Review: Carrie

KING, Stephen, Carrie, New English Library Ltd., Dunton Green, Sevenoaks Kent, UK, 1983.

Octavo; paperback; 222pp. Moderate wear; rolled; spine creased; covers rubbed and edgeworn; text block edges toned with some spotting; retailer’s ink stamp to the inside front cover; previous owner’s bookplate to the title page. Fair.

This is more like it. Here is King with an editor firmly in place, reining in the rambling and circuitous tangents and keeping him on track. Interestingly, there’s still a lot of scaffolding going on here, and it almost takes out the whole exercise, but he gets control of it somewhat towards the end. There’s even a little Mythos stuff happening along the way to keep us Lovecraftian types happy. Let’s dig in…

For those not familiar with the movie or the book, this is the story of Carrie White, a repressed, mother-dominated, young woman who becomes the target of cruel bullying from her school peers; at the end of the novel she uses her powerful telekinetic (“TK”) gifts to kill most of her tormentors while laying waste to the town and its denizens. The story is presented to us as a series of narrative scenes broken up by excerpts from a government report (the “White Report”) about the incident, and others taken from books and articles published about the happening, written by the witnesses and survivors. Making the events in the story a fait accompli in this manner lends the whole exercise a grim inevitability that nevertheless keeps the reader turning pages.

This is King’s first horror novel and the first book published under his own name (he wrote other novels under the pseudonym “Richard Bachman”). In this work, he establishes what becomes a common trope in his later efforts, namely the setting of the tale in a bucolic New England American town, in this case the fictional town of Chamberlain ME. Along with this, he invokes the concept of populating the locale with a range of quirky and idiosyncratic side characters who throw their own lights onto the events. This is something he refines in his next novel – ‘Salem’s Lot – where such recording of the town and its occupants reaches a fever-pitch, becoming almost like a James Herbert novel in its efforts to create and then dispose of as many side characters as possible.

Here, it’s not so bad. The personae who show up – those not connected to the school – are lightly sketched and glossed over, offering their opinions and then moving away from the spotlight. Some of them get referenced by later characters as having met gruesome fates and such reiteration makes for some satisfying eliminations of loose ends. For the most part however, this and the obviously well-mapped nature of the town (at least in the author’s head) is still scaffolding and most of the extraneous detail is unnecessary for the plot to progress.

Interestingly, there’s less of this in the retailing of the school and its occupants. Here, King is happy to assume that everyone knows what an American high school entails and he glides past piles of information as understood material, which he wouldn’t have dared to do in another setting. He’s willing to trust his audience in some venues, but not others, which is a definite shortcoming. In later books this is glaring, but here there’s the sense that a word-limit has been imposed and he’s watching it intently. Many of these moments can be overlooked as grace notes in the descriptions, telling details that cinch the idea without bogging things down, and in this story it’s clear that a little has gone a long way. Obviously, an editor unafraid to anoint a King manuscript with a red Sharpie was in attendance. But back to the school…

From long cinematic exposure, we are attuned to how a stereotypical high school in America works (in fact, I went to an American high school myself for a period of time and it’s actually scary how by-the-book these places are!). There are the cool kids and the nerds; the jocks and the dweebs. We have cheerleaders and quarterbacks and stoners; lesbian-tinged sports mistresses and proms. All made to order. As I said, in any other venue, King would info-dump us to death about how things work and where things are but, in this setting, even he would have to admit that he’d be trying to teach us how to suck eggs. However, because this is such familiar turf, he devotes his talent to other ends and actually – now that he doesn’t have to cling so desperately to unnecessary details – makes some stunning inroads into the material.

The high points of this novel are the character sketches King provides of many of the main actors. Leaving aside Carrie herself at the moment, many of her peers – all side characters in the drama which unfolds – are given extra time in the spotlight and become well-rounded to the point where they start to rise out of their stereotypical background. Prime among these are the two main villains, Christine Hargensen and Billy Nolan. Chris is the girl who delights the most in the degradation of Carrie which occurs at the start of the novel; backed up by her lawyer father, who gets litigious on the school for trying to punish his – his! – daughter, she lets her sense of entitlement run away with her and plots Carrie’s comeuppance. Luring local dropout and ne’er-do-well Billy into her scheme with promises of sex, she rapidly discovers that her sidekick beau has his own demons and he soon takes over as the master in their plotting, driven by longed-for retributions of his own. Watching these two hook up and then engage in a tightly-fought battle for dominance is riveting and is worth the price of admission.

