How Early Novels Like Carrie Became Classics

A review of Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King by Caroline Bicks; 304 pages, Hogarth (April 2026)

I.

Back in the 1960s and ’70s, you could still find serious music lovers who claimed that the Beatles were a passing fad and that their music would be largely forgotten in another fifty years. Likewise, in the 1980s and ’90s you could find plenty of serious fiction lovers who claimed that Stephen King was a writer of ephemeral novels that would soon be forgotten. In the 1970s, when King began his amazing run of bestselling novels with Carrie (1974), ’Salem’s Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), The Stand (1978), and Firestarter (1979), few serious book reviewers took any notice. Those who did were often dismissive.

So who were those critics praising instead? Well, there was Larry Woiwode, whose 1975 novel, Beyond the Bedroom Wall, was one of the most critically praised books of the decade. Writing in the New York Times, American novelist John Gardner (not to be confused with the Brit who would later continue Ian Fleming’s James Bond series) wrote: “It seems to me that nothing more beautiful or moving has been written in years.” He called it “a first-rate novel,” “simply brilliant,” and a book of “unbelievable sensitivity and power.” Other reviewers compared the book to the works of Dickens, Melville, and Tolstoy. Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley included it on a list of the twenty best books of the 20th century, alongside classics like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976. Nowadays, for better or worse, the book and its author are largely forgotten. Beyond the Bedroom Wall was last republished in 1997 as part of Graywolf Press’s “Rediscovery” series, but few people seem to have rediscovered it. To date, the book has garnered only twenty reviews and 31 ratings at Amazon.com, where it is the 1,401,444th bestselling book. Needless to say, no 50th anniversary edition was ever published.

I don’t mean to pick on Woiwode. He was just one of many authors who were wildly overpraised by the serious critics of the decade. Ann Beattie, who was born two weeks before King, was hailed as the voice of her generation when she first began publishing stories in the New Yorker. Her reputation has been slipping ever since. In 2011, Michiko Kakutani called her book Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life, “preposterous,” “narcissistic,” “self-indulgent,” and “the sort of pretentious volume that makes people hate academics.” Among the other stars of the era, Bobbie Ann Mason would become a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, Ellen Gilchrist would win a National Book Award, Alice Adams would win a special O. Henry Award for Continuing Achievement in the Short Story, and James Alan McPherson would win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction—but none of these writers is widely read or influential anymore. King’s stature, on the other hand, seems to grow and grow with each passing decade.

In 2024, King’s first novel, Carrie, was republished in a 50th-anniversary edition, featuring a foreword written by Margaret Atwood. Atwood’s essay, which was also published in the New York Times, noted that Carrie is “one of those books that manage to dip into the collective unconscious of their own age and society.” She added, “King is a visceral writer, and a master of granular detail. … He writes horror, the most literary of forms…” Hundreds of Times readers expressed their love for the novel and its author in the comments beneath Atwood’s essay. One of those comments was from Mary Leonhardt, author of Parents Who Love Reading, Kids Who Don’t, a book about the difficulties of passing on one’s love of reading to a child. “Stephen King’s novels, esp. Carrie,” Leonhardt wrote, “were books that I could usually get my students, who thought they hated reading, to love. And from King they would eventually go on to other authors, and pretty soon we had a literate high school student. He did more to push up reading scores than all the phonics programs in the country.”

Back in 1974, ordinary readers—as is often the case—were much savvier about American culture than most scholars and book critics. They made a smash hit of Carrie long before the snobs finally managed to see its virtues. Even after the success of Carrie, the New York Times didn’t bother reviewing its follow-up, ’Salem’s Lot, a book whose value ordinary readers recognised immediately. But it has been a long time now since the country’s scholars and serious reviewers could afford to reflexively dismiss King and his work. The late David Foster Wallace was a big fan of King’s and used to teach his books to his creative-writing students. Literary author Karen Russell has cited him as a direct influence. Novelist Tom Perrotta (Election, Little Children, etc.), who has an English degree from Yale, considers King a master of colloquial English with a genius for tapping into the collective unconscious of Middle America.

I asked several AI programs to tell me the number of books written about Stephen King’s work, but none was able to give me an exact figure. Google’s AI told me:

The body of work focusing on King is extensive, reflecting his massive influence on modern literature. … While Stephen King was historically dismissed by early academic circles as a purely commercial genre writer, there are between 30 and 50 formal, standalone book-length critical and academic studies dedicated to his work.

The list includes Stephen King: Modern Critical Views edited by Harold Bloom (1998), The Road to the Dark Tower: Exploring Stephen King’s Magnum Opus by Bev Vincent (2004), Respecting the Stand: A Critical Analysis of Stephen King’s Apocalyptic Novel by Jenifer Paquette (2012), The Linguistics of Stephen King: Layered Language and Meaning in the Fiction by James Arthur Anderson (2017), and Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King’s It (University of Mississippi Press, 2022).

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