Book Review: Carrie (1974) by Stephen King

“But hardly anybody ever finds out that their actions really, actually, hurt other people!” (98).

Originally intended to be a short story published in the men’s magazine Cavalier, Stephen King’s debut novel Carrie is the book that vaulted his career into prominence as the pre-eminent horror writer of our age. At the time of writing, King was working as a teacher and living in a trailer with his wife and two children, but after being convinced to pull the story out of the trash by his wife Tabitha (to whom the novel is dedicated) King expanded the story into a novel and, following its acquisition by Doubleday, the advance and royalties quickly gave King the financial freedom to quit his job as a teacher in order to focus on full-time writing.

Released in the 1970s at the height of second-wave feminism, Carrie offers a profile of a troubled sixteen-year-old young woman whose fanatically religious family and constant harassment at school leads to a classical revenge-story of the courageous ancient variety, rather than the modern timid kind. The twin abuses of bullying and religion serve as the key antagonists in the novel, the impetus for Carrie’s desire for vengeance. Indeed, King based the character of Carrie on two girls he knew in school –one was impoverished and faced mockery for wearing the same clothes every day, and the other was raised in a devoutly fundamentalist household.

It is 1979 in the small western Maine town of Chamberlain (note the Civil War connection), Carietta “Carrie” White is an unusual teenager –she was born with strange telekinetic abilities. In the novel, telekinesis is described as “the ability to move objects or to cause changes in objects by force of the mind. The phenomenon has most reliably been reported in times of crisis or in stress situations, when automobiles have been levitated from pinned bodies or debris from collapsed buildings, etc.” However, Carie’s telekinesis is kept a secret. She is an outsider at Thomas Ewen Consolidated High School, like “a frog among swans.” Her mother Margaret is a widow with “near-fanatical fundamentalist religious beliefs.” Like many dogmatic religious believers, she rejects her own body, her sex and sexuality, and forms of happiness like drinking and dancing and so on. All the joyful things of this world are regarded as “sinful” and even “satanic.” Margaret’s husband Ralph died in a freak construction accident in Portland. We later learn that he once insisted on having sex with his wife, but when she refused, he got drunk and raped her anyway. The result was the birth of Carrie. However, Margaret had been so sheltered and confused by the ways of the world that she didn’t even know she is pregnant. She believed it was a a cancerous growth in her belly, a punishment from God for her sinful ways. She tried several times to kill her newborn daughter, but was always persuaded against doing so. Now, she punishes Carrie daily with abuse and forced prayer, as well as self-mortification, an she wishes that Carrie had never been born. She expresses contempt for Carrie’s “dirtypillows” (breasts), and she makes her sit for hours inside a dark closet to repent her sins. Margaret fears her daughter’s special abilities are actually a demonic sign.

Naturally, Carrie is a troubled child. Like her mother, she is remarkably ignorant of worldly things. This comes to a head when Carrie suddenly experiences her first period in the high school locker room (Carrie’s telekinesis has delayed certain elements of puberty, “a kind of mental puberty”). Margaret has never explained this natural biological process to her daughter so Carrie panics and fears she is bleeding to death. Immediately, she is mocked and bullied, with other girls laughing and gawking at her. They form a circle and begin throwing feminine products at her. Carrie is sent home for the day by the high school administration, all of them amazed that Carrie has never heard of menstruation before. When she gets home, Carrie is immediately punished.

“Girls can be cat-mean about that sort of thing, and boys don’t really understand. The boys would tease Carrie for a little while and then forget, but the girls… it went on and on and on and I can’t even remember where it started any more” (97).

One unique ingredient in this novel is the way Stephen King intersperses sections of the book with epistolary interludes: news clippings, congressional hearings, police reports, quotations from neighbors, letters from townsfolk, scientific diatribes, and other after-the-fact historical analyses. Early on, we learn that the “Carrie White Affair” actually caused a massive scandal which was only paralleled by the JFK assassination. What happened? We eagerly await the dramatic conclusion to the novel.

Time passes and Carrie slowly learns to harness her “flex” or “wild talent” wherein she telekinetically moves objects simply with her mind. She learns to pop lightbulbs, shatter mirrors, and send objects floating through the air. When she was younger, she sent a “rain of stones” crashing down onto her house. Some students start to feel bad for Carrie. One popular boy, Thomas Everett Ross, is encouraged to ask Carrie to the Spring Ball so she can be included. When they attend the dance together, Carrie is adorned in a beautiful dress she sewed together herself (her mother tried to stop her from going, but Carrie used her powers against her mother to shut her out). All things considered, the night is altogether lovely –Carrie enjoys spending time with others like a normal young girl and she and Tommy are even named Prom King and Queen! But little does Carrie know, the bullies are just waiting to ruin everything, particularly the ringleader Rita Desjardin.

