Carrie

[A] genius for storytelling

One of the few horror writers who can truly make the flesh creep

Guaranteed to chill you

How can it be that it was published 50 years ago? Even though it was written in an age before smartphones and social media, the specific teenage-girl pain of the novel feels fresh and stinging . . . Carrie reads like a book written without fear, the calling card of a writer with immense storytelling power . . . One of my favourite things about the novel is its unusual scrapbook effect. Interspersing the story with snippets and clippings from fictionalised articles about the "Carrie phenomenon", King creates a sense of foreboding . . . a great work: haunting, hard to stop reading, close to the bone. And still exhilarating, half a century later

King is telling us something about the alienation of the outsider, and the cruelty of those who keep them out. But morality aside, it's a revenge fantasy. That's the enduring appeal of Carrie. When King was first conceptualising Carrie, a character he said was inspired by a few tortured and abused girls he knew in his childhood and in his adult life as a teacher, he could never have known how powerful of an archetype he was articulating in her... This is a thriving narrative, but before there was that Texan star Pearl and that Promising Young Woman, there was the girl who could move things with her mind. There was Carrie