

Carrie was not the first novel Stephen King ever wrote (it was his fourth), but it was the first he ever had published and it is the book that made him a rock star of the horror genre.

Before we begin in earnest, I'd like to say something about that. King is always, without fail, branded as a horror writer, an author who writes scary things that give you nightmares. It was this branding that actually kept me away from King as a young teenager; I didn't get along well with horror movies, and had no desire to read horror novels.

But when I finally did get around to trying King as a 17-year-old, I was surprised to find that despite the universally accepted branding, I don't really find him to be a horror writer at all. He writes some tense and scary scenes into his books, no doubt, but he writes everything very straight, by which I mean he doesn't go for the shock or the gotcha or (for the most part) the gore. What I'm trying to say is that he wasn't what I expected when I approached his books thinking of him as a "horror writer".

King's books are rather imaginative, with supernatural premises and often a host of very human characters taking part in or caught up in events, and you can usually count on some of his human characters being at least as awful as his monsters. His books are tense, but are they scary? They are supernatural, but are they horrifying?

Maybe I have a different concept of those words than most, but I don't believe they are. I've never felt horrified reading a King book, I've never had to put one down or put my hand over my mouth in disgust or pull my feet up off the floor or leave all the lights on at night.

In my mind Stephen King is more of a dark fantasy/suspense writer who steeps his imaginative ideas in realistic places and surrounds them with realistic characters. But every single critic in the world is convinced that his books are monstrously frightening. Look at the quotes in my copy of Carrie, for example. "Gory and horrifying"; "Eerie and haunting — sheer horror!"; "Shivering, shuddery, macabre evil!"; "If The Exorcist made you shudder, Carrie will make you scream."

And okay, critics of 1974, I'm sorry, but what the hell? Did you all overdose on hyperbole that day? Was it something in the water? I understand that positive popular reviews tend to go overboard sometimes, especially the bits that end up quoted on the back covers, but every single King book is plastered with quotes like these, about how horrifying and terrifying and evil and gory and nightmare-filled these stories apparently all are. And, just ... they're not. King can disturb you sometimes, he can give you a tense read, he can make you think about the dark side of humanity, and he never flinches from the reality of his fictional situations, but he is not the pure rocket-powered nightmare fuel his publishers decided to promote him as.

I say, ignore the press and the hype. If you've never tried King because he writes horror, I'd say give him a chance someday. He might surprise you. Alternatively, read my posts instead and learn what happens in all the books.

Okay, now I've got that out of my system. When King wrote Carrie he was poor and working as a teacher. He couldn't even afford a working telephone in his home. And so when he received the news that Carrie would be published, it arrived via telegram of all things. Though he only received a $2500 advance on the hardcover, which sold a mere 13,000 copies, Carrie soon made King a rich man. The paperback publishing rights sold for $400,000, which dollartimes.com tells me is the equivalent of $1.9 million today. Said paperback sold more than a million copies in its first year, and more than four million to date.

Why was it so popular? To be honest, I have no clue. It's not bad, per se, but it's really nothing special. It's short, competently if unexceptionally written, and presented in a very up-front manner. However, some of my opinion may be coloured by the fact that it's so different from all his subsequent books.

By that, I mean that Carrie is strange because it tells you the ending right at the start. From the very beginning of the book you know that there was a prom, there was a girl named Carrie White, and there was a lot of death and destruction caused by telekinesis. The book tells you what to expect, and then circles around the issue for just over 200 pages, mixing plot progression with reports and newspaper clippings and such that were written after the destructive event.

King never goes back to this style in future books, at least not that I'm aware of yet. From here on out he tells his stories straight, giving us a beginning, a middle, and an end while he tries to build tension or mystery or suspense or danger. In Carrie, the suspense is not about what happens, but almost solely about how and why it happens.

King himself has spoken somewhat poorly of this first book, admitting that it was a young novel by a young writer (he was 27 when it was published). It's not really representative of his work as a whole. But it's where he started, so let's begin.

By the second page we know that Carrie White is telekinetic, and by the fourth page we know that there is a tragedy caused because of this. The rest is pretty much details, but that's where the devil is so let's dig in.

The book essentially opens on a shower scene, but not a sexy/horrifying one like in Psycho. We are in a high school locker room in Chamberlain, Maine (King sets most of his books in fictional small towns in Maine, his home state). It's a girl's locker room and they're all showering after gym class. No, it's still not sexy, get your mind out of the gutter already.

Sixteen-year-old Carrie White has her first period while in the locker room shower and the other girls all taunt her while she cries and screams because she thinks she is bleeding to death. And my first thought is, how does any girl reach sixteen without knowing what this is all about? I guess Carrie is what you'd call a late bloomer (pun intended? You decide). Anyway, she's bleeding all over the place and crying and screaming and all the other girls throw tampons and pads at her while laughing, so it's all pretty traumatic, and of course the point is that this is when Carrie's telekinesis begins to manifest.

I'm a bad person because even though I felt sorry for Carrie, at first it was also hard not to sympathize just a little with her tormentors. Carrie in these initial scenes is presented as sort of an incredibly awkward loser, dull and even a little slow in the head. It's not pretty, but a girl like that would be picked on in any school in America.

