Stephen King truly needs no introduction.
King is responsible for keeping people awake at night long after they have put down one of his novels and crawled beneath their covers to imagined safety. He is the master of the horror genre, become a pop culture icon, is one of the bestselling authors of all time, and his fandom has only grown as more generations have come to his work.
That work began in earnest with his debut novel, Carrie. It is one of King’s best, a haunting tale about bullying and ultimately what happens when the bullied snap. If you haven’t read it, here is a bit more about it:
Stephen King’s legendary debut, about a teenage outcast and the revenge she enacts on her classmates.
Carrie White may have been unfashionable and unpopular, but she had a gift. Carrie could make things move by concentrating on them. A candle would fall. A door would lock. This was her power and her sin. Then, an act of kindness, as spontaneous as the vicious taunts of her classmates, offered Carrie a chance to be a normal and go to her senior prom. But another act–of ferocious cruelty–turned her gift into a weapon of horror and destruction that her classmates would never forget.
Just reading that summary gives me chills. Of course, I will forever have the Sissy Spacek Carrie White in my mind. I’m a product of my generation and I actually saw the movie before I read the novel. Still, with Carrie receiving a brand new book cover, it made me remember the novel and made me curious.
That curiosity led me to this question:
What is your favorite early Stephen King novel?
Personally, I love The Stand and The Gunslinger, gravitating more to the epic and less the horror. But Carrie would be my favorite horror novel in that time, followed by Cujo. That damn St. Bernard…
Here is the list of early novels for you to choose from:
- 1974 – Carrie
- 1975 – Salem’s Lot
- 1977 – The Shining
- 1978 – Night Shift (stories)
- 1978 – The Stand
- 1979 – The Dead Zone
- 1980 – Firestarter
- 1981 – Cujo
- 1982 – The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger
Would love to hear for which you voted—and why, of course!
The Shining, which is still my favorite King book overall. I first read it when I was 15 (thanks Dad), and it’s still the only book that made the hair on my neck stand up.