Carrie (1974)

So this is how it begins. With a teenage girl menstruating in a high school locker room shower while her classmates throw tampons at her.

Carrie was Stephen King’s first book, the only one he’s ever written as just a jobbing author, instead of a New York Times bestseller. It’s a slim volume – 252 pages in the Pocket Books paperback edition I have. That would barely count as a novella to King these days, but in his first stab at a long-form work, King gets in, makes his point and gets out, with a minimum of fuss. That focus lends Carrie an almost searing intensity, which works in its favor. Honestly, you wouldn’t want to spend much more time than this watching this story unfold.

Carrie is an uncompromising, ugly, difficult book. It’s the story of Carrie White, an unpopular girl poisoned by her ultra-religious, domineering mother, and ridiculed endlessly by her peers. We first meet her in that high school locker room – she gets her first period at 16, and has no idea what’s happening. Her mother Margaret, a strict Christian, has never told her about menstruation, believing it to be a mark of the devil. The other kids react as horrible kids would, taunting her and tossing sanitary napkins. (“Plug it up! Plug it up!”)

But, as King artlessly tells us on the second page, Carrie White is telekinetic, meaning she can move objects with her mind. And here King seems equally interested in telling us two different stories. The first (and infinitely more interesting) one is about Carrie herself – about that one person in every high school who exists to be the butt of jokes. Her mother is dangerously religious, fanatical to a degree I would have trouble accepting if I hadn’t read news reports of people just like her, and growing up with her mom left Carrie scarred and unable to fully blossom.

This story is also about sexual awakening, and that element of the novel is also fascinating. We have several depictions of women waking up to their own sexual power, and in Billy Nolan, the sexually dominant older boyfriend of popular girl Chris Hargensen, King creates his first real villain. Nolan uses sex as a power play, as a weapon. And when he and Chris drop two buckets of pig’s blood on Carrie White at the school dance, King describes the thrill as almost sexual. His examinations of this theme are well done.

But it’s the other story, the one that wants to be a dry elucidation of telekinesis as a phenomenon, that drags the book down. The narrative is constantly interrupted by excerpts from reports on “the Carrie White affair,” and bits from character Susan Snell’s autobiography. These sections actually foreshadow the main plot, over and over, and too far in advance. I would have preferred it if King had allowed the story to unfold naturally. In the end, I’m not really interested in the potential worldwide impact of telekinesis. I’m really only interested in its effect on one girl, and her small town.

I’m not sure if King took any pleasure in telling this story. He spends about 100 pages building up Carrie’s confidence – Sue Snell, feeling bad about the locker room incident, convinces her boyfriend Tommy Ross to take Carrie to the dance. This simple act of kindness builds her self-esteem to such a level that one gets the feeling she would have been fine, would have grown up free of her mother’s influence. But then, the pig’s blood, and the carnage, as Carrie, betrayed and damaged beyond repair, uses her power (flex) to destroy her town, killing more than 400.

The bloodbath is so much worse because King brings us inside Carrie’s head. We feel her pain, her anger, her betrayal, and that is to King’s credit. But I wish there had been some shaft of light in this story. It’s clearly – clearly – not the work of a writer who wants to sell millions of copies of his work. This is a dark and disturbing little book, and King writes it as if he were possessed by the story. Like he had to tell it, and in order to tell it, he had to go to these pitch-black places.

As for the writing itself, it’s not bad. King introduces that trick he does to parenthetically

(oh god oh god what was that)

bring us into his characters’ minds, and it must have seemed fresh in 1974. But Carrie is not a very intricate book, and despite some chilling run-on sentences during scenes with Carrie’s mom, the writing is fairly straightforward. King will get better, but for my money, he will rarely get more disturbing, or more direct. Latter-day King, the one who sells millions each time out, might have tried to expand this story, and while that may have led to more interesting character moments, the razor-sharp power of this tale may have been diluted in the process. Carrie is a little book that hurts a lot.

Next: Salem’s Lot