After a dramatic and ominous build-up of tension in the novel, we are saddened and horrified to learn that Carrie’s big moment has been destroyed as two buckets of pig’s blood are dumped onto her in front of the whole school. The culprits? Two obnoxious spoiled brats straight out of a 1950s cliché –Billy Nolan and Chris Hargensen.   

“A sudden smothered sound that might have been a half-scream came from her mouth, and she leaned forward and pulled violently on the cord with both hands. It came loose with slack for a moment, making her think that Billy had been having her on all this time, that the rope was attached to nothing but thin air. Then it snubbed tight, held for a second, and then came through her palms harshly, leaving a thin burn… The music inside came to a jangling, discordant halt. For a moment ragged voices continued oblivious, and then they stopped. There was a beat of silence, and then someone screamed. Silence again… Then, inside, the laughter began” (195-196).

Now covered in blood with only the whites of her eyes showing (King makes a dark comparison to an old Disney blackface cartoon and a Native American covered in war paint), the kids all start laughing at Carrie again as she flees out of the gymnasium (but only after tossing Rita Desjardin like a ragdoll into a wall). But this time, Carrie stops and decides to take her vengeance. Like a vicious parody of Lady Macbeth, Carrie turns around and heads back to the gym, locking all the doors from the outside using her powers. She forces several people to dance round in a ridiculous manner. She then sets off the internal sprinklers, and unleashes electrical wires which causes a fire, electrocuting many students, and before long the gym erupts in a huge explosion from an oil tank. Carrie then goes on a rampage throughout the streets, destroying the whole town of Chamberlain. She rips apart fire hydrants, opens a gas main and destroys several gas stations before praying in a congregational church and finally confronting her mother. At home, Margaret is waiting for her daughter with a butcher knife. She tells Carrie the whole story of how she was raped by her husband (though she confesses to secretly enjoying it). She then stabs daughter but misses ever so slightly and the knife only penetrates deep into Carrie’s shoulder. And so, Carrie decides to finally put an end to her mother, slowly decreasing her heartbeat using her telekinetic powers until her mother finally dies. Carrie then proceeds across town with a butcher knife protruding from her shoulder, continuing her savage reign of terror. In the end, she finally lays down on a grassy spot to look up at the stars. Here she dies. All across town, people who have been in the vicinity of Carrie simply know that she was the cause of this disaster (her telekinesis sent out some sort of signal). By this point in the story, Carrie becomes our tragic hero. We find it terribly sad when she is mocked and bullied, and then we take joy when she destroys the whole town of Chamberlain. We share her hatred of everything. As the novel concludes, there is a brief coda which alludes to the fact that there are other special children out there with the “TK Gene” (i.e. strange telekinetic abilities). It’s an ominous ending.

Suffice it to say that Carrie is a fascinating horror novel about the dangers of human cruelty, particularly school bullying –a timely topic that continues to plague American society. High schoolers who are made to feel ostracized at home and at school have the potential to unleash savage destruction. Cruelty breeds more cruelty. But herein lies the true horror of Carrie –it is not Carrie’s telekinetic powers that we find so terrifying, but rather the cruelty she faces by her mother and her peers. Paranormality is actually ancillary to the true horror of the novel. In this way, Carrie offers a sympathetic experience –we might easily replace the character of Carrie with an angry young man and her telekinesis with a gun. At the same time, Carrie also offers an examination of 20^th century feminism. Her mother’s extreme religious is a key inspiration of her daughter’s revenge-story. And by the end of the novel, Carrie has transformed from victim to victor. The feminist triumph over school bullying and religious extremist is delivered to us in the form of a grotesque parody –a paranormal teenager covered in blood and mass-murdering people. Perhaps there is a subtle acknowledgment here that new waves of feminist theory in the 1970s might actually seeking to achieve either something impossible or undesirable. Either way, Carrie’s mother shows us that the alternative to feminism, the religious impulse, when taken to its extreme, is actually a violent rejection of all things sacred and beautiful in life. Fanaticism is the great enemy of humanity. Carrie’s story is a sympathetic one because, on the lower frequencies, we all have experienced similar terrors in our own lives.

King once described Carrie as “a cookie baked by a first grader – tasty enough, but kind of lumpy and burned on the bottom.” I tend to agree with his assessment, but I still think readers will find Carrie a worthwhile starting point when delving into Stephen King’s ever-expanding universe of horror novels.

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King, Stephen. Carrie. Vintage Books, a Division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, NY, 1974 (republished in 2024 as the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition). Dedicated to his wife Tabby “who got me into it – and then bailed me out of it.” Also worth reading is Margaret Atwood’s introduction to the novel which was first published in The New York Times in 2024.