Carrie by Stephen King

The story of the picked on misfit who enacts revenge upon their tormentors is nothing new and today often brings with it terrible stories of unthinkable school massacres that many struggle to understand. Back in the 1970s, however, things like that didn’t happen, and those picked on by bullies either had to deal with the issue with their own fists and hope to god they could take the bully down, or spend the rest of their school life navigating the hallways differently everyday just so they wouldn’t get a whooping between bells, one which would just be an appetizer for the main feast after school. With the novel Carrie, however, Stephen King added an extra variable, one which gave the power of telekinesis to the victim, a power that could be used to enact a swift and harsh revenge upon all those that had made her life a living hell.

The novel starts out with a newspaper story, one which recalls an interesting incident at the White’s residence inhabited by Margaret White and her young daughter Carrie. The incident involved a sudden shower of rocks and boulders, ones which seemed to simply fall out of the crisp blue sky onto the house and lawn, but only that house and lawn, while dozens of neighbors stood around watching. After that the story jumps into a traditional novel narrative, and introduces us to Carrie, a high school misfit who has been the butt of jokes ever since her first day of school when she got down on her knees to pray in the cafeteria before eating lunch, who is just finishing up her post gym class shower. Unfortunately for Carrie things are about to get really bad because for the first time ever she is about to have her period while she stands there naked in the hot shower spray. Making the situation worst, her mother has never taken it upon herself to explain this normal monthly cycle to her, so when she sees the blood coming out of her ‘womanly parts’ she screams bloody murder and begs her fellow students to help her, which, of course, results in them throwing tampons at her while shouting Plug it up! a scene I’m sure many horror fans are familiar with and can picture easily thanks to the wonderful movie Carrie (1976). Not long after that Carrie becomes the victim of another bloody mess, this time thanks to a bucket of pigs blood that is dumped on her as she and Tommy Ross (the boyfriend of Susan Snell who feels guilty about the shower room scene and tells him to ask Carrie to the dance) are crowned Kind and Queen of the school prom. This time, however, her classmates don’t get the last laugh and it isn’t just them who are going to pay the price, not when the town of Chamberlain, Maine has allowed these girls to act this way all their lives. Nope. This times its Carrie’s turn to make people cry, and cry they will.

As many of you know the novel Carrie was turned into a wonderful movie a few years after its publication, one which launched the careers of several different actors and actresses, and helped turn Stephen King into a household name. However, there is much within the book that never gets shown on the movie screen, stuff that makes the story of Carrie even more heartbreaking, which is why I urge horror fans to read the novel. It is also an interesting supplement to the movie because it goes beyond the story of Carrie and takes a look at what many ‘experts’ would do after the horrible prom night events, that being to examine the situation to death and publish dozens of books and articles and interviews on the subject, ones which try to understand what happened and why, all of which is nicely interwoven into the narrative flow of the story. It is interesting to note that these fictitious books excerpts and articles on the prom night disaster and Carrie White were added after the story was completed because it was too short to be published as a novel and needed more content, a hurdle which Stephen King was eager to get over because his family desperately needed the money a novel would bring, his five thousand dollar a year teaching salary not enough to keep his family of four afloat for much longer. Of course, even then he had no idea if the novel would sell or if he would get another rejection letter from Doubleday, but thankfully his determination paid off and the novel was published. Little did anyone know at the time but the publication of this novel would be a defining moment in the history of the horror genera, one which his own wife was a major part of as well since she was the one that pulled the first few pages out of the trashcan after he got frustrated with the story and threw it away. We all owe Tabitha King a big thank you for that.