Carrie

Written by Stephen King and since its publication, made into a movie starring Sissy Spaceck, Piper Laurie, and John Travolta, Carrie is a spooky piece of work, but ultimately not King’s greatest achievement. I managed to complete it within two days, which proves that it’s still a page-turner, but I just did not find it nearly as thrilling as some of his other books. 

Carrie White is no ordinary girl: she has the power of telekinesis. Repressed by her fanatic and religiously extreme mother and alienated and subjected to mockery and bullying by her high school peers, Carrie’s emotional state is one of dangerous instability. When she is asked by Tommy Ross to the Prom, which is a dream come true for her, the night that begins as one of perfect social acceptance soon turns into a bloody nightmare involving a horrible prank with pig’s blood and soon Carrie is forced to exercise her terrible gift on not only her peers, but the town that mocks and scorns her. 

Unencumbered by chapters and divided into three parts, Carrie is a seemingly King-esque novel, but one that achieves certain distinguishing traits by different means. 

An example of this is the way in which the story is broken up. King’s frank and to-the-point chapters are still there, but rather than broken up into chapters one, two and so on, various articles, statements, and excerpts are interwoven, ceasing the free flow of the story. I found this technique quite interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, although they take on a seemingly factional timbre, the articles and excerpts are from other fictional works, created for the purpose of the story. Most of the excerpts are from testimonials of eyewitnesses as well as from two other factual works called The White Commission and The Shadow Exploded. What’s also clever about this technique is that the excerpts foreshadow the events of the coming chapter as well as make it easier for the story to jump to the actions and perceptions of different characters. The entire story is written in the third person register all the way through, but does not spend the entire duration focusing on Carrie. 

The story of Carrie also paints an opaque picture of the strength, impression, and the fragility of the emotional threshold of people. At the end of the day, the real killer in this story is pressure and stress, the combination of which comes to a complete atomic head within Carrie. There is the humiliation that she is subjected to by her school peers, resulting in low self-esteem and strong resentment towards anything and everything. Aided by the fanatic repression and horrific religious mania and pressure of her mother, which results in further self-loathing as well as macabre judgmental perceptions and punishments, the emotional state of the heroine is one that is so unstable and it’s that that achieves the intended horror. Characters are always the more frightening when you can’t foresee what actions they are going to take, when you suspect that the might do something incredibly violent. 

Filled with the supernatural, power, alienation, repression, fleeting hope, and horror, Carrie is an engaging book, but not King’s best work it has to be said. I powered through it fast enough, but I was not as completely wrapt in it as I was Misery or The Shining.