Of course we don't get the whole story or the whole Carrie in this first scene. A little later on when she walks home from school and sits alone in her house we get to see things from Carrie's point of view, and that's when I really feel like a bad person for not sympathizing with her sooner. She's the classic downtrodden class loser who wants to be normal but can't, and so would settle for being left alone, but can't have that either. I've kind of been there myself, though not to anywhere near the extent Carrie has.

And then we meet her mother, and holy shit, now I feel ten times worse for Carrie than I even did before. You see her mother is what is known in polite circles as a fucking goddamn religious maniac. If you take offense at that phrasing, then I'm sorry, but there's really no other term that applies. Your average run of the mill religious maniac doesn't even compare. Margaret White has decorated her home with pictures of suffering sinners. She sees sin everywhere, even in all the established churches, and carries a Bible with her wherever she goes. She tries to raise Carrie to believe that everything is evil and dirty, from boys to sunshine to chocolate cake, and beats her daughter and locks her in a closet with a nightmare picture of an angry God for hours at a time and Jesus I can't even describe it all. It's ten kinds of messed up, it's messed up from acorns to Sunday morning, people. With a mother like that, it's surprising Carrie has turned out even as good as she has.

Some part of Carrie knows it, too, knows the truth about her mother, and combined with the slow flexing and growing of her telekinesis Carrie begins to have dangerous thoughts about the ability to have her own life, a real life, with her power to keep her safe from her mother's wrath. As Carrie tries to show a little independence, just a tiny bit, her mother slaps her, manhandles her, and repeatedly throws her in the Closet of Sin, until Carrie snaps and uses her brain to throw pies and cups around the home and scares the hell out of her god-fearing mother. And it occurs to me that Carrie is a 1970s River Tam. She can kill you with her brain.

But keeping safe from the wrath of batshit insane mothers is one thing; nothing keeps you safe from the wrath of teenagers. The girls who taunted Carrie in the bathroom get in a heap of shit over it, and one in particular, Chris Hargensen, is a real piece of work. In and among some underage sex and drug use (King is infamous for his uninspiring sex scenes, and here is his first, with lots of talk of rubbing; but it's basically just two good kids having awkward sex in the back of a car, so we can forgive him) ... where was I?

Right, teenage wrath. There are two girls the story focuses on, Chris and Sue. Chris is a rebellious troublemaker and Sue is basically a good kid who has actually managed to gain a little perspective and maturity in high school. Sue feels bad for picking on Carrie and tries to make up for it by getting her popular boyfriend to take Carrie to the prom as a sort of apology, and Carrie, desperate for normality but wary of being tricked, accepts. Chris, on the other hand, gets banned from the prom for refusing to accept punishment for her actions, and after her attempt to get her father to sue the school fails, she turns instead to her loser pothead thug boyfriend (all the popular girls in school have at least one).

The boyfriend and his thug pothead loser friends go slaughter some pigs and gather the blood in buckets, because Chris has a plan to humiliate Carrie White on prom night as payback. Payback for what exactly, I'm not sure. How dare that Carrie White let me pick on her so that I got in trouble! Seriously Chris, I'm no expert, but there is something you need and I want you to guess what it is. All right Chris? No cheating, but it's three words, and the first is "A", the third is "Clue" and the second is "Fucking". Can you do that for me, Chris? Can you get one of those?

No? All right then. Pig blood on prom night it is.

The various psychologies at play here are interesting, because like I said it's the human characters in King's books that are scary just as often, if not more often, than the supernatural elements. Here we have the "terrifying power" from the cover blurb, the telekinesis, but that's not the part of this book that's scary yet. Hell, at this point I think it would be fantastic if Carrie would use her power to give her mother a solid dose of her own medicine, especially when it's revealed that she once tried to cut out Carrie's eyes when Carrie was three, because Carrie was looking at an older girl in a bikini.

No, the terrifying power isn't the scary part. Far scarier is Chris, who you can clearly see is a selfish, arrogant, controlling bitch who is taking her life in dangerous directions, addicted to her own high school powers of popularity and mean-spirited bullying. Scary too is her boyfriend, who drives around stoned with his stoner friends, all of them future convicts in the making, killing pigs and draining their blood to use in a gruesome practical joke designed to ruin a downtrodden young girl's already ruined adolescence forever. When they bash the trusting pigs over the head and slit their throats so they spill their blood into the buckets, that's what's scary. Not that telekinesis bullshit.

Between vengeful bullies, dim-witted thugs, and psychotic mothers, at this point Carrie's "terrifying power" is the only thing that might keep her safe from the actual terrifying things in the world.

As we get closer to the moment we all know is coming, King slowly tightens up the tension and starts to make you both dread and anticipate the climax. Carrie has hit puberty and is breaking free of her mother's maniacal grip, and even though dear mother tries to guilt Carrie into staying home from the prom by hurting herself, Carrie will not relent, and uses her power to gently push her mother away. It's like they say, you can't choose your family, but you can choose how hard to use your telekinesis on them. I'm sure that's what they say.

