“This is for Tabby, who got me into it – and then bailed me out of it.”

Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, was published in April of 1974. At the time Stephen (26 years young), his wife and two children, lived in a trailer in Hermon, Maine. Famously, Stephen says that he wrote the beginning of this novel as a short story, and disliked it so much that he threw it in the trash. His wife, Tabitha, fished it out and asked him to keep working on it, saying she wanted to know what happens. After Doubleday accepted the manuscript for publication King worked with Bill Thompson (who would be a longtime editor of his work) to revise and pad out the story to novel length. The Brian De Palma movie was released in 1976, and was very successful. The mass market paperback rights, around 200k, allowed King to quit his teaching job and write full time. And so a legendary professional writing career was officially begun.

I began reading Stephen King novels in 1993 when I was 12 years old. Thirty-six years later I have read all of his published works, which number more than 70 books including novels, novellas, short story collections, the Bachman books (published under his pen name Richard Bachman) and non-fiction books. Many titles I have read multiple times. I decided to embark on a reread project, to go back to King’s major novels, in order of publication. (A list of reread project titles here). I have loved these books for so long, and so deeply. I hope to bring fresh eyes and perspective to this revisit.

Part I: Blood Sport

Carrie opens with a news clipping from 1966: On August 17th (my birthday!) a rain of stones falls on the house of Margaret White and her three year old daughter Carietta, in Chamberlain, Maine. The stones damage the house but fall nowhere else, not landing on any other property. Throughout the novel our main narrative will be interspersed with articles from news, magazine, police logs and books that fill in the story of both Carrie and her Telekinesis powers. Even recognizing that this is a technique to pad out the story, I liked the style choice. The articles are like pallet cleansers, breathing space from the ever mounting tension of the main narrative which is moving us closer and closer to what we already will know will be a horrific event.

We then cut to what is the most memorable scene in the book, Carrie is showering in the girls’ locker room after gym class when she, at the age of 16, gets her first period. She doesn’t know what is happening, and as the other girls notice and begin teasing, mocking and eventually throwing menstrual products at her, she becomes hysterical. This culminates in the gym teacher coming in and smacking Carrie across the face. This will not be the only adult to smack her across the face today. A rough one for our Carrie, to be sure. It has already been established that Carrie is a pariah in the school, considered odd for her religiousness, shyness, and at times sanctimonious ways. Much of Carrie’s behavior can be traced to her upbringing by her mother, who is extremely religious and also abusive. We learn that Carrie is “chunky” and has acne (unlike the ethereal beauty of Sissy Spacek in the film).

One of my favorite parts comes when Carrie and the gym teacher, who walked back her physical abuse by helping Carrie secure her pad, and is now getting her a slip to go home for the day, come into the principal’s office. A) the gym teacher has a bloody handprint on her white gym shorts, which skeeves the principal out big time, and B) the guy has an ashtray in his office, described as the statue The Thinker with the head carved out for the ciggie butts. One of my favorite things about old media is that everybody smokes, all the time, everywhere, and nobody bats an eye. Teachers smacking you in the face and smoking butts in the building, what a world!

Through Carrie’s walk home and some flashbacks we firmly grasp that Carrie has telekinesis powers, has had them since childhood and has lightly used them. We revisit the rain of stones incident and learn this was triggered by little Carrie seeing her teenage neighbor in a bikini (with an apparent nip slip). Carrie’s mom, old Marge, busts out of the house in full hysterics and drags Carrie back inside where she chokes Carrie until she almost passes out, and threatens to cut out her eyes with knife. Again, Carrie is three. So Carrie makes it rain, baby, first ice, then stones unto boulders. Out of the clear blue sky. Their roof is toast. She also tosses some furniture out of windows just to get her point across. Her mom locks her in the punishment/prayer closet for a few days. Which seems to be her go-to for most situations. We also get the memorable use of “dirty pillows” which is what Marge calls boobs. And honestly it is a term that has a way of sticking in the mind.

The Carrie we meet, at 16, is furious and vindictive post shower trauma. Her inner monologue is full of rage, directed mostly at her classmates, who she sees as relentless and cruel. And Carrie from the jumps seems to be aware that her powers, which she has dabbled with her whole life, are suddenly super charged. She knocks a kid over on his bike, chucks an ashtray (yes, the thinker!) and blows some lights all in the first few scenes. Some articles that get interspersed here point to her menstruation as a flashpoint. I personally feel like this is all trauma based. To say that she is now an adolescent at the moment of first menstruation is a bit trite. Such changes do not happen in one moment in time. But Margaret, Carrie’s mom, seems to agree, as she views Carrie’s period as a curse. She says, you are a woman now, and then smacks Carrie right across the face. Second hard slap to the face she’s received this day.

“Eve was weak and loosed the raven on the world and the raven was called sin.”

