Stephen King’s first novel made him a household word, and that word was “Carrie”. Now everybody’s favorite pyrokinetic returns to the screen, this time in a series. Here’s the trailer.
The new series is from showrunner Mike Flannagan. It stars Summer H. Howell in the title role, with Samantha Sloyan as her overbearing, abusive mother. The scenario is that a sheltered girl is bullied, leading to a horrific, bloody incident. The moral of the story is “never bully people, because there might be some pretty interesting consequences for doing that”.
Stephen King started writing Carrie in 1974 while working as a high school English teacher, and living in a cramped trailer. He wrote three single-spaced pages about a bullied girl’s horrific locker room experience, but he hated the draft. He thought he didn’t understand teenage girls or the female perspective, felt the idea was a “loser” and crumpled up the work and threw it in the trash.
He and his wife Tabatha were struggling, their combined incomes not amounting to very much. His wife emptied the trash, found the discarded draft, smoothed them out, and read them. She told him the story was powerful and insisted he finish it, offering guidance on the nuances of teenage female dynamics. King expanded the piece from a short concept into a full length novel, which then faced 30 rejections before Doubleday finally accepted it.
King’s career launched, and their lives transformed, he went on to write 84 books in total as of this writing in 2026, with more on the way, including 67 novels, 12 anthologies and 5 nonfiction books. He has also written and published more than 200 short stories.
The second moral, the unspoken one, is that there’s often more value in who you are and what you do than you might see in yourself. If this wasn’t true, neither Stephen King nor his initial creation Carrie would ever have seen the light of day.
If you love the work of Stephen King, this might be a winner for you. If you’re a writer, you might take some inspiration from it.
It debuts on Prime Video on October 7.
