Did Stephen King take a lesson from Bram Stoker?

Taking a break from crime fiction, I picked up Stephen King's Carrie, his first novel, the one that transformed him from an English teacher sending short stories to men's magazines into a novelist with a brilliant career ahead.

I missed Carrie and Brian de Palma's film version when they came out because in 1974 I was transforming myself from a graduate student into an assistant professor. The job market was brutal and I had no time for pop culture.

I really enjoyed Carrie. Mostly, I think, because King is writing about real people in real situations as he observed them (he describes this process in On Writing, pp. 77-82). I cared about the characters, what they did, and what happened to them. 

I was also fascinated by his narrative technique. His use of scenes told in the third person from different characters' points of view is conventional, but he interrupts the flow of scenes with texts from reports written after the climactic event: an academic study, a memoir, news accounts, letters. 

These parallel texts do many things: foreshadowing, backstory, commentary. They do lots of things that are often hard to write and hard to read when they come from the principal narrator. King wisely keeps each inserted text brief.

Another novel that does this brilliantly is Dracula by Bram Stoker, also of course a horror story. The first page describes the novel as a collection of documents. Later in the book one of the characters sits down to transcribe a collection of letters, telegrams, diary entries, and  news reports and thus we learn how the novel we are reading came to be . . . supposedly.