First Things First…
This will be my third time reading Carrie. Kinda surprising, because I like it but don’t love it. I don’t think I’d ever feel the need to revisit it, if not for Geeksbury. I’m anxious to work my way through Stephen King’s whole catalog, and this was his first published novel. So here we go…
7 Things I Like
7. A Competent School Administrator
Principal Grayle is such a minor character, I doubt most reviewers get around to mentioning him. But I appreciate the competence with which he handles the few situations we see him in.
The main thing is, he’s forced into a confrontation with Mr. Hargensen, Chris’s father, who’s a big shot lawyer in town. And he more than holds his own—he forces a guy who tries to bully him to back down.
This bucks what would’ve been an easy cliché of the incompetent administrator (which we kinda get anyway with the Vice Principal, Mr. Morton—more to come).
But it also takes away an easy excuse for why such terrible shit could happen to Carrie in the first place. It’d be easier to let her bullies off the hook if you could point to inept school leadership and say, of course things like that happen here. But that’s not the case. It’s a well-run school. This stuff happens anyway because these girls really are cruel—at least in those moments.
6. TK Isn’t Disappearing
Despite his massive success, Stephen King isn’t known for writing great endings. But I love Carrie’s chilling ending.
The second to last item is the conclusion of the State Investigatory Board of Maine, which has found that a recurrence of a person with TK is highly improbably, if not impossible.
That’s followed by a personal letter from a woman in Tennessee that describes the funny things her two-year-old daughter can do. The little girl clearly has TK. Which may amount to nothing. Or it may lead to the next Carrie White.
Not a good look for the dimwits who ran the investigation.
5. Rage Runs Deep
“They laughed at me. Threw things. They’ve always laughed.”
Carrie White
As Carrie walks home from school after the shower incident, still suffering from cramps, we get insight into her headspace…
“Imagine Chris Hargensen all bloody and screaming for mercy. With rats crawling all over her face. Good. Good. That would be good. Crash in her head with a rock, with a boulder. Crash in all their heads. Good. Good.”
Clearly, her rage doesn’t begin on prom night, after getting doused in pig blood. And it didn’t begin when her classmates pelted her with tampons, either.
As traumatic as this experience is, Carrie has been ridiculed and picked on for years. And only someone with this much pent-up rage would be capable of the holocaust she inflicts on the entire town on prom night.
4. Flexing Her Muscle
TK has been latent in Carrie her whole life. Her mother knew it from the time Carrie was a baby.
It comes to the forefront following her first period, but it’s not fully developed. It’s weak. Like a muscle that hasn’t been stressed.
She practices, first with small objects, then bigger things, like her bed. At times, it literally says “FLEX” as she “flexes” this muscle and becomes more adept at using her power.
I like this for a couple of reasons. As long as you’ve bought into the idea that she has TK, it feels more realistic when you know she’s been developing her power that she could cause such absolute destruction on prom night. Otherwise, there would’ve been no way she’d be able to slam all the gym doors shut and keep them sealed tightly, turn on the sprinklers, and do everything else she does that night to destroy the town.
But it also shows Carrie had some sense she would need this power over others. This slaughter wasn’t premeditated, but there must’ve been an underlying sense of wanting the ability to take revenge the next time somebody bullied her. And this, again, speaks to the rage that’s been inside her for a long, long time.
3. Avoiding Suzie Homemaker
“As someone who had been Popular herself all her life, it had almost seemed written that she would meet and fall in love with someone as Popular as she. They were almost certain to be voted King and Queen of the high school Spring Ball, and the senior class had already voted them class couple for the yearbook. They had become a fixed star in the shifting firmament of the high school’s relationships, the acknowledged Romeo and Juliet. And she knew with sudden hatefulness that there was one couple like them in every white suburban high school in America.”
Narrator
Sue Snell’s character is an underrated part of the story. Not just because her idea for Tommy to take Carrie to the prom unwittingly sets in motion the massacre. That’s obviously critical. But related to that is Sue’s self-perception, and her awareness that she’s walking a well-trod path toward becoming nothing but a cliché.
Her relationship with Tommy comes with expectations that reach far beyond high school. They can last a lifetime.
