Stephen King’s first published novel is decidedly one of his best. Carrie delivers scares, but with an intriguing structure and some complex, believable characters. Most importantly, it gives us a story that has entered popular mythology.
Story
The title character is a combination ugly ducking and Cinderella, a pathetic outsider who is tormented by her high school classmates. The teasing reaches its apex when Carrie begins her first period in the shower after gym class. The girls pelt her with sanitary napkins and scream at her. As some characters attempt to atone for this attack and others try to go even further with their hatred, a course of events is set in motion which will end in disaster.
The novel resonates the way it does because it gives us a compelling mixture of satisfying and frightening messages. Carrie, the ultimate outcast, has the power to get even with everyone who has ever hurt her. We may be less sympathetic to Carrie after a few real high school students have tried to do what she does (some of them inspired directly by Rage, another early King work), but the revenge fantasy here is still potent. The individual can triumph over oppression and, one day, all of them really will be sorry.
But a disturbing fatalism counteracts this idea. High school is a hierarchy: there is a natural order to things and you shouldn’t try to change it. If you try to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, it’s probably going to blow up in your face. If the do-gooders in this book left Carrie alone, there would be no tragedy.
Characters
Carrie White seems to combine Eleanor Vance from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House with the author himself. From Jackson’s character, Carrie gets her strained relationship with her mother and her sense of distance from the other characters. Most obviously, King stole the episode in which stones fall on Carrie’s home directly from Jackson’s novel. The influence of Hill House on King’s work doesn’t stop with Carrie—the Overlook Hotel in The Shining benefits from King’s study of Jackson’s haunted house.
That King identified with Carrie himself is clear from some interesting details. Author and character share a birthday, September 21. In early drafts, Carrie's father had the same name as King's own father. It seems to me that King’s own anger infuses the character and makes her both sympathetic and real.
The author’s experience also serves the high school setting well. King was a teacher and knows how schools work. Rita Desjardin is one of the most realistic teacher characters I’ve ever read, a woman who is genuinely trying to do the right things but does make mistakes and has trouble being honest with herself about her own feelings.
Although I think both Carrie and her mother gain greater depth in Brian dePalma’s great movie based on the book, supporting characters like Desjardin are more interesting here. Sue Snell and Tommy Ross, the good kids, are especially well drawn.
Structure
The structure King chose for this book means that we can know characters like Sue much better than we could in a straight narrative. King interrupts his story and tells chunks of it with excerpts from books and articles written about the events in the novel. One of those books is Sue’s autobiography, which shows us an older woman still trying to come to terms with these events. Obviously, it was very important to King to show how the innocent actions of Sue and Tommy might be misinterpreted after the fact. Because we read different accounts of the events, we get a greater sense of reality.
Although it was somewhat presumptuous of King to draw so many parallels between his fictional story and the Kennedy assassination, this does give the story a sense of enormity and makes us consider how these events would be received in the real world.
In Danse Macabre, his excellent book on the horror genre, King himself states that the conclusion of the novel of the novel is not entirely successful. I agree that it loses some momentum, but I think the final connection between two of the characters is fascinating.
Carrie is one of a handful of works where I think the movie version equals the novel. The movie has great acting and moves more smoothly to its finish. The novel goes into greater depth and moves further beyond the central story. But both are wonderful-- if you enjoy one, I think you’ll probably enjoy the other.
In an exclusive introduction written specifically for this edition, King looks back at the creation of his first masterpiece 25 years ago. Carrie Whit...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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