Carrie

I read Carrie in middle school--it was probably my fourth Stephen King book, after It and Night Shift and Eyes of the Dragon--and although I enjoyed it, this second read made me realize that much of the nuance and impact went over my head. Back then, I didn't have a real understanding of extremist religion or the impact of bullying. Carrie herself was so naive that she as a character felt unbelievable because she was so outside my experience, and I didn't understand how sheltered an extremist parent *could* keep their child if they so desired. It was the same with the religion--it was so extreme, so outside my experience, it felt unbelievable. Thirty years later, reading this book as an adult who's well aware of all of these factors and show more how painfully believable the character and situation are, telekinesis aside, made for a very different read, even when I went in knowing what to expect. The sheer power of the everyday horror, of the bullying and extremism and lack of love even between family, has such an impact, and although I felt the hatred in the story as a child reading the book, it hits much differently now.

I think this is probably a book everyone should read, to be honest, horror lover or not. There's a power to the story and to the humanity of it that goes beyond the story, uncomfortable as it may be. show less

'Carrie' was Stephen King's first published novel (1974) although his fourth to be written. It is an act of exorcism of teenage shame as becomes clear if you read King's own introduction to this edition. It is as not so much about bullying but the emotional result of doing nothing about bullying.

You can come down in your sympathies on one of two sides. For Carrie as lumpenproletariat scapegoat and victim of the viciousness that is the American High School or for a largely innocent town and youth destroyed by her vengeful rage. This moral ambiguity makes this a major first horror novel.

King himself tends to squirm a bit, recognising his own past cowardice and that of others, but countering that this is just what happens when you are an show more undeveloped human, a teenager. His instincts are towards the small town and all the lives lost -consequentialist to the core.

But he knows he is on shaky moral ground. It is the honesty of his writing that shines through - Carrie destroys because she has been destroyed. The world as she sees it has done nothing (whether family or school) but been other than active or complicit in her destruction.

One could say, against conventional morality, that her violence is heroic. She has been pushed into it by society (whether a lousy upbringing or 'normie' cruelty). The alternative to her existentialist revolt would be lonely suicide as was the outcome for one of King's own adolescent models.

Given that Carrie is essentially super-normal 'psycho-kinetic' (which might stand in for any other apparent 'abnormality' like autism or sexual difference), the bullying of the adolescent school girls that drives her into extremity looks like the final effort at survival of her essential self.

So, while King comes down clearly on the side of the small town and normality (as he does more obviously and cleanly in 'Salem's Lot' against the more obviously inhuman), he has the courage here to lay out choices for us - the freak's survival (though she be human) or ours (as the normal).

This is not a trivial matter because the mentality and revolt of Carrie could be read back easily enough into the conditions that lead to at least some acts of terrorism. The book stops us short, forcing us to make some awkward and defining judgements on the nature of good and evil.

If you do not end up with some sympathy for the dying Carrie after all she has gone through and do not despise the adolescent cruelty that led her to her murderous rage then you are implicitly complicit not only in the cruelty wreaked on her but on all similar cruelties on similar social scapegoats.

The most interesting aspect of the novel thus lies not in understanding Carrie or the cruelty of adolescent High School girls but in the presentation of the 'good' normal people - Susan Snell, Tommy Ross, the gym teacher Rita Desjarfin.

These people have all the right sentiments but their empathy tends to be retrospective, introspective and redolent of cowardice. They try to make things better only to make things worse. Whether intentionally or not, King has encapsulated the weakness of the American liberal.

This is psychological horror at its best. The apocalyptic end far exceeds what any film version could do with the story but the reader's discomfort comes not from the cathartic death rate but from the way King weaves his fingers into our reservoirs of personal guilt and shame.

The result is an odd mix of fatalism and implicit moral instruction. The reader is really being asked to absolve themselves because they are weak and can be no other than they are. Little can be done about endemic bullying and literary sympathy is about as far as we can go in dealing with it.

There is conservatism and despair in this positioning. There is no questioning here of scapegoating or of the American High School system, only a vague implicit appeal to withdraw from direct complicity or engagement lest you make things worse. Maybe start by being kind from the beginning if you can.

There is one flaw in the book that detracts from the whole. King (still at the start of his career) periodically introduces a tentative bit of literary experimentation that jars by splitting paragraphs with bracketed 'thoughts'. This is a shame because it works at the point of crisis but not otherwise.

Fortunately, in Salem's Lot, King gave up on trying to be literary (the curse of culture) and went for what he was to do best - be a story teller of genius who writes extremely well. Otherwise, Carrie has all the hall marks of King - readable prose that wants you to keep reading.

We can see why the book has been filmed three times. It meets the twin needs of exorcising Americans' ambiguous relationship to their formative adolescent high school experience and presenting an uncomfortable but decisive way of exorcising guilt and shame over 'normal' behaviours.

