Book #108: Carrie

Book #108: Carrie by Stephen King

August 15, 2014

Since I started this whole “reading challenge,” I’d had this kind of unofficial rule in my head, that I wouldn’t read a book by the same author twice in the same year. I kind of read two books credited to Dennis Lehane this year, though he technically edited and contributed to one, and authored the other. With my reading of Carrie, I’m officially broken the unofficial rule. Oh, well. No more rules; I always enjoy my reading best when I just read whatever the hell I want to, anyway.

So Carrie was King’s debut novel. It’s the book that gave him international attention and fame, and because of the film starring Sissy Spacek, it’s a well-known story, particularly the prom scene (which actually went down differently than how it’s portrayed in the film). I think King was my age when the book was published, in fact. I can definitely see how this first novel would get a lot of attention, but I can also see how King’s writing has evolved since then. I usually find King’s work to be very character-driven, but in this case, I was reading to see how the whole prom night thing went down. See, even if I had never seen or heard of the movie, I would have had some idea that disaster was going to strike, as the narrative also includes fictional news clips, exerts from books about Carrie White, and transcripts of interviews with witnesses and survivors of what happened on prom night.

In his memoir On Writing, King admits that he didn’t like the character Carrie very much. He wrote her based on either outcast girls he witnessed when he was a teacher, or outcast girls from when he was in school, something like that. Every school has at least one girl, I think, who is the odd one out for some reason. Nowadays, it’d be most likely that she’s obese, and/or poor. In this case, of course, Carrie is an outcast because of her mother’s really really psychotic religious beliefs. She stands out in her homemade, modest clothing, and has stood out since the first day of kindergarten, when she went to her knees in the cafeteria to pray at lunch. Since then, her life at school has been a nightmare. She takes on the victim mentality of her against the world, and in such a hostile environment, why wouldn’t she?

I think most people can think of a time when they’ve been left out, or picked on. It doesn’t feel good at all. It would be awful to feel that way all the time. And most of the time, those kids who are ostracized don’t have any power in the situation. Nowadays, may schools are touting “anti-bullying” policies and even education programs. That may result in these outcasts being picked on in stealthier ways, or maybe just being ignored, period. Bullying is a really complex topic. Human beings are pack animals, and I think in some ways it’s instinctual to pick on the perceived weakest link. Does that excuse it? Absolutely not. But if adults are susceptible to this (and trust me, bullying happens in the “adult world,” too), then certainly children have a harder time reining this in.

I don’t necessarily think that bullying is inevitable. I’d like to think that we can all just get along, but adults have to set the example first. Anyway, Carrie, of course, is not such a powerless victim to her peers, because, of course, she has powers of telepathy. It’s repeatedly referred to the TK phenomena in the book. The news clips and book exerts and interviews are mostly from after Carrie’s death. It’s been acknowledged that Carrie possessed such powers, and used them to kill hundreds of people at her high school and throughout her small Maine community. The exerts from the book The Shadow Exploded, which questions the official investigation around Carrie White, points out that the TK phenomena (in King’s world) is genetic; in fact, at one point Carrie’s mother reflects on the fact that her own grandmother had “devil powers.” Another situation described at the end of the book makes it seem like the TK phenomena would skip two generations of women, so that a girl would have it if her great-grandmother did.

Carrie’s powers have been triggered in stressful situations, but the things that happened weren’t really in her control. When she was three, and had wandered into a neighbor’s backyard and talked to a girl in a small bikini, her mother had freaked out and taken a knife, threatening to cut her daughter’s eyes out. Little Carrie was so terrified that hail rained from the sky onto the White bungalow, then the furniture flew all over the house, and then rocks fell from the sky, destroying the roof. That’s the one big thing that Carrie did with her powers, before prom night. Obviously, the little girl was under major duress.

Then, when Carrie got her period (a major biological event for every young woman), and was traumatized when her classmates pelted her with tampons and pads and screamed at her in the showers, she suddenly had more strength than ever. She was now able to control things, and she started to train her powers. She had nothing sinister in mind, not at first. Any violent thoughts that she had about Them (how she thought of her classmates who ostracized her) would be kind of normal for an angry young outcast; I didn’t think she was going to use her powers for harm. No, it was after the cruel prom night prank that she reminded herself that she had powers…then, keeping control of her mind, she herself got out of control, consumed by the years of anger and hurt that she’d felt.

Here’s an interesting difference between the original movie and the book. In the movie, as soon as everyone starts reacting to the spilled blood (shocked laughter, etc), Carrie does her bug-eyed thing and starts hurting people, flinging them into walls, and setting the place on fire as she stands up on the stage, then walks out amidst the construction she has caused. In the book, it’s quite different. When she’s drenched in blood and being laughed at, she flees. When she falls down in the front lawn of the school, that’s when she remembers her powers. She’s safely outside the auditorium doors when she starts the electrical fire, which would eventually lead to the school’s explosion. She then goes through the streets and leaks out gasoline from the gas stations, which eventually start fires of there own. That’s just a few things that she did to cause the deaths of maybe 500 people in her small town.

The scene with her mother is different, too. Her mother does stab her; Carrie (almost calmly) gets her mother’s heart to stop, killing her. But she doesn’t express her regret at killing her mother right away; she doesn’t mentally cause the house to collapse around them. It is consumed in the fire that Carrie started on their street, along with other houses. Carrie leaves to go burn down a local bar (in her mother’s honor, I guess), and she ends of dying in the parking lot there, having overexerted herself, and having the stab wound in her shoulder.

King definitely started off his career as a professional novelist with a bang, and I’d still say that  Carrie is his best-known work. Is it his best? No, but it’s far from the worst King that I’ve read, too. If I didn’t feel like the characters drove the story, I can at least say that they were complex, as I would expect from King characters. Margaret White was interesting, as she grapples with horrible guilt from sleeping with her husband before they were married; she even got pregnant with Carrie before they were married, and she seems to think that that’s why her husband died, and why her daughter has “evil powers.” She had a violent episode in high school; she saw a classmate smoking a cigarette, and proceeded to beat this person with her purse. Her father, a bar owner himself, was killed by a drunk patron. It’s pretty easy to see how Carrie became the way that she did, but I’d be even more interested in seeing how Margaret got her twisted religious views, so twisted that she won’t even go to a church to worship, but will only do so at home. Besides situations with her grandmother and her daughter, it doesn’t seem like much from Margaret’s life was “phenomenal,” but I still think it would make a very interesting story.