Day Three: Carrie

Well, last night I finished the first book.

Carrie is the novel of Carrie White, a high school age girl, raised by a extremely religious single mother.  Bullied by her peers, Carrie's latent telekinetic abilities  come to the fore, eventually coming to ahead at the Spring Ball.  

While this was the first of King's books to be published, it was apparently the fourth that he wrote (according to wikipedia). It feels, in many ways like a first novel, albeit a  rather skilled one.  There are some flaws, some awkward phrasings, but all of them forgivable.   There are things here (the attention to  music, the descriptions of cars) that will crop up in a lot of King's later works. King himself has described this as a "raw" work, and I think that fits the writing style as well as the story. 

One of the more interesting parts of the novel are the newspaper clippings, journal articles and interview transcripts that are interspaced throughout the text. It is through these that the bigger picture of the story begins to become clear, and it also adds a separate perspective for the text. There are also articles talking about a TK gene and the implications of that on a global scale. 

I like the idea of TK being a hereditary power.  A recessive gene that manifests power only in women. Sexuality and gender are important themes.  While we know that there were other incidents in Carrie's past, her powers trigger again when she gets her period at age 16.  With a mother that taught her that her body was an evil, sinful thing, Carrie is not prepared for this and at first thinks she is bleeding to death.  

The real horror of Carrie isn't just when Carrie eventually loses her mind at the prom and destroys the school and a good portion of the town.  Kings descriptions of those events are frightening and occasionally quite gruesome. But what sticks with me as a reader is the descriptions of the bullying that Carrie endures.  Not even the events themselves, so much as the moments when we get inside the head of the characters perpetrating them.  There is a stark realness to it that is hard to ignore. 

I like Carrie quite a bit.  I realized when reading the book, which I first read at least 10 years ago, that most of memories of Carrie are actually of the movie.  I had forgotten that there were some many differences between the movie and the text. 

Carrie Overview

Fear Level: 4 out of 10

Connections: Carrie (the prom night fire) is mentioned in The Dead Zone

Car Talk: A rather long description of bad guy Billy's car, and Chris's attraction to it.

King Digs Dylan: 3 Dylan references here.  1. A mention of a notebook of Carries were she wrote down "Everybody's guessed/That baby can't be blessed/'Til she finally sees that she's like all the rest" a slightly misquoted passage from Just Like A Woman. 2. Mr. Tambourine Man is listed as part of the prom entertainment. 3. One of the excerpts from a book on about the affair quotes from Tombstone Blues. 

Lameness of Ending: Low, but there is a bit of DUNDUNDUN! as the very last thing is a letter written by a woman to her sister, talking about an incident where her little girl is showing signs of TK powers. 

Overal Rating: 7 out of 10

Next Book: 'Salems Lot