Another witness to Carrie’s shame at the start of the book is Susan Snell, who feels great remorse for her involvement and then tries to make up for it by arranging for her boyfriend to take Carrie to the prom in her stead, knowing that Carrie wouldn’t be attending under normal circumstances. While nowhere near as captivating as Chris’s downfall at the hands of Billy, Sue’s progression through the novel is finely-drawn and believable and she becomes the final witness to Carrie’s revenge. It has to be said that Thomas “Tommy” Ross, Sue’s compliant boyfriend, is somewhat lacklustre in all of this. He goes to his sacrifice like a lamb to the slaughter and he feels like little more than a stuffed shirt in the proceedings. I think we’re meant to feel some kind of sympathy for him – like he’s some sort of saint – but he comes off as simply unbelievable. Then there’s Carrie.

Writing religiously-repressed characters is a high-wire act. If you push it too hard, it just falls across the line into parody. King walks that line here with Carrie and her mother. The amazing thing that he does with this is to keep us thinking that Carrie is fundamentally alright; that beneath all of this repression and isolation and social awkwardness, there’s a real little girl waiting to step forth. And it works. We see this ugly duckling step up and take flight, transforming into a swan on the night of the prom and being crowned Prom Queen. Even her blossoming super-powers get rolled up into this progression and it’s not too hard a stretch to buy into. There are a couple of moments when it almost goes too far, but these instances get reined in. King is nothing if not psychologically insightful when it comes to character. After the bucket of pig’s blood falls onto her though, it’s all over bar the shouting.

Once the blood hits the floor, Carrie goes from high school dream girl to nameless force for destruction. The crucial thing to note here is that she leaves the school – where King feels he can trust us to know what’s what – and heads into town, a town that King has meticulously pieced together in his head and which he insists on describing to us in minute detail, because we obviously can’t be trusted to take the concept of “town” onboard. After a few hiccups and sputters, Carrie just goes postal and trashes the place, and we lose all sense of the character while King gives us street names and local infrastructure: she rips down power lines on X-street; she tears up gas mains on Y-street; she burns down a church on Z-street. There’s a moment when we’re told that she psychically unscrews all three bolts on each of a succession of fire-hydrants: was I aware before this that fire-hydrants have three bolts? Did I need to know this? No, and no, and being told this sort of stuff – scaffolding – is completely beside the point. Anyway, the town gets its just deserts, everyone who has ever been mean to Carrie gets what’s coming to them and Carrie and Sue confront each other and bond psychically just long enough for Sue to “see” the sensation of Carrie dying and “crossing over” (it’s a nice touch; I’ll pay it).

Of course, the carnage is hinted at all through the story due to the scene cuts being interspersed with excerpts from the White Report and other sources. We know from these that the end result will be big, but it’s not really until we get there that we learn just HOW devastating Carrie’s vengeance was. It’s a nice exercise in building expectations and dread. My one quibble is that, from the tone of the ‘Report, it’s clear that the Powers That Be are completely onboard with believing in TK, even discussing strategies for identifying the gene responsible and suppressing it in latent individuals. I think we all know that a report such as this would be doing its darnedest to de-bunk psychic powers and would work hard to discredit witnesses and their statements. Sure, there would be a discussion about rogue superpowers and how to control them, but it would be a Top Secret document that only the President and the Chiefs of Staff would be privy to. Of course, this book was written back in the mid-Seventies when we were all a lot less jaded than we are today…

There’s a clear line of succession from this story through to The Shining, in that the horror of the material stems from psychic powers and their ramifications. Even after The Shining, King was still not able to let this particular notion lie – Firestarter had its day in the sun too, and there’s also a sequel to The Shining now, Doctor Sleep. King’s trick of inserting stray comments, italicized and in parentheses, into the internal monologues of his characters obviously stems from Carrie and it shows up again, also to good effect, in The Shining (I don’t recall it being used in ‘Salem’s Lot; maybe it’s a King constant, but either way I’m not going back to check). The over-explaining is kept in check here, but the flood gates loosen in the next novel, only to be clamped back down in The Shining due to the limitations imposed by that book’s setting; thereafter, the gloves are off. There’s nothing to be done: it’s now a feature and there’s no going back. Even his children – those who also write - are infected with it. I don’t know, maybe people like being lectured to by Stephen King? I know I don’t like it and my opinion of him as a writer has not shifted a bit.

In the final analysis, there’s gold in this tome but not where you'd expect. It’s better than other King novels in some ways, but it’s also a little clunky in places; the quality of writing between this book and ‘Salem’s Lot is a quantum shift. If he trusted his readers a little more this would rate higher but, as it is, I’m giving it three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.