The Curse of Blood:
Intercourse
Childbearing
Murder

pages 66-67

Carrie gets locked in her terror closet to pray away her sin (the evidence of which is her period, for her mother is explicit in that she would not have started her period were she free of sin – a real lose/lose framework for the human body), and we see that the girls who pelted Carrie with tampons and pads are now in trouble with the gym teacher, who has on some clean short-shorts and is busting balls. Detention for all. Now we meet Sue Snell and Christine “Chris” Hargensen. Along with a bunch of other girls not worth going into except to say that one is name Donna Thibodeau. Nice name (and not the last Thibodeau to turn up in a King novel, I’m looking at you Under the Dome.) Anyway, Sue is a nice girl with a conscious and she feels bad about the plug it up business, but Chris is a spoiled brat (her dad is a lawyer and a real big deal) and is furious, and will get more furious when she ditches the detentions and ends up banned from the prom, despite the efforts of her slick asshole dad. This will lead to everything that follows.

If there is one hard to swallow part of this tale it’s not Carrie’s TK abilities, but Sue Snell insisting that her cute, fun, handsome, kind boyfriend Tommy take Carrie to the prom, and Sue will stay home. She is doing this as a penance for her behavior, and sees it as a kindness to Carrie. This is a horrible plan. I’d argue this is not a gift. Even without what we know will happen, a pity invite to the prom by someone else’s boyfriend is not going to help Carrie’s reputation. It’s only going to make things worse. Hierarchies in a high school might as well be writ in stone, no one is allowed to rise, it simply will not be permitted. Later it is questioned if Sue was in on the pig blood plan, and though she isn’t, it seems to me that her hubris created the stage for this massacre.

Chris Hargensen has a boyfriend, Billy Nolan, who is a sociopath, and together they hatch a plan to get Carrie. We see Billy and “the blood Boyz” (as I call them) sneak out to a farm and kill two pigs, collecting the blood in buckets and putting it on ice days ahead of time. We will pretend that would work.

Part II: Prom Night

We get some insight into Billy Nolan.

“He didn’t talk when he drove; he liked to drive. The car was his slave and his God.”

Billy is from a broken home, his mom brings home a string of bad boyfriends, and his favorite way to blow off steam is to drive around at night hitting stray dogs with his car. Stephen King and cars. We will be seeing this theme again and again, and it’s present book one day one. More blood imagery here with Billy coasting his car into the garage in neutral, the bumper dripping dog blood. Normal things. He met Christine Hargensen and decided he’d have her and now he has her and he wants to do this pig blood (Pig blood for a pig, ya dig) thing cause it’s fun but he’s already kind of sick of Chris and is starting to hate her.

We get some fun history on Carrie’s Mom. Margaret was an annoying religious zealot in her childhood and basically turned her back on her family, who owned a roadhouse. She marries Ralph, also a religious nut, and then Ralph dies and 7 months later she gives birth alone in her home (there is a bit of a discrepancy here as on page 16 we are told Ralph dies and she gives birth after, but then on page 183 Ralph prevents Margaret from killing baby Carrie in her crib when she catches the baby with her bottle hovering above her (excellent imagery)). We learn that Margaret’s grandmother had TK, and I’d like to read an entire novel about that badass lady who could light the fire without touching it and whose eyes glowed like a witches. We learn the grandmother died in her 60s from heart disease and it’s implied this is from telekinesis, that it damages the heart somehow. Which gives shades of Firestarter, and the brain damage/bleeding angle in that book.

Carrie makes her own prom dress, red, velvet, low cut (dirty pillows out). And things move at a good clip now. Carrie is done with her Mom, shoving her around with her TK and breaking all the rules. She announces she’s going to the dance and that she is going to do as she pleases, unless Mom wants another rain of stones incident. Roofs are expensive so Margaret backs down fearfully, but lets Carrie know they will laugh at her at the prom. Prophesy foretold.

Tommy and Carrie go to the prom. It’s a dream. Everyone is nice to Carrie. The dress is a big hit. And wouldn’t ya know it Tommy and Carrie get voted king and queen of prom. They are seated on their thrones on the stage when Chris pulls the rope and down comes the pig blood. One bucket crashes down right on poor Tommy’s head and he is out cold. They are covered in blood. Everything grinds to halt. And someone laughs.

Carrie hops off stage. People are laughing but only a few and many more are silent or deeply upset. Someone trips Carrie and she falls and crawls, leaving a smear of blood on the floor. She leaves. The doors close and lock. She returns and is peering in. The sprinklers come on. Then a kid gets electrocuted on stage grabbing onto a hot mike while standing in water. The volts cause him to dance and jitter. More power lines come down onto the wet gym. More people get fried and some fires start. All of this is coming from Carrie. The idea of a school shooter came to my mind here. Indiscriminate slaughter. She leaves again and blows some gas tanks, the school is engulfed. She walks into town, yanking down wires, unscrewing hydrant caps to drain water supplies and shooting gas from pumps as she goes. Soon fires and blackouts are blooming all over town. Everyone that sees her knows her name and that this is all her doing, through some mass knowing. There is some wonderful use of color in the descriptions of the ensuing massacre; her thought was colored a ghastly purple; now the fairy tale was green with corruption and evil; turning the world into the maroon tones of dried blood; lighting the duck pond and the Little League diamond in scarlet; And power transformers atop light poles bloomed into nacreous purple. Carrie goes to a church, finds no solace, sets it on fire, then she goes home – looking for her momma.