#BookReview ‘Carrie’ by Stephen King

Ok, yes I know I am about as ambitious as the next book blogger, but sadly with the staying power of one of those little sticky spidermen who flick flacks down a wall, but here we go again!

Remember them? You got them in party bags and threw them at walls then you got (or, well, I got) yelled at cos they left this weird stain behind? Yep, one of them in human form, that’s me!

NOT content with going through the Stephen King oeuvre based in Castle Rock, The Dresden Files, ALL of Agatha Christie’s books plus new ones being released, I have kind of gotten a little bit addicted to podcasts. In particular, ‘The Loser’s Club’ podcast, which reviews all King’s books whilst taking a side eye at adaptations, good, bad or indifferent.

And when it comes to ‘‘Carrie’, there are way more than I realised!

So basically, the podcast is like listening to a bunch of friends discussing your favourite books, to the point where you are joining in the conversation and replying to talk points to an audience of a bewildered dog, and cats who never rated you much anyway.

The Consequence of Sound who make ‘The Loser’s Club,’ brought up so much that I decided to go back to the very beginning, and re-look at a book I haven’t read for quite a long time….

*Warning! Here there may be spoilers for those who have not read it…*

About the book…

Stephen King’s legendary debut, about a teenage outcast and the revenge she enacts on her classmates, is a Classic. CARRIE is the novel which set him on the road to the Number One bestselling author King is today.

Carrie White is no ordinary girl.

Carrie White has the gift of telekinesis.

To be invited to Prom Night by Tommy Ross is a dream come true for Carrie – the first
step towards social acceptance by her high school colleagues.

But events will take a decidedly macabre turn on that horrifying and endless night as she
is forced to exercise her terrible gift on the town that mocks and loathes her . . .

First published in 1974, the first problem with Carrie is finding an accurate synopsis of the story-each one of them makes it look like a revenge tale, focussing on the end of the book not the journey King took to get there.

As a reader who encountered this novel first in my teens, then as a young mother, and now in my early 40’s, this book reads differently at each stage of my life. As a teen you are pretty much of the ‘fuck yeah the townspeople deserved everything they got!’

As an adult however, you aren;t skippin g past the story for the gory bits etc, you begin to take note of non linear fashion that King uses, his literary techniques used to ampliffy your emotional reaction to the prom Night Massacre.

Interviews, biographies, graffiti and even scientific reports are used between Carrie’s own thoughts to both bring you into the sad and tragic tale of her existence, whilst affording a distance as people outside of Carrie’s immediate sphere try and rationalise just what happened. In  an effort to stop this happening again, everything is pulled apart and dissected, but amongst the many voices, the true one is that of Carrietta White, daughter of Margaret, a high school pariah and unsophisticated , unworldly outcast.

Partly because of her own awkward siconnect with the world, partly because of her mother being known to the entire neighbourhood of her small Maine town for knocking on doors with religious pamphlets, Carrie is an easy target for exclusion and ridicule.

The book opens with what should have been a straight forward post gym ritual, the communal shower. Shouting and catcalls ringing off the tiles as water splashes and girls squeal, noises of a very differnt kind begin to merge from the steam and movement as Carrie is revealed to be experiencing her very first menstrual period.

This is such a game changing and overwhelming thing for any young woman to go through, let alone in public, and let alone for a girl with no support groups like Carrie.

I imagine every young woman who has read this particular scene has winced and held this to themself as the worst possible humiliation to happen to them-the monthly fear of being caught out, having to go home from school for strikethrough etc is a very real terror. But with Carrie, this is manifest in that she genuinely does not know what is going on.

She thinks that she is dying.

As girl after girl cottons on to what is happening,they turn into pack animals whose disgust is exhibited by throwing sanitary towels at her and chanting.

Intervention in the form of the gym teacher, Miss Desjardin, comes too late for Carrie whose humiliation is now set in stone for the rest of her school days.

Her way of dealing with her own disgust at Carrie’s apparent inability to help herself is projected outwards towards the girls-she demands, and gets, punishment for all the class on the understanding that non compliance with ehr detentions will forfeit their prom tickets.

And here is where the wronged girl becomes the focal point for everything that leads to a stunning denouement, a moment of reckoning with such power-forgive the pun-that even now, over 40 years later, ‘Carrie‘ is phrase which nearly everyone knows, and relates, in the main, to the Prom Night scene . It has become short hand for a powerful revenge, a well met revenge on people who made this young girl’s life pure hell.

Googling ‘Carrie’ comes up with the film versions and reviews way before actually mentioning the novel, so I get the feeling that lots of people feel that there is very little difference between reading the book and watching the De Palma version.

However, on revisiting it, I found that there was so much more depth in the book, much more cleverness and eloquency in the female narratives than Stephen King often gets ridiculed for.

It is supposed that he cannot write sex scenes and he is not much better at writing women’s roles.

