Review Carrie by Stephen King Spoilers

[captainhammerica]

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Today I’ll be reviewing Carrie, a novel by Stephen King. Now normally I don’t like to give too much away plot wise in a review. People hate spoilers and I’ve found that I have a looser definition of spoilers than most, or I’m guessing so from the glares I get after discussing a movie someone hasn’t seen yet. However I think I’m a little safer here since the book has spawned a few movies over the past 40 years. Even though I never saw the original movie all the way through, I think I was around three or four when I saw it, I can still remember the slaying of pigs and the dumping of blood on Carrie quite vividly. Three or four, which begs the question, what the hell were my parents thinking letting me watch this movie? Come to think of it, I also remember before saying “sh*t” for the first time after I learned it from Stand by Me. So in a way I have a unique history with Stephen King’s movies corrupting my childhood….I won’t even say what happened when I saw It.

The book is also special if you read Stephen King’s On Writing. This being his first published novel he goes into a bit of detail about writing it. At the time King was living in…well, maybe not poverty necessarily, but nowhere near as well he does now. The book was a runaway hit though and sold like crazy, King made $400,000 from the paperback sales, in 1970’s dollars. It changed his life. Funny thing is when he first wrote it the first few pages ended up in the trash, and it’s only by his wife fishing them out and urging and helping him to write that Carrie came to be. Moral of the story, God bless Tabitha King.

Carrie tells the story of Carrie White, a teenaged misfit in a small town with a religiously zealous mother and less than understanding or kind classmates. Which sadly in my experience high school hasn’t changed much four decades later. What sets Carrie apart though is her telekinetic powers that she reconnects with after a humiliating event in the gym showers. When one of these kinder students who hopes to make up for this ere in judgement, another seeks to humiliate Carrie further, hence the infamous pig’s blood scene. Finally Carrie snaps and the high school and the town are soon engulfed in Carrie’s telekinetic driven revenge.

This novel is terrifying on a couple of fronts. However, I think the thing that will get you most is how it can harken back to most people’s high school experiences. Bullying is something that we look upon as wrong, but sadly it usually only occurs to us in hindsight. At the time generally we’re just happy to have someone else in the crosshairs besides ourselves. I can’t say I’m proud of everything I’ve done, and the things that I did in high school especially. Carrie reminds you that in times when people need a friend the most, most often we were willing to be strangers for the sake of our own happiness.

King knows how to write. He knew how to write in the 70’s, he knows how to write now, he knows how to write stone sober, and stoned out of his mind. Hey, he said it, not me, read On Writing, it’s a really great memoir. Even in one of his first novels he writes exceptionally well, but it being one of the early ones, it also shows signs of experimentation that is not present in his later body of work. And the experimentation leaves me with mixed feelings.

Throughout the novel the book is peppered with excerpts from fictional books and newspaper clippings that follow the climax of the novel, most notably My Name is Susan Snell and The Night Exploded. This is important to the novel for a couple of reasons, one it shows that the events were so horrifying they gained the spotlight of the entire nation, it wasn’t just confined to a small town. It also makes the events feel more real. However, it offers spoilers, spoilers even with someone as loose a definition as me. You know something is going to happen, and some of the excerpts spoil who survives and who dies before the famous pig’s blood scene.

Another piece of experimentation were some of the character’s thoughts popped up in the middle of the narrative in parenthesis. Seeing how the bulk of the characters in the novel are teenagers, it does reflect how their minds tend to wander. However, the structure of these parenthesis and character thoughts can break up the (man I could really go for some chicken parm right now) flow of the narrative.

Overall though the book is still an enjoyable read, and while sometimes the experimentation is hit or miss, the hits stand out more than the misses. The setting may seem a little dated, but the characters and themes stand the test of time. Though bumpy at times this novel really paved the way for one of America’s greatest writers, and some of our greatest stories ever told. Even with that distinction, it still manages to stand on its own.

[barb429]

I love to go back an re-read Carrie every few years. I've read all of Stephen King's books, and I like to go back sometimes and see how his writing style has changed over time. You are right, the themes of the book are timeless- the loneliness of begin a teenager who is considered an outsider or different. Carrie will always be in my top ten of Stephen King novels.

[MikaylaSanchez]

Carrie was honestly one of my least favorites by him. The writing style confused me, the story was amazing! I just wasn't a fan of the random bits of "articles" inserted into the novel. I understand they helped build structure, but I personally believe it would have been better without.

[L T Brook]

Carrie was the second book I read by Stephen King and I fell in love with it. It really puts cruelty of teenage girls in the spot- light. I have not had the chance to see the original Carrie film but I did see the remake for i think it was 2014 and I was appalled. The characters were way under played and they downright changed her mother's character entirely. The ending was atrocious and should have been rewritten. The whole time I watched it, I was raging over all the changes and innaccuracies. My husband told me he was no longer watching movies with me unless I promised to behave.

[MythicDrmR]

This was the first Stephen King novel I ever read. I was about twelve at the time and living in Lewiston, Maine... local hero! The places that he mentions in his books (many of them) like South Paris and Norway are as familiar to me as the back of my hand. I have continued to read his books through the years and have revisited several over and over again. Some of the movies have been okay, but they just can't seem to touch the books... which take you so far into the characters and "life" of each story. My personal favorites include "It", "The Stand", and "The Talisman".