But, at the end of the day, I am sure I am not alone in seeing Carrie, the individual, as the focus of my sympathy and the flaccid, cowardly, unthinking if (mostly) 'innocent' small town victims as far less interesting and, ultimately, far less worthy of redemption. show less

Okay, let's talk.
Spoiler alert, I'm not a Stephen King fan. I never have been. I've read The Body, I read Shawshank, I read Later. All novellas, all unbearably long-winded. Every couple of years, I try to give him another shot, and he's just not for me. If you like Stephen King, that's great! I'm happy for you! But I'm going to challenge you to think about why you like his work. Is it nostalgia? Is it shock value? Is it writing style?
I don't read a lot of books written by men, and that's because they're all written for other men. This book starts and ends with a teenage girl getting her period- an experience Mr. King has never had, and it's so obvious he has no idea what he's talking about. Stephen King got the idea for Carrie when he show more was in a girl's high school locker room, and he had a fantasy about the very situation that opens this novel. Sorry? He had a what? I know he wrote this book 50 years ago, but I think SK should be punished for this one. He should, at the very least, be psychoanalyzed.
If nothing else, Stephen King is so brave for writing about something he couldn't possibly know anything about. He's so brave for deciding to write his very first book and immediately jumping into a description of a vulnerable and naked teenage girl. He's so brave for describing her breasts over and over(and over) again. He's so brave for writing MORE THAN ONE description of rape in which the women change their mind and "enjoy it" halfway through. He's so brave because I can't think of any reason someone would ever do that other than to piss off every reader.
Overwhelming misogyny aside, this book was sooo boring. I didn't feel connected to the characters, their struggles, the story, or anything else. The pacing of the entire novel is slow but also panicked somehow?
I hated every second of this mess. King should have left this idea in the trash where it belongs. Next time you see me add a Stephen King to my CR, just go ahead and block me for a week so you don't have to hear the rant. show less

After being teased by her classmates when she gets her first menstrual cycle, Carrie White remembers and strengthens her telekinetic powers -- with deadly consequences when the bullying continues on prom night.

I did not realize until I had finished reading it that this was Stephen King's debut novel. I knew it was an earlier one and recognized themes and ideas that he's continued to play with and refine over the years, including telekinesis in minors, deadly fires, small towns upended by traumatic events, and -- most importantly -- that the true horror is not the supernatural, but people themselves. In this case, that takes the form of abusive religious zealotry and small-minded teens that won't stop teasing/pranking no matter how much show more harm they commit. Like the character of Sue Snell, I found myself pitying Carrie more than anything else. Yes, her reaction is outsized and she takes out innocent people alongside those who did her wrong, but she never really had a chance -- especially with her dangerously unwell mother.

The novel is a mix of typical narrative and bits of other (fictional) materials, such as court testimony and survivor memoirs. It makes for an interesting read that builds tension; you know something bad is coming as referenced by these materials. It's the kind of foreshadowing that King does so well. Even with a story as massively popular as this one that I knew most of the plot beforehand, I still felt the anticipation of waiting for the big 'reveal' of what would happen.

For the audiobook, Sissy Spacek does an excellent job as reader. There are parts of the book that haven't aged super great, but that's to be expected with an older title. Overall, it's still a good read worth the time. show less

Carrie is King's first published novel. I tend to prefer King's earlier novels--they're tauter and nothing is scarier in my opinion than his next two novels, Salem's Lot and The Shining which display him at the top of his powers; it's those two novels I'd recommend as an introduction to King. That said, even though even King himself finds Carrie unskilled compared to his later work, he also called it "raw" in its "power to hurt and horrify" and I fully agree with that. The title character Carrie White is that girl in high school we all know. The one who being weird and isolated was the target for plenty of cruelty. Even those of us just plain nerdy at that age can often remember that horrific side of high school, the experience of being show more humiliated by bullies, and can identify with Carrie despite her weirdness; King taps into that adolescent experience vividly. Reading the description of everything from her awkward looks to how she's treated by her awful mother and her peers is at times exquisitely painful.

This is described as an "epistolary" novel and there are frequent extracts from newspapers, scholarly journals, as well as letters, together with touches of first person account. Epistolary is not usually a structure I find appealing, but most of the narrative is carried by the usual third person, and this novel fully pulled me in and gripped me from the start. I think the film was was terrific--Sissy Spacek made a very memorable Carrie--but read the book. I think it's even more horrifying and powerful. show less

Stephen King is still alive and so I wonder at his not directly addressing the several instances of troubling racist language in this edition—likely an unfortunate stamp of the time, but would it be so hard to write a new foreword that says as much? The book itself is fine, very much a first-time author book, lots of cringey language in terms of cliches or slang that no longer make sense (if it ever did). The structure was interesting with the interspersed “excerpts” from court testimony, scientific papers, books, etc. I found it gimmicky at first but by the end I liked how all the various perspectives wove together and reached for something deeper than just the story of a girl trod down in horrible ways—compelling by itself, show more but reading an almost throwaway snippet about all the proposed ways to deal with others with telekinesis (eg locking them up) was far more chilling because hello—of course that is how we would handle it in the US. Why be nuanced and compassionate when you can instead destroy, imprison, or torture in the name of science and knowledge accrual? Carrie, very much a caricature at the book’s start, transforms into someone I feel genuine sympathy for by the end—not as someone who exacts relentless revenge, but as a little girl who could have thrived in love, who attempted to give the world a chance no matter how much it rebuffed her, and who ended up succumbing to the only recourse she saw left to her. show less

(I mentioned in my Matilda review the similarity between Dahl's book and Carrie, and I'd like to proceed in this vein, as if the latter were a sequel to the former). Miss Honey has died a miserable death and now Miss Trunchbull, a.k.a. Margaret White, has adopted Carrie, née Matilda, and they now hate each other more than ever. But it's not a game anymore of ghostly spirits and chalkboards: Carrie has just had her first period, and all the energy and bloodlust that she has had to bury inside all these years is ready to come rushing out. Margaret White, however, is not the only one in danger, because all the other children are growing up too and resent Carrie of her differences. Carrie has always had a stalwart heart, but everyone has a show more breaking point. Such a divine creation like a telekinetic girl can only have a disastrous ending. show less