However, I would like to hold ‘Carrie’ up as an example of him not only inhabiting the mind and emotions of a regular girl-Susan Snell- he manages to capture with pinpoint accuracy the mentality of teen girl bullies in Chris Hargensen, the mother figures of Margaret White contrasted with Sue’s mum, and then Rita Desjardin-not a mother but responsible for the phsyical wellbeing of all of these girls.

The ‘blossoming’ of a young girl into a woman, as signified by the beginning of the menstrual cycle and development of secondary sexual characteristics signifies her ability to breed, and in this, the aspects of the female characters extend from disgust, manipulation and goading towards the others in their life.

Margaret sees Carrie as the symbolic and actual representation of the fact that she ever had sex. Her daily repentance is tied to religious fanatacism and trying to keep the world safe from Carrie as much as it is keeping Carrie safe from the world.

Sue uses sex and the promise of sex to manouevre her boyfriend Tommy Ross, into taking Carrie to the prom. No good deed goes unpunished and whilst Sue again feels this is penance for their behaviour in the locker room, it is more about her relieving her feelings of guilt,at least to start with, thanbeing altruistic.

Chris uses sex as a manipulation with her partner, Billy Nolan, when she cannot get her father to overturn Rita’s dententions. In forfeiting her prom ticket, she plots her revenge on Carrie and for that she needs a strong man, literally, to bring the house down.

And so the stage is set-the Prom Night is going to be rigged with Carrie and Tommy winning the King and Queen titles. And when they get on the stage, there will be the prank to pay for all pranks courtesy of Billy and his goons. And all of the audience will bear witness to the greatest humiliation you could imagine.

Think starting your periods in public is bad? Wait till you see what Chris and Billy have lined up for you….

Entitlement, privilege and expectation are all so heavily expressed in this book that it appears the work of a much older writer.

He inhabits the female perspective so well, he understands how Carrie sees this as one last chance to have a moment, a small one which will be the fulcrum to her existence, the night her life can really begin.

Sue sees it as redemption until too late, she realises that what she has done is set her classmates up as lambs to the slaughter.

Chris slams the pen shut behind them and provides the killing stroke.

Margaret sees it as her last chance to admit defeat and permanently tackle the blight of her life which is her daughter, a daughter who is unlike other girls.

For weird things happen whenever Carrie gets emotional, ever since she was a small child. And the advent of her period has brought out something which has lain dormant, boxed away by prayers and penance.

And on  Prom Night, it gets loose….

Whether Carrie has ultimate knowledge of what she does and becomes on that night, and the venegeance she wreaks is open to debate.

Whether it is deserved is another point of discussion. Her anger is an uncontrollable wave, boosted by years of being ignored and abused by those who should have shown her unconditional love. Those who should have protected her. Those who could have improved her life chances. Those with power made it impossible for there to be any other outcome.

As you read, the sense of futility and finality rises up from the pages, and the ultimate conclusion is that this was inescapable.

It makes you want to weep for the missed and lost opportunities, for Carrie (who you have a sinking feeling will have been dissected without impunity)and the lesson which wasn’t learnt.

If this had happened today, you can almost guarantee the girls would have filmed Carrie’s humiliation, and made her a worldwide cautionary tale for the outcast teenager.I would like to think that these so called enlightened times would have better safe guarding that would have identified, and removed, a girl like Carrie from a household like hers. It’s a small, fool’s hope.

This is a novel of terror, a novel of heart, a novel which resonates through its pages and leaves a lingering impression ,but no clue as to where the career of this writer would go to. It is short-for King-, he uses epistolary frameworks which foreshadow the Prom Night Massacre, whilst simultaneously providing the explanatory narrative that gets our priniciple cast to the school gym on that fateful night.

Carrie is meant to be the anti-hero. She is an outcast twice over -punished for her and her mother’s behaviours-and should know her place in the evolutionary chain. But she uses her inate power and instead of becoming a woman, she takes this dark gift and becomes a weapon. And she means to be the last one standing.

However, those who bore witness and survived, keep reminding you, the reader, that they were only kids. But so was Carrie.

*apologies for the multitude of thoughts, boy that really went to some places, huh!*

About the author…

Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His first crime thriller featuring Bill Hodges, ‘Mr Mercedes’, won the Edgar Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Both ‘Mr Mercedes’ and ‘End Of Watch’ received the Goodreads Choice Award for the Best Mystery and Thriller of 2014 and 2016 respectively.

King co-wrote the bestselling novel ‘Sleeping Beauties‘ with his son Owen King, and many of King’s books have been turned into celebrated films and television series including ‘The Shawshank Redemption‘, ‘Gerald’s Game’ and ‘It‘.

King was the recipient of America’s prestigious 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters. In 2007 he also won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife Tabitha King in Maine

Links-https://www.stephenking.com/

Twitter @StephenKing @HodderBooks @LosersClubPod 

Links-You can listen to the superb Constant Reader Podcast where Richard dissects both book and film with his special guests following this link.

There is also one of my other favourites, The Loser’s Club who chair regular discussions on all of King’s output, starting with quintessential classic, Carrie, via the link below-