She’s afraid of conforming to the life expected of them—kids, soap operas ironing her husband’s clothes, joining the P.T.A., taking pills to keep her weight in check. Sue sees this life that her family, friends, and maybe even she herself expect of her as a life of quiet desperation. She’s conflicted because she seems to enjoy her popularity, but she recognizes that it comes with tradeoffs that won’t allow her to become a fully realized person. Trying to do right by Carrie is, I think, her way of resisting the path of conformity she’s been on.
2. Rejoining the Human Race
Norma Watson is one of the few survivors of prom night. She’s not a major character, but we get a few pages of her testimony from an article, and in it she says…
“It was as if we were watching someone rejoin the human race.”
If this was a “happily ever after” type of story, that’s what it would have been. This social outcast who had been the butt of every joke for her whole life suddenly breaks free from her mother’s control and can just be a normal teenager.
This is what prom night should have been for Carrie. It’s what Sue had in mind by asking Tommy to ask Carrie to the prom.
And Carrie, for her part, wants this.
Early in the book, Carrie looks at herself in the mirror and imagines what she could be. She sees that she could be pretty. She believes she has nice legs, and that if she stopped eating chocolate her acne would clear up, and if she just bought some more fashionable clothing she’d look good. It makes her feel “alive.”
Now, her TK muscle has removed her fear of her mother. And she eventually lets herself believe Tommy’s invitation is genuine. She goes to the prom. She gets swept away in the evening’s enchantment. And she finally believes she can be more than the weird religious girl with the even weirder religious mother who keeps her away from other people except for school.
She can be part of society. She can be part of the human race.
But then comes the blood…
1. Prom Night Massacre
“Carrie happened at the school…”
Vic Mooney
This part of the book delivers.
Starting with Billy and Chris pulling the rope…
All the way through Carrie slaughtering her classmates and lighting the school up…
Going on to destroy the town…
And then going home and killing her mother…
It’s all riveting…
Especially the way Carrie’s thinking evolves in real time.
When she first decides to use her power to “show them a thing or two” by turning on the sprinkler system, it says…
“She giggled again and got up, began to walk barefoot back toward the lobby doors. Turn on the sprinkler system and close all the doors. Look in and let them see her looking in, watching and laughing while the shower ruined their dresses and their hairdos and took the shine off their shoes. Her only regret was that it couldn’t be blood.”
It’s wild just how small she’s thinking there—ruining their outfits and hair—compared to what she achieves moments later. She laughs the first time she sees a boy get electrocuted and die. And right after that…
“… in a sudden, blind thrust, she yanked at all the power she could feel.”
She realizes her power over them is so much greater than she imagined. That’s when she starts to think about the few kids escaping through a back door, and that she’ll go back to kill them. That’s when she realizes the fire department would come put out the fire, so she destroys the hydrants and makes it impossible. The more destruction she causes, the more her rage grows.
It’s fitting, considering all the bullying and abuse she’s been through at the hands of her classmates and her mother. But it’s also heartbreaking because of how innocent she’s been all along—until she gains power and loses complete control.
1 Thing I’m Mixed On
1.Tommy
Tommy is a bit of an empty character.
This might be on purpose. He’s likable, popular, and ultimately harmless. But despite their relationship, he doesn’t inspire much in Sue. In fact, he’s part of the reason she’s unhappy and rebelling at the thought of being such a cliché.
Tommy is a gentleman when it comes to Carrie. But just like he lets himself get talked into taking Carrie to the prom by Sue, he then gets swept away by the beauty (and, possibly, by the novelty) of Carrie. It doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of conviction in him about anything. Yet, it’s refreshing, in a story where so many people are shitty to one another, to have at least one character who’s good.
1 Thing I Don’t Like
1. Fumbling Carrie’s Name
I get the point of this scene. The vice principal, Mr. Morton, keeps calling Carrie by the wrong name, again and again, all in the span of about two minutes. It shows he doesn’t even know who Carrie is. And Carrie is so invisible that he continues to fumble her name even after he was just told moments before what it is.
Plus, this is another example of Carrie’s rage flaring, even if briefly, because of Mr. Morton’s disregard for her.
But I hate this scene, only because it goes overboard. They go through the charade too many times, to the point where it’s ludicrous.
Mr. Morton is the opposite of Principal Grayle. He’s a much less competent administrator.
Ultimately, it’s a short scene and an unimportant character, so this is a nitpick. It’s just something that stuck out to me as I read.
Tim Matassa
