Carrie

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

[A] genius for storytelling

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

Guaranteed to chill you