by Stephen King
novel
published 5 April 1974
I read Carrie in the Barnes and Noble Three Novels omnibus. I kind of regret that it isn’t the first Stephen King novel I read - I think I finished The Gunslinger and The Stand, first - because of how self-referential his prose multiverse has become. Thankfully, there isn’t anything in this volume that carries over into either of those stories. Or, as it turns out, the rest of King’s web of wonder. Interestingly, King has left it, his first major success, as a monolithic entry in his canon, only referenced - once - AS a work of fiction in The Dead Zone. I think that’s quite alright. I can’t think of any way King could build on this story without cheapening the depths of its tragedy.
Carrie is a sort-of-but-not-quite epistolary novel. King has peppered the narrative with a host of fictional texts, from journalistic reports to the Carrie White incident to source books on psychic phenomena to interviews with survivor Sue Snell to cataloged graffiti. This is a good way of building both setting and suspense. One of King’s hallmarks is that he pulls back enough of the curtain early on to let you know that something bad is going to happen and even gives you some idea as to the nature of the bad thing. The supplemental texts make it clear that something profound happens involving Carrie White and before you’re even 15% of the way through the book you know that a lot of people are going to die. This dovetails nicely with the cultural phenomenon that Carrie has become. How many people have read this book over the last five years without having some inkling of what sort of massacre awaits, I wonder?
Stephen King’s writing voice is generally third-person limited omniscient with you getting stream-of-consciousness internal thoughts of the character who is the focus of the current section. Once you get past the infamous shower scene and the initial fallout, the narrative largely focuses on Carrie’s point of view - and rightfully so! - but spends a fair amount of time on other major-minor characters like Sue, the school principal, Chris and her boyfriend, and the gym teacher, Rita. The fictional texts are weaved in between perspective shifts so that the reader can back out of one character’s head before plunging into another. If you’re the kind of reader who is off-put by frequently changing perspective then, well, this may not be a great introductory King novel. I think that the Bachman books that I’ve read - The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man, and Thinner - maintain a consistent perspective and may be more approachable in that regard. Maybe the interstitial documentary-like asides will help you to refocus! Or maybe they’ll make things worse. This is just one of those things that you’ll have to read for yourself to see.
The perspective-jumping is important because this is a critical element of this particular book format of King’s: the holistic anatomy of a tragedy, from everything that led up to it to the event itself and then touching on the trauma that follows, detailing all of the moving parts. Other King novels touch on this, most notably in my mind Cujo, which isn’t to compare Carrie White to a rabid dog but rather the capriciousness of Fate as it led to both the prom night massacre as well as the desperate siege of Donna and Tad in their derelict Ford Pinto. As far as the holistic representations go, well, Carrie is a short book. As a part of the omnibus I read, it’s less than 200 pages versus the subsequent Salem’s Lot, which clocks in at around 450 pages and follows a handful of smaller human dramas so that you get a better sense of how the vampiric invasion is unraveling the town of the setting.
I love this book because I feel for Carrie. She is an outcast, bullied by her fellow high schoolers and toting a lifetime of emotional abuse from her malcontent mother. One of the popular girls at school, Sue Snell, has something approaching good intentions when she sends Carrie to prom with her boyfriend. And, just when she is at the top of an impossible wave of positive emotions, Someone bursts the bubble she is riding, and she falls deeper into her misery than she’s ever been. She lashes out, gutting the city of Chamberlain. While she is a terrifying force of nature, King has painted a character who I found thoroughly sympathetic and human. Carrie doesn’t even want to destroy the town when she returns to the gym. In what starts as a laughably lame attempt at retaliating against her perceived enemies, she merely turns on the sprinklers so that she can ruin their prom outfits. This is a far cry from Shirley Jackon’s Merrikat of We Have Always Lived In the Castle, who imagined the mocking boys of the village dying from the symptoms of poisoning and would probably have killed the town a thousand times over if she had Carrie’s psychic powers. It echoes, however, in our first insight into Carrie’s point of view: “If only it would be today and Jesus coming not with a lamb and a shepherd’s crook, but with a boulder in each hand to crush the laughers and the snickers, to root out the evil and destroy it screaming […] And if only she could be His sword and His arm.”
Unsurprisingly, Carrie’s night of vengeance parallels the destruction of The Shop by Firestarter’s Charlie McGee. Both are characters who King has endowed with psychokinetic powers and each is pushed to an emotionally visceral and more or less immediate tipping point in a history of injustice. Powerful negative emotions begin and then fuel their respective rampages. There is a wealth of experience that separates the two, however, and somewhere at the root of it is parenting. Charlie’s sole parental figure throughout the novel’s action is her father, who knows about Charlie’s pyrokinesis, wants to help her learn how to control it, and reassures her that he will love her, no matter what. In stark contrast, Carrie’s mother, Margaret, resents everything about her child and wants nothing to do with Carrie or her gift, having first attempted to kill her back when she was still a baby.
