Carrie by: Stephen King

 

Stephen King’s Carrie is one of his many novels that has entered the public consciousness through cultural osmosis.  If you haven’t read it, you have likely seen one of its many film adaptations (or if you’re unlucky its infamous musical adaptation).  If you haven’t seen an adaptation, you likely have seen it parodied or referenced, or at least the 1976 Brian de Palma film version parodied or referenced.  Despite this, the novel, King’s debut, is markedly different in terms of style to much of his other work and by necessity how it possibly could be adapted into a different medium.  Carrie is a novel in the grand tradition of epistolary tales, mostly told through newspaper articles, interviews, and government reports, though interspersed with traditional prose to actually provide connecting tissue for the plot.  The story goes that King struggled with writing the early pages of the novel, threw them out in frustration, and his wife Tabitha is responsible for reading the early pages and convincing King to continue with the novel.  She was entirely correct to do so, Carrie in my estimation is a contender for one of King’s best and it was his debut.  That obviously isn’t to say that King peaked here, it’s more to say that King has always had the potential to write perfect pieces of fiction and execute them perfectly.  Despite writing this novel at age 27, King actually characterizes the teenagers incredibly well, he understands the cruelty that can be inflicted on those outside of cliques and how the adults in the situation have a tendency to make situations worse, often knowing they are doing so.  Carrie at its heart is a look into teenage life and King’s own views on religious fundamentalism, it being the main reason why Carrie the character is unable to properly socialize and become an outcast.  The cruelty to Carrie at the hands of her peers is very specifically due to the societal role that women have largely been forced into, especially in terms of body image expectations.

 

The style of the novel keeps the reader at a distance throughout, King writes formally, insisting on searching for the logical reason as to why there was so much death and destruction on that fateful prom night.  There is ever present narration explaining that telekinesis, often abbreviated as TK in the novel, is a relatively new phenomenon being studied, so the way Carrie’s telekinetic abilities are played almost undersells them until the climax of the novel.  The climax takes approximately half the novel’s page count, yet King pulls this incredible trick of making it feel frantic and almost impossible to follow exactly what form the destruction took.  King is careful to make it so the reader while placing Carrie responsible, wonders exactly how much of it was under her control.  It’s an extended sequence where every gas station in town ends destroyed and firefighters from forty miles away end up in town to clear away the rubble.  King is also particularly clear about how the aftermath effected the survivors, constantly questioned by the United States government trying to get to the bottom of events without ever really being able to understand what happened.  The ending of Carrie is particularly effective at leaving the ending unsettled.  A friend of mine interprets Carrie as not horror, but tragedy and he is partially right, but King is writing both tragedy and horror.  The ending is the ending of a horror story, it’s an uneasy ending.  People have to pick up the pieces and there is a hint that there will be more Carrie Whites in the world, her name became synonymous with unexplained arson and freakouts.

 

Overall, Carrie is such a standout debut it finds itself among my personal favorites of the works of Stephen King that I read.  It’s the novel that gave King his career for good reason, Tabitha King clearly responsible for assisting in the characterization of the female characters and saving the novels.  It’s a novel that hits deeply on the human condition of cruelty, dissecting in a way how children become outcasts in society propped up by the selfish adults with their own vision put towards their own interests.  It’s a novel that’s impossible to put down once you start, I read it in a single day.  10/10.