Carrie

Carrie was Stephen King's first book, first published in 1975. He has of course written scores of books since then, under many names, but this one is the one that he wrote and threw away, not satisfied with it, and his wife Tabitha fished it out of the trash and the rest is history.

I had never read this one before (I suppose there are those that have read all of King's books, but I've only read a small portion of his output) and was impressed once again with the man's humanity. He writes horror novels, mostly, and Carrie certainly qualifies, but this is a story about an outsider who desperately wants to belong, but is ultimately rejected. Oh, and she also has telekinesis and destroys the town in revenge.

The story is pretty simple: Carrie White is the kind of girl in high school that no one pays attention to except to pick on or bully. The opening scene is in the girls' locker room, and she has her first period. She doesn't know about these things, because her mother is a religious nut. The girls torment her by throwing tampons and sanitary napkins at her. These girls get suspended and banned from the prom.

One of the girls, Sue Snell, feels terrible and gets her very popular boyfriend to take Carrie to the prom. Another girl, Chris Hargensen, reacts the exact opposite and, with her scuzzy boyfriend Billy, decides to get revenge. She connives for Carrie to be elected prom queen, while Billy fixes it so she will be covered in pig blood. Bad move.

Throughout the book we get glimpses, sometimes terrifyingly so, of the hell that is Carrie's home life. Her mother, Margaret, is a zealot of almost incomprehensible extremity. She refers to breasts as "dirtypillows," thinks showers are sinful, and has some disturbing art at home: "The blue light glared on a picture of a huge and bearded Yahweh who was casting screaming multitudes of humans down through cloudy depths into an abyss of fire. Below them, black horrid figures struggled through the flames of perdition while the Black Man sat on a huge flame-colored throne with a trident in one hand. His body was that of a man, but he had a spiked tail and the head of a jackal."

Though Mama keeps a firm hand on Carrie, often sending her to a closet for hours on end to pray, the young girl realizes she has a power--she can move things with her mind. She decides to defy her mother and go to the prom, with devastating results.

King is skillful in dropping hints at what is to come (of course, reading this book now there are no surprises). The book weaves in many official reports, newspaper articles, parts of books, etc. (this does pad the novel a bit--it could have been a novella): "the two most stunning events of the twentieth century have been the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the destruction that came to Chamberlain, Maine, in May of 1979." Sometimes his foreshadowing doesn't mesh: "In the wake of two hundred deaths and the destruction of an entire town, it is so easy to forget one thing: We were kids. We were kids. We were kids trying to do our best. . . ." Later, we learn that there are over 400 deaths.

King's place in the literary canon is controversial, as there are those who dismiss him as a genre writer and those who exalt him as one of our greatest writers, no matter what he writes about. He certainly can wax poetic: :Carrie ran. She ran through the middle of them. Her hands were to her face but she could see through the prison of her fingers, could see them, how they were, beautiful, wrapped in light, swathed in the bright, angelic robes of Acceptance. The shined shoes, the clear faces, the careful beauty-parlor hairdos, the glittery gowns. They stepped back from her as if she was plague, but they kept laughing."

The book was made into a popular movie, as almost all of King's books would be, and I'll discuss that next week.