Carrie (1974)

This review is posted on my blog

What happens when you mix high school, crazy, and supernatural powers? Carrie, that's what! This was my first venture into the world of Stephen King. I know what you're thinking how did this girl escape Stephen King for 25 years? Surely she's encountered it and just doesn't know it! Well my friends, you would be wrong. I was busy reading and re-reading, The Hobbit, and Harry Potter, and perusing the forums for fan theories. So now, years past when I should have been exposed to things everyone knows about, I'm trying to catch up. A wonderful woman I work with suggested to me that I start with Carrie so I did.

The first thing that struck me about this book was that it was wonderfully written. Even the sporadic writing style of jumping from narrative, to documents and back again oddly worked. The only thing I knew about Stephen King was that he's 'that horror guy with a million books' so I was under the impression that someone with that many books could not possibly be that high quality. Boy was I wrong!

While I didn't find this scary, I thought it was a brutal view of a tortured high school student with exaggerated consequences. The frank discomfort that this book gives the reader is so effective in getting it's message across.

The way this book is designed you know from the beginning it's not going to end well, but I still had that hope that if Carrie could just hang in there until after high school, things might be OK.

I was very excited to find that this is also the first novel that Mr. King wrote, and that I can continue through his books chronologically (I love chronological reading!) and see his writing progress!

I would absolutely recommend this book to every high school student. Perhaps if more students put themselves in the head of the 'losers' they would be a little nicer. I would also recommend this to almost anyone, as it is an excellent book. ( )

Highly disappointing. Narration style, composed of book excerpts/court proceedings/etc, felt chunky, awkward and highly annoying. Climax in the middle of the book just took all the interest out of the second half, which dragged on and on with unnecessary and boring details. I guess the idea was to make us imagine telekinesis as a real phenomenon in everyday life but easy story flow and readability were murdered in the process. The story itself was interesting enough but I felt that the narration style didn't let it shine through and you could only glimpse it here and there, lamenting a little story that could have been... ( )

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I am probably one of the last people on Earth that hasn’t read a Stephen King book. Carrie is the first book I decided to read. People have been suggesting it to me for a while, and it seemed like a nice short bit of introduction to Stephen’s horror world.

Also, a special thank you to my friend Dave, for constantly recommending Stephen King books to me, until I finally decided to listen to him. He seemed to be right! Don’t forget to go and follow him - he is amazing!

Now - Carrie.

A book about a girl that lives with her crazy religious mother in a creepy house. A girl who is being bullied at school all the time. A story about a girl that has the ability to move objects as she wishes. And a prom night, where everything escalates.

Carrie is a sixteen year old girl. And she has been raised by her mother, who is a religious person in a - not healthy way. When Carrie misbehaves, she is sent to a closet to pray for the whole day. Even though Carrie doesn’t share her mother’s beliefs, she can’t really stand up and fight for herself.

The plot gets a grip when Carrie has her first period at the age of sixteen. She thinks she will bleed to death. And all her classmates are laughing at her, because she is stupid. And throw tampons her way. And as I am reading this, I keep thinking - what kind of mother won’t tell her child about menstruation, and puberty, and all the normal teenage phases a kid has to go through while growing up?

This moment, in the school bathroom, is the moment Carrie finds out about her powers.
And a few weeks later, a terrible thing happens.

This is a horror story, but the horror doesn’t lie in what Carrie did, but what led her to do that. Who it is to blame, and why things escalated the way they did.

Stephen King described bullying in its most painful and real way, and the consequences it can lead to. And it does happen, in every school, to a lot of children all over the world each day. A sometimes, most of the times, they are bullied only because they are different, not because they are bad.

This is a story that silently stands up to bullying, and by doing that raises such a strong voice in every corner of the world.

And remember - if you are the bully - think twice before you say things. Words can hurt, and they can result in bad things happening. Think twice about why you say what you say. The classmate of yours might have a talent you don’t know of.

And if you are the bullied child - also remember - you are kind and beautiful, no matter what everyone says. You shouldn’t let people bring you down. And we have all been bullied while growing up. Once you reach a certain age, people stop caring, and you stop caring what people think, and then, finally, you can be comfortable and happy with who you are!

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**Carrie** was a good book, and I think its biggest failing was that it felt like a great book that followed a blueprint to greatness. But you can't say that the blueprint doesn't work – because it does. **Carrie** is one of those horror books that make very clear that the supernatural is not the stuff horrors are made of. That's reserved for regular humans and their actions and decisions. Stephen King is really good at painting humans in their day-to-day lives, with both their kindness and their cruelty. His pacing is also awesome and reminded me a bit of a tuned-down Vonnegut. ( )

Una joven con poderes sobrenaturales decide vengarse de sus compañeros de clase, que se han burlado de ella.