Chris and her boyfriend Billy the thug set up their trap with the buckets of pig blood, to be dumped on the winners of the prom popularity vote, and Chris has told her friends how to vote so that Carrie is up there and will be humiliated at the highest moment of her life. We start to see that all is not well and healthy in the fairy tale romance between a clueless evil bitch and a caveman thug.

Speaking of fairy tales, that's what this is as Carrie is picked up by Tommy, Sue's boyfriend, and taken to the prom where everything is magical and wonderful and actually goes well for Carrie. It's Cinderella, of course it is, but we already know that the prince is not going to find the foot after the clock strikes midnight.

The tension continues to build as the vote for king and queen of the prom ends in a tie and a runoff vote, and with both votes you can see that the final result could have been avoided if only Carrie and Tommy hadn't voted for themselves each time. It really is some good building tension given that we already know for a fact that things will not end well.

Unfortunately things go off the rails a little when the climax actually arrives. Carrie and Tommy win the final vote, ascend the stage, stand there while the whole school cheers, and then the blood falls and Carrie is suddenly back in the shower from the beginning with blood running down her thighs and the whole school is laughing at her and it's just too much. But then the story goes all over the place. The climax runs 60 pages long but at least half of it is those damn newspaper clippings and book excerpts and interview transcriptions from after the event, constantly yanking the reader in and out of the present and losing the sense of forward momentum. It's not an anti-climax by any means, but it doesn't live up to the buildup and that's too bad because it was some fine buildup, really it was.

As Carrie loses her shit for reals and locks all the students in the gym while setting the place on fire, suddenly I don't want her to defend herself from the world quite this vigorously. Now driven just as crazy as her mother from too many years of embarrassment and shame and, well, living with her mother, Carrie just plain loses it and unleashes her powers. She strips fire hydrants so that the fires can't be put out. She leaves her classmates to burn to death. She opens gas mains and gas pumps and explosions start to tear the town apart. She rips down live electrical wires and doesn't care that people are dying.

And I can't help but think some part of her mother would approve of this almost Biblical reckoning, the wrath of God scourging a town full of sinners and all that, except as far as dear mother is concerned Carrie is the devil and must be destroyed. That's no way to treat an angel of destruction, mom.

While the town goes to hell in several roomy handbaskets, Carrie comes home and her mother stabs her with a butcher's knife so Carrie stops her mother's heart. She then sets off, bleeding to death, with some notion of destroying the roadhouse in town that her mother always hated. Why this is so important when Carrie is dying is a little fuzzy, but it's okay because that's the same roadhouse where Chris and Billy fled to after dumping the blood so it looks like we have time for one last reckoning.

Chris and Billy meanwhile are having a great time what with Billy practically raping her and Chris kind of accepting it, and this is a horror too, not the same horror as a girl blowing up the town and killing hundreds of people, but it might be just as bad because it's real in a way that telekinetic teenagers are not. This is the sort of thing that can actually happen, and I think it's a nice touch that King doesn't lose track of real bad things while he's cranking out the imaginary bad things.

But even the whole telekinetic-teenager-destroying-the-town thing isn't entirely imaginary, not anymore, not when sometimes people get guns and go into their schools and shoot at their classmates. I don't know if anything like that happened much in the 70s, but if not King predicted it sort of well here. Sometimes when certain types of people get bullied and picked on and pushed too far they overreact and do some terrible things. But even though bullies are awful, they don't deserve to burn to death or get shot, and all the kids and people who only passively allowed the bullying without standing up don't deserve it either. Does that make Carrie the bad guy now? Maybe it does.

Chris and Billy though, maybe there's a part of me that thinks they at least do deserve it, so when Carrie's last act is to kill them I don't feel too cut up. Carrie didn't know that they were the guilty parties, she was just lashing out because Billy was trying to run her over with his car, but I'll take what I can get.

Because Carrie is running some sort of broadband telepathy as well, Sue shows up as Carrie is dying and is there as she fades away. In the end Carrie is a scared sixteen-year-old girl who wants her mother, and that's sad for so many reasons. She's a bad guy who killed hundreds of people after lashing out in humiliation and pent-up rage, but it's not her fault that all that rage built up in the first place. She was never taught how to avoid it and never taught how to deal with it.

So in the end maybe it's everyone's fault, including Carrie. And in the end maybe everyone loses. Except whoever gets the contract to rebuild the school and all those ruptured gas mains, I guess. It's like the circle of life, only with money.

This last section is merely denouement, eight pages of newspapers and excerpts and such that tell us two things. One, the town of Chamberlain died that day and afterward no one wanted to live there anymore, they all moved away bit by bit after 450 deaths in one night. And two, authorities have essentially discarded the notion that it was telekinesis that caused this and that it might be genetic and could happen again, so that King's world goes on without real belief in the supernatural. This is important because King's world, which is extrapolated from our world, becomes a sort of consistent thing over the years, with characters and such bleeding from one book into another at times, much of it tied together by his Dark Tower series.

But for now we are only at the beginning, and that was it, that was Carrie, now it's done. It was interesting and short but not particularly of any special quality. On my Stephen King Quality Meter, Carrie gets a 40/100.

Next: 'Salem's Lot