today with no knowledge of what would become of its author, no idea that Stephen King would become what Dave Barry calls "Big Steve," the guy who churns out a bestseller a year at least, even after getting run over by a runaway van. Forget all that: Carrie, released in 1974 was Stephen King's first published work. There was just the book. And though America had produced a lot of fine horror (Shirley Jackson had long moved into a sort of canon
, Rosemary's Baby
was quite recent, and Richard Matheson's Hell House
even more so,) Carrie was different.Carrie, to pretend you don't know, tells the story of a beautiful girl who has been stamped and pounded into submission by her high school classmates in the small town of Chamberlain, Maine. Oh, Carrie has trouble at home, too; her mother is a fundamentalist so fanatical that she regards the other fundamentalists as servants of the devil. But Carrie's real problem is high school. King recognizes this with razor acuity: take away Carrie's loony Mom and there's still a good chance that high school will be every bit as soul-crushing for Carrie as it is for countless other scapegoated, clumsy, unhappy and uncomfortable teens. Carrie is first and foremost not a girl who turns out to possess raw and dangerous power, but a girl who just can't take one more day of meanness, and another day of meanness always comes.
Stephen King has written about one of the instances from his own childhood that brought him to write Carrie. He told the story of a girl he went to school with who was a little awkward and backward and certainly poor, poorer in a poor town to start with. She was teased for her grooming and her looks and her awkward gait. King tells a story with an almost Cinderella tone, that one year this girl came back from Christmas break with new clothes. There was a visible shift in her, a confidence everyone noticed. But the crowd turned, and the teasing increased, and King says he watched her shrink back, never to try to break out again. That's Carrie, but I think for most of us, it's at least a few more.
Carrie takes place in and near a high school in a small town in the early 1970s-- the book reads like a letter from that era, especially because it's essentially an epistolary novel, made up of roughly half straight narration and half articles, interviews, what have you. The changing viewpoints both in the narration and through constant changing of source make this feel like one of King's most modern books, even though the brand names, the customs of high school, the little details clearly signal an America of nearly forty years ago. This matters: take away the Bob Dylan lyrics people copy into one another's yearbooks and you've still got a world of no cell phones and no Internet, no cable TV, no escape outside the community. It was a lonelier world, to be sure.
It's a zippy read, too: the book is about 200 pages long, maybe less. King wrote an introduction for a recent edition; that probably gets it up to a workable length, though one suspects that "King's 2011 Carrie," if it were to exist, would be about 500% the size of the original.
Forget all that. This is a book about the pain of high school. The pain of being alone, of daring to ask if for once, the bullying would just... stop. And of a very special moment when it totally doesn't.
Go back and read Carrie
.
-- and 
-- is a case study in gothic, true gothic, complete with governesses and long shadows, whispered secrets and vampires rising from crypts. I wanted to spend a moment on Dark Shadows before I return to my own crypt, of sorts.
) took his own series and made a movie out of it.
but that I turned around and passed them out. In this case, I gave out copies to 9 different Texas middle schools, where students in book clubs will get to read the book 8 or so months early, and with any luck can write me some helpful notes in the marginalia. I actually hope they enjoy it, but more than this I'm hoping to get a feel for what's working for them in the series and what's not. It can have a lot to do with the new project, "AVH3," whatever it's going to be called.
and 
for practical advice. 
tonight. One is five and one is eight and the Charlie Brown DVDs are a big hit with them, so we are careful not to break them out until the right month, so they retain their specialness. We can watch each over and over again, but only in October, or November, or December. 
, a book so deeply researched and thorough that I've never seen anything quite like it. I've read a fair number of books on vampires and vampire literature; my favorite is J. Gordon Melton's 
. That excellent work covers the whole range of vampires with an emphasis on pop culture, so one finds articles on a whole potpourri of vamp material: nearly 1000 pages long, Melton provides articles on Anne Rice, Blade, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Lord Byron, Dark Shadows, even the short-lived 
.
beget 
; 
beget 
beget 
again.
but with Sentient Tractors.” And it’s true, we do that. But it’s not as mercenary as it sounds. “Like X but Y” is the way you describe in a conversation what writers do anyway. It’s the kind of game we played when we first started writing; the very first writing formulation for me when I was, “I want to write a story like the one I just read in Twilight Zone magazine, but here’s how I will make it mine.”
on a big screen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and I realized that the DVD era has brought a few curses along with its blessings. Of the good, thanks to DVD and VHS before it, we are able to see an old film whenever we want. I have The Vampire Lovers on DVD myself, in fact. And most of the times I've watched a movie and studied it, I've watched a home video version. But I realized while watching the movie in a theater that theaters give us the gift of focus. In a theater, we delegate to a third party the authority to tell us to shut up and listen, to sit quietly in the dark. I'm used to this for brand new movies, but I have to search for it for older titles.
