20. 'Carrie' (1974).

Carrie - Beware: Spoilers ahead.

King’s first published novel, Carrie, is a rare example of a story that has retained its power over forty years.

It is the story of a high-school outcast with a religious zealot mother, who suffers the ultimate humiliation when she has her first period in the school showers after gym class. Due to her mother’s refusal to acknowledge a woman’s sinful reproductive system, Carrie does not understand what is happening to her, and her terror is compounded by the reaction of the girls around her, who pelt her with sanitary towels and tampons.This mix of fear and humiliation triggers a latent telekinetic power in Carrie, and the activation and growth of this power propels Carrie and her fellow students to a horrific, deadly fate.

Carrie White is an iconic character, recognisable the world over. Most who haven’t read the book have seen one of the movies, and even those who haven’t won't show a completely blank face at the mention of her name. She is an embedded part of our popular culture, so much so that ‘doing a Carrie’ has become shorthand for any violent public outburst by a young woman.

One of the key questions I posed myself before reading this novel for what must be at least the fifth time was, why? What is it about Carrie that got under people’s skin, so much so that a flimsy, just over two-hundred-page novel, has sold more than four million copies? It is well known that Tabitha King, Stephen King’s wife of an incredible fifty-odd years, fished the first few pages of Carrie out of a wastepaper-bin. This female intervention is highly appropriate given the woman-centric narrative of this text. Women are all important both inside and outside the text, and it is likely that without Tabitha’s intervention and perspective, Carrie may never have been finished.

How does it read?

King was anxious that he didn’t have the knowledge or understanding of women to write about women in a way that was authentic and meaningful, and it is true that on occasions King’s naivety comes across. For example, it’s difficult to believe that Carrie, even had she never been taught what a period was, would not have had some automatic instinct that what was happening to her was normal and natural.

A similar clunkiness is also present in the writing of the key male-female relationships in the novel; Sue and Tommy, and Chris and Billy. Sue’s adoration of Tommy feels a little off, a little too much for a girl we are told repeatedly is ‘Popular’ (capitals included). Tommy seems just a bit too nice for a girl like Sue, and Sue’s inability to grasp what Chris would see in a guy like Billy Nolan is, to be frank, utterly unrealistic. Billy Nolan is, sadly, the kind of boy most young women gravitate towards, and I include my younger self in that group. I also, on a couple of occasions, had a good giggle at the sex scenes in the novel, particularly the rather strange way King describes female pleasure – ‘body filled with sunlight, musical notes in her mind’. Perhaps best left hazy, or to the ladies.

For me, that’s where the criticism ends. I tore through this novel at an enormous speed. It is hugely readable, hurtling between the lead up to the prom and the aftermath and investigation. The story is told through a mix of epistolary (newspaper clippings, autobiography extracts, interview transcripts) and King’s more standard third person narration, often from a range of character’s perspectives. I liked this stylistic choice, and can imagine that if you were one of the rare few who hadn’t got some idea of the outcome of the story, this would keep you turning pages to find out how Carrie meets the end we know is coming.

This is the first time I noticed King using his inner monologue italics, where he inserts the characters thoughts in between the rest of the narration. He uses this very frequently in Carrie, more so than I can think of in any other text he has written. Whether you like this stylistically or not is a matter of personal taste, but I’ve always found it an ingenious way to allow the reader into a character’s mind, into the thoughts that they themselves are refusing to acknowledge.

Who’s who?

The characterisation in this novel is really excellent. King mentions in Danse Macabre that he felt that Brian De Palma did a much better job in accurately depicting the students of Ewen High, and I can see why he thinks so; De Palma’s teenagers are grittier, meaner, but in a much more teenage way, and the women are in charge, with Billy Nolan relegated to a fairly laughable side character by John Travolta.

I think King is overly harsh on his own work, however. The villains in Carrie are genuinely awful people, and there’s a different type of nasty for every taste.

Chris Hargensen is the bitch we all knew at school (if you didn’t, you were the bitch), the one who lived to make others unhappy. I never understood why some girls felt the need to do this, and even as an adult I don’t buy insecurity or the intoxicating quality of power. Some people are just mean, even kids. Especially kids. Chris is a dangerous combination of beautiful, entitled, and vicious, and her determination to ruin Carrie is terrifying.

