‘Carrie’ by Stephen King
In my review of On Writing by Stephen King I alluded to Carrie and the circumstances under which it came to be published. It was 1974 and King and his wife Tabitha were living paycheck to paycheck - he in teaching and laundry, she at Dunkin’ Donuts - when, one fateful night, his agent called to tell him that Doubleday had purchased the rights to Carrie for the princely sum of four hundred thousand dollars, half of which would be his. King had already been writing for several years at this point, selling the odd short story and collecting rejection slips, but it was with Carrie that he forged a legitimate writing career, one which has been running like clockwork ever since. Anyway, enough context, just what exactly is Carrie all about?
Carrie White is sixteen years old and living in the small town of Chamberlain, Maine when, with the arrival of her first menstrual period, she discovers that she has psychic powers - telekinesis, to be specific. Following a traumatic incident in the school’s communal showers (think running water, blood, and the worst humiliation any teenage girl could ever imagine) Carrie finds that she can move objects without touching them and bend most matter to her will. A lifelong misfit, Carrie endures bullying both at school and at home - her mother Margaret is a Bible-toting nutjob who refers to female breasts as ‘dirty pillows’ and neglects to explain menstruation to her teenage daughter. Because of this, Carrie believes she is bleeding to death and is mystified by the shower of sanitary napkins being rained down on her by her cackling classmates. One of these classmates, a malevolent blonde named Chris Hargensen, is stripped of her prom privileges for her part in the incident and, along with her latest beau and a few of his no-good friends, she hatches a plan to get revenge on Carrie White. However Carrie White is no ordinary girl, and Hargensen’s revenge plot has catastrophic consequences for the entire town of Chamberlain.
Carrie is pure entertainment; a blood-soaked, fire-ravaged book which begs to be read in a single setting. It is about as un-literary as a novel can be but, hell, it is good fun all the same. Stephen King is known for his formidable, no-holds-barred imagination and his innate ability to tell stories and Carrie, the little high school novel that started it all, provides ample evidence of this. From the innovative Q&A sequences to the not-too-distant future setting, everything about Carrie attests to the fact that Stephen King is a born storyteller. The novel may be a touch dated, as King himself admits in the introduction, but it certainly hasn’t lost its power to grip; the suspense is still there, as strong as ever. With another adaptation of Carrie due out later this year - I doubt it will better the Brian DePalma version of 1975 but, hey, at least they’re trying - I thought it ripe for plundering. I will now leave you with my favourite passage, perhaps the most enduring image to come out of either book or film.
'Carrie was standing in front of them, perhaps seventy feet away. The high beams picked her out in ghastly horror-movie blacks and whites, dripping and clotted with blood. Now much of it was her own. The hilt of the butcher knife still protruded from her shoulder, and her gown was covered with dirt and grass stain. She had crawled much of the distance from Carlin Street, half fainting, to destroy this roadhouse - perhaps the very one where the doom of her creation had begun. She stood swaying, her arms thrown out like the arms of a stage hypnotist, and she began to totter toward them.’
Creepy, right? But wonderfully so.
This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in January 2013.