“Someone ought to try and be sorry in a way that counts.… in a way that means something.”
Carrie
By Stephen King
24 Jan, 2016
Because My Tears Are Delicious To You
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There’s a process that TV Tropes called “adaptation displacement”:
Adaptation displacement is the phenomenon by which a derivative work becomes successful enough to overshadow the original work completely.
Jaws, for example. Anyone mentioning Jaws probably means the movie, not the novel. They may not even know there was a novel or if they do, they may think that the novel is a novelization of the film.
Now, it’s possible that Stephen King is immune to this process, being a sales behemoth, but I think not. And I am not the only person to think even King is victim to adaptation displacement. Take King’s 1974’s debut novel Carrie: mention it and people are likely to think you mean the 1976 Brian De Palma film or maybe the 2002 Bryan Fuller adaptation (which I have not seen) or the 2013 Kimberly Pierce adaptation (which I have also not seen). Or even the Broadway musical (!!!).
I read the novel first and so for me, Carrie will always be the Signet mass market paperback about an unpopular girl: her first date, how she was transformed from outcast to queen of the ball, and how in the end she finally embraced her inner potential.