Billy Nolan, on the other hand, I found much less frightening. What is he other than a big, thick lump of muscle, doing as Chris tells him? King writes that ‘he was the first she could not dance and dandle at her whim’, but Nolan still strikes me as little more than a pawn, and Chris’s sudden turn to submissiveness at the end of the novel feels unlikely and out of character.

The scariest character in the novel is, by a long way, Margaret White, Carrie’s completely bonkers mother. It’s incredibly difficult for me, having grown up in a home with a kind, loving mother, to imagine what a life with someone like Margaret would be like. King paints an image of their history through descriptions of their house, covered in grim religious painting and glow in the dark crucifixes, and Carrie’s closet, Dahl’s chokey taken to its extreme.

Margaret creates Carrie both biologically and emotionally. Carrie is, fundamentally, an abused child Carrie. When Margaret drags her four-year-old daughter inside and is heard clearly, by anyone in close distance, hurting her, nobody acts.

who was ignored and let down by those around her. When the stones rain down on the bungalow, a woman recounting the tale says that ‘everyone on the street that was home had come out’. This is perhaps the most horrifying part of

The only character that makes any effort to do anything for Carrie is also one of the strongest; Sue Snell, who is never saccharine enough to be unbelievable. It’s likely that all of us have, at some point, done something that made someone else feel like crap, and regretted it, but how many of us made an active effort to atone? The importance of an event like the prom to a teenager is very easy to forget or trivialise as an adult, but Sue’s sacrifice, trite as it may seem in the grand scheme of things, is a heartfelt one. It is perhaps the only point which softens the unflinchingly harsh ending of Carrie, that she dies knowing Tommy and Sue were trying to be kind.

A modern tragedy?

One thought that kept occurring to me as I read the novel was the inevitability of Carrie’s fate, and of all the others around her. There is a sense that, as in Shakespearean tragedy, our heroine’s tragic outcome is fated, and that no matter what happened in the lead up, Carrie was always going to end up holding the doors closed on the burning gym before stumbling home to Mama. The epistolary form and regular jumps between before and after the prom ensure that the reader has no doubt of Carrie’s end; it is the journey that is the story.

Carrie’s fall from grace is, in many ways, worse than that of a traditional high-born tragic hero. She is offered a mere glance of the kind of life she could lead, before it is cruelly taken back. It is this brief glimpse of what could be, followed by the crash back to reality, that sends the character over the edge into madness and unleashes her full power. In a traditional tragedy, the undoing of the hero is the basis of the plot, and stretches across the whole story. In Carrie, the transition from queen to blood-soaked ruin is as quick as a tug on a rope.

The deaths of all but a few characters is another obvious tragic convention, with the players left standing contemplating what they have learned from surviving the experience, and what others should learn from it. In Carrie, as in any tragedy worth its salt, the good die along with the bad, and we feel the careless loss of lovely, sunshiney Tommy Ross keenly.

Is there a message from the tragic overtones of Carrie? Some have seen it as a cautionary tale about giving in to anger. Carrie’s realisation of the potential of her own power is sparked by rage, and it could be suggested that her fate comes from ignoring the teachings of her mother, and not turning the other cheek. A more likely message is simply to be kind, with the ending a stark warning about what you may unleash if you’re not. For many young women (and men, for that matter), Carrie’s treatment is all too familiar, and her final, devastating response a sweet daydream rather than a nightmare.

There is potentially a darker, more depressing moral to this story. The characters who have pushed Carrie to the point of no return have no reason to hate her, except that she dares to break out the social cage they’ve put her in. Maybe King is delivering a warning to us all: know your place, or prepare to be knocked back into it.

How do I rate it?

I’ve decided that for longer texts, King’s novels, novellas, and screenplays, I’m going to give a rating. I won’t apologise if there aren’t many I rate below a seven; he’s my favourite, and his worst is better than most writers’ best.

Carrie – 8/10.

I toyed between 7 and 8, and if I were rating purely on the writing style, I’ll admit it is clearly early and a little rough round the edges. But there is something so visceral about this terse, tense little novel, and something so original about its premise, that it deserves an extra mark.

No unsatisfactory ending here, either; King must have started with those later. Carrie’s ending is deliciously dark, promising the inevitable future that comes when people don’t learn from their mistakes.

Now get in your closet and pray.