Margaret is a horrific villain. She should be Carrie’s confidant and shelter, but she is so fundamentally warped by her failure to cope healthily with her trauma - the death of her father - that she is a black hole of a caregiver. Carrie’s struggle at home is a battle between Becoming a Woman, with all the power and sexuality that ought to represent, and her mother, who has internalized misogyny to such a degree that she blames women for all of the sin of the world. There is no Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in her theology:
“Eve was weak and loosed the raven on the world,” Momma continued, “and the raven was called Sin, and the first Sin was Intercourse.”
There is an interesting thread to follow from here to Firestarter. When Wanless, the doctor who oversaw the Lot Six experiment, attempted to communicate the danger of Charlie’s existence to Hollister, he directly referenced John Milton and his production of Paradise Lost. The character in making the comparison intended to demonstrate how the powers of the mind can develop from childhood to adulthood, but there is a subtext that, to Wanless, Milton’s Paradise Lost was horrific in and of itself.
The scholarly annotations of my copy of Paradise Lost – a Penguin Classics clothbound hardcover – led me to believe that Milton’s critical interpretation was something of a feminist revolutionary. After spending a few minutes on Google, it’s clear that there is a wealth of contrasting literary criticism on Milton that pegs his beliefs as sexist and to a slightly lesser degree misogynistic. When writing this review, I was initially set to suggest that Margaret White’s self-annihilating sexism was the sort of Biblical dogma that Milton had intended to unravel in recasting the Fall. Whatever Milton may have intended, the morass of misogynistic baggage that centuries of patriarchally-driven theology have piled upon Eve is still very real. This is one avenue by which Christian masculinists justify the subjugation of women, an outgrowth of the fear of Woman.
One of King’s descriptions of Carrie is “…an uneasy masculine shrinking from a future of female equality”. Carrie’s power – and Charlie McGee’s! – is shackled by male concerns. This is echoed throughout the text of Carrie but is at its most overt when Margaret is delivering her religion-fueled diatribes. In Firestarter, Charlie’s use of her power is guided primarily by her father, Andy, and she only engages in self-defense (and the destruction of The Shop) once Andy sanctions it. By using their powers they embrace who and what they are, connecting with the grief and anger of oppressed womanhood. Carrie’s mother laid the foundation of this abuse, upon which the rest of the town of Chamberlain was content to lean.
Carrie deals with bullying, whether by your peers or your parent(s), but it’s also about being a bully. The book spends the first few major segments looking at Carrie from the outside, using the points of view of people disgusted by or dismissive of her. Whether you feel sympathy with her at the onset or not, you are nonetheless forced to engage with the point of view of her abusers before the text deigns to get inside her head as she walks home from high school that first time. It’s a neat trick because it sets the reader up to follow along with Sue Snell’s emotional journey, feeling bad for and wanting to assuage the guilt incurred by briefly aligning with the lifetime of trauma that has rained down on her. The beauty of Sue’s character is that she is self-aware enough when confronted by Chris to realize the depths of her hypocrisy, the shallowness of her mea culpa.
This book hurts, particularly Carrie’s evaporative happiness when she is at prom. I yearn for the Carrie who didn’t get to be, Don McLean’s secret lover, who was judged harshly for being different when she was just as human as any of her classmates – psi-powers aside. It hurts to see her express wonder and briefly enjoy her life when I know what is going to happen to her, and I also know that one great night as a teenager isn’t enough to turn around or even really begin to mend the lifetime of pain that she has suffered. Regardless of whether prom night had gone perfectly for her, post-dance dinner with Tommy and all, Carrie was still hard on the rails toward a final confrontation with her mother.
The part of Carrie most likely to stick with me for the rest of my life is the moment where Sue, hooked into Carrie's mind, experiences her death in tandem. It is a haunting section and King's poetic image of the fading conscience as witnessed empathically by the living Sue was and remains a harrowing expression: “For a moment Sue felt as if she were watching a candle flame disappear down a long, black tunnel at a tremendous speed (she’s dying o my god i’m feeling her die) And then the light was gone, and the last conscious thought had been (momma i’m sorry where)”.
I apologize if this review feels like it got invaded by Firestarter. If I had written it back when I originally read Carrie then neither it nor Paradise Lost would have even entered my mind. I loved it, though, and while it was a labor being some three or so years divorced from when I initially read it, I'm grateful to have the opportunity to look back and make these comparisons.
