Carrie - Stephen King

Being on the road a lot this summer means I'm biased towards straightforward books. Stephen King is a good bet, as is Thomas Harris, as would be Richard Price. Something I can read in the back of the van in tiny bits and pieces without losing the thread through gas station stops, meals, blown tires, etc.

Carrie - what a way to step onto the scene. Apparently he got a $2,500 advance on it from Doubleday. Then another company bought the paperback rights, for which King got $200,000.

It's an epistolary book, but that form drops into the background pretty quickly. There's a few clunky sections, where different witnesses testify at length about what they were eating when they heard the explosion, or why they were at the gas station that evening, or whether or not they'd brushed their teeth that morning. Overall, though, the action is brisk and the tension builds quickly.

I'm never crazy about books trying to hook you with flash-forwards to the climax, because it's easy to overplay that hand. The rest of the book can seem dull by comparison, or worse, the height of the action can be overexposed and lose its impact. Carrie teeters on the edge of stealing its own thunder, though there are certainly some fireworks left to go off by the end.

(Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin was the most impressive piecing together of a climax that I can remember reading. The details dropped through the entire book did nothing to undermine the horror of the final reveal.)