"Plug it up, plug it up," yell Carrie's classmates in the extraordinary opening to Stephen King's debut novel. Carietta White, bullied for years at school, the daughter of a domineering, ultra-religious mother and the owner of unsuspected telekinetic powers, has just got her first period at the age of 16 while in the showers at school, and thinks she is bleeding to death.

"Carrie looked down at herself. She shrieked. The sound was very loud in the humid locker room," writes King.

"The laughter, disgusted, contemptuous, horrified, seemed to rise and bloom into something jagged and ugly, and the girls were bombarding her with tampons and sanitary napkins, some from purses, some from the broken dispenser on the wall."

That story, written by a 26-year-old teacher and laundry worker and published for the first time on 5 April 1974, would go on to transform King's life. Paperback rights sold for $400,000 (£240,000) to Signet Books, and the book itself "shook the horror field up like a bomb", says Ramsey Campbell, one of Britain's most respected horror writers. With millions of copies sold today, Carrie also launched the career of one of the world's bestselling novelists. "It's notable as a marker for what is to come: the career of the most influential horror novelist of his, or perhaps any, generation," says John Connolly, author of the Charlie Parker mystery thrillers.

"Although Carrie helped usher in a boom period of huge popularity for horror fiction, it's also a very strange and unusual book – uncompromising," believes American author Jeff VanderMeer. "Carrie changed the paradigm by announcing a very American form of horror that broke with the past. That process might've been ongoing anyway, but a lot of horror and weird fiction was still in a kind of post-MR James/Lovecraft mode of parchment and shadowy alleys and half-seen horrors, and here was King dropping buckets of blood over everything and making characterisation both more relaxed and more contemporary. But just as sophisticated, if more naturalistic, less stylised."

The novel retains its power to shock and disturb, as Carrie discovers her telekinesis, and goes on to attend what must surely be most memorable prom in literature. Written in a mix of voices, from third person narration to newspaper reports and academic papers, "to this day, the structure and voice still feel radical, and the characterisation of Carrie by a male writer remains startling," says horror author Adam Nevill. "The book's power endures. Carrie has the energy and vision of an idiosyncratic early work that burned its way out of a young writer who wasn't following conventions, or even second-guessing reader expectations; maybe it just had to be written in that way at that time. In hindsight, the fact that such an unusual book in a popular genre launched the most successful literary career in modern times, is the most encouraging and curious legacy of Carrie."

James Smythe, novelist and the Guardian's resident King expert, agrees. "One of the primary joys of Carrie for me – once I get past the astonishing jealousy that it was King's debut published novel, and that he was only 26 when it was published – is the structure," he says. "It was the first thing I can remember reading that showed me that a novel didn't simply have to be a linear single narrative. It uses so many different voices and ways of delivering the story that it's almost giddying; and it's astonishing assured and neat to boot."

The manuscript, though, was almost consigned to the bin, King recounts in On Writing, and the book might never have seen the light of publication if it were not for his wife Tabitha. It brought together a series of strands – his discovery when working as a janitor at a high school one summer that girls' showers had curtains, an article in LIFE magazine suggesting that some poltergeist activity might actually be telekinetic phenomena, and his memories of two girls at his own school, both dead, who would form the character of Carrie White. From these, he made "three single-spaced pages of a first draft, then crumpled them up in disgust and threw them away," he writes.

"I couldn't see wasting two weeks, maybe even a month, creating a novella I didn't like and wouldn't be able to sell. So I threw it away. The next night, when I came home from school, Tabby had the pages. She'd spied them while emptying my wastebasket, had shaken the cigarette ashes of the crumpled balls of paper, smoothed them out, and sat down to read them. She wanted me to go on with it, she said. She wanted to know the rest of the story. I told her I didn't know jack-shit about high school girls. She said she'd help me with that part," King says in On Writing. "I never got to like Carrie White and I never trusted Sue Snell's motives in sending her boyfriend to the prom with her, but I did have something there. Like a whole career. Tabby somehow knew it, and by the time I had piled up 50 single-spaced pages, I knew it, too."

Carrie's UK publisher, Philippa Pride at Hodder & Stoughton, says the book continues to sell strongly year on year, with a boost from a new film starring Chlöe Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore last year. But Brian De Palma's 1976 dramatisation, starring Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie, remains the definitive version.

"Part of the enduring appeal is the universal, timeless tale of a lonely girl wanting to fit in, be liked and go to the dance. Part of the underlying impulse for Steve's writing Carrie was to take the Cinderella fairy tale and twist it by its tail," says Pride. "He had also seen the damage religious fanaticism does at first hand, when kids raised in strictly fundamentalist homes have to try and exist in a secular world. It can be very hard for them."

"Steve once told me that he had intended for Carrie to leave one of her dancing shoes at the prom, as a tip of the hat to Cinderella," she adds, "but he simply forgot it".

Campbell believes that what brings the novel to "its own unique life" is the author's intensely precise focus on his characters, his genius for inhabiting their core, so that we don't just feel with them but seem almost to share their breaths".

"Even if you know the film, don't deny yourself the novel, with its spectacular trashing of the town and its piercing glimpse of a dying consciousness. Carrie prefigures any amount of great work to come, but it's secure within itself – a haunting experience," says the author. "Much as I admire De Palma's version, I find the book richer. Like many of the classics of the field it draws on popular myth – in its case surely a nightmare version of Cinderella's transformation for the ball, or indeed a twisted Ugly Duckling tale."

As well as the pig's blood and the stones raining from a clear sky, the horror of Carrie's hours shut in a closet by her revolting mother and the looming crucifixes, the novel also stands out for its unerring insights into life as a teenager, for King's moving and disturbing look at not fitting in. In the introduction to the novel, he writes of the "wavelength only other kids can pick up", which broadcasts "STRANGE! NOT LIKE US! KEEP AWAY!" about certain individuals. "It is like a pirate radio station of the heart. I can no longer pick up on that wavelength, but I can remember it very well," writes the author.

"I first read Carrie when I was 11," says the author Sarah Lotz, who writes horror as one half of writing duo SL Grey. "You couldn't have pried it out of my hands. I was being bullied at school at the time, and completely identified with Carrie's desire to fit in and her anguish at being sidelined. But I could escape when I was at home. Carrie couldn't. I remember desperately hoping that she'd find a way to escape her monstrous mother. Even back then I knew that King couldn't have ended the novel any other way – from word one it was clear Carrie was destined for a tragic end (and there's no coming back from committing a telekinetic Columbine-sized massacre). Deeply scarred by this, I made up my own ending, one in which Carrie ducks the prom, escapes, and basically becomes one of the X-Men (only more of a bad-ass). This hasn't stopped me putting my own characters through the mill though. Carrie taught me that sometimes you don't always get the endings you deserve."

Sarah Pinborough, the British horror novelist, is another writer to have been inspired by a young reading of the novel. "I read Carrie when I was about 10 or 11. It must have been the first King I read. It completely fascinated me with its tale of high-school tauntings and the need to fit in – in many ways so similar to the those I could identify with at English schools, and yet with the added glamour of American high school life that intrigued us all so much," she says. "Somewhere in my future puberty was waiting for me, a mysterious black magic I didn't want and was afraid of, and for me Carrie will always be about that terrible scene in the gym when her period first arrives and the enormous changes that come when shifting from being a child to being a woman. Stephen King has always been an inspiration to writers with his characterisation and in his portrayal of teenagers in Carrie, his first novel, I think he's at his deftest."