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| 1st edition hardback (1974) |
Carrie: a novel of a girl with a frightening power (1974)
As a child, until well into my teens, I took part in a semi-regular routine that I imagine is still pretty common to American kids growing up in the suburbs: several weekends every summer I would go garage sale shopping with my grandmother. Not just the ones in our neighborhood, though; our range was wider than that. My grandmother would peruse the classified section of the newspaper and circle ads that looked promising, plotting out the houses and sales we would hit throughout the morning (as any serious garage sale hunter will tell you, the early bird gets the worm at these things). I’m not sure if many local papers still run ads for garage sales – I’m sure Craigslist has cornered that particular market, among other, less savory ones – but I do remember looking through the paper myself, circling ads that listed “books” as one of the types of item for sale.
This was how I acquainted myself with Stephen King: through regular excursions to dig through the stuff others had decided they had no need of. As an avid reader and budding horror maven, I eagerly dug through cardboard boxes full of paperbacks. With little experience and no real developed tastes, I snatched up whatever I could find that looked spooky or scary. John Saul and Dean Koontz were early names I looked out for, but as the summer progressed and the garage sale count grew, I learned to pay special attention to the name Stephen King.
This is all a rather tangential way of explaining that my experience reading Stephen King was rather random. I followed no real roadmap, knew nothing of publication dates (and would not have cared if I did), cared not a bit about a book’s reputation or critical standing. If it was written by Stephen King, I put down my handful of quarters for the books (fifty cents was always the magic price when it came to paperbacks in the summers of my youth). I started with It, but might follow that up with Eyes of the Dragon, The Tommyknockers, one of the Dark Tower books, a short story collection. For a few years Stephen King books were reliable Christmas or birthday gifts. Needful Things, Insomnia, Nightmares & Dreamscapes.
I let myself get off on another tangent, when all I’m really trying to say is that there are still gaps in my Stephen King knowledge, and pretty big ones at that. For years I had no idea Richard Bachman was another name I should have been looking for at garage sales (this was pre-internet, remember). There are some pretty famous, important works in King’s career that I still haven’t read, and until a few weeks ago Carrie was one of them. I’d seen the movie several times over the years, of course, but I’d never cracked the novel until picking up a copy for the express purpose of writing this series of posts.
I must say, to rehash a sentiment I’ve had several times already in this project of ours, reading King’s first published novel, over a quarter century after I was first introduced to the man’s works, was an interesting experience, for reasons I’ll get into as we go along. For now, Rik, before we dive in headfirst, I’m curious to hear what place this book held in your own personal canon. I’m assuming you did not miss out on this one, as I did.
Rik: It’s pretty simple: Not fully, at first. But it took a while to finally read it all the way through. My mother regularly kept a book sitting on the bathroom counter in our house, and at a certain age, I figured out that some of those books had “dirty” parts in them. I was already quite the avid reader, and was on my own journey through literature in my turn from tween (we didn’t call it then) to teen, which mostly involved some amalgam of science-fiction, fantasy, and jungle adventure. I was just getting into horror through the movies, though I was fascinated by Poe since I was much younger (but for many reasons not necessarily or fully related to horror).
My mom read a lot of cop thrillers, mysteries, supernatural and horror novels, and the popular crap of the day (Jonathan Livingston Seagull, etc.)… basically whatever caught her eye at the checkout stand or bookstore, or that her friends were reading or recommending. In a reverse of such a trend, my friends and I had all, around the ages of eleven and twelve, become really adept at not just snooping out Playboys and Penthouses in our individual houses, but also at ensuring that when those magazines were tossed out in the trash, that they didn’t actually make it to the dump. By the same token, I was good at finding the dirty stuff in books and letting my friends know to watch out for certain novels their parents might be reading and exactly where the best stuff was to be found (chapter and verse, as it were).
At some point, I moved beyond just looking for the racy stuff and dirty words, and actually started reading anything that my mom was reading. I remember Peter Benchley (because this is how I first read Jaws and The Deep), Dean Koontz, James A. Michener (whom I found too dry), James Clavell, Joseph Wambaugh, Michael Crichton, Sidney Sheldon, Harold Robbins, Frederick Forsyth, Judith Krantz, Ken Follett, etc. But I didn’t know Stephen King from Erica Jong at this point, except that Erica Jong wrote a really, really dirty book (Fear of Flying) that my mom read. And thus, far before I could fully understand it (or what a "zipless fuck" was, I sneak read that book as well.
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| Tie-in cover for the 1976 movie; possibly published in 1977 based on the books mentioned on the cover.. |
And somewhere in there, probably after the movie came out since I remember the paperback had a picture from the film on it, I read Carrie. Well, I read parts of Carrie. I am pretty certain that The Dead Zone is the first of King’s novels that I read all the way through, and I know that I also read through the entire Night Shift short story collection at the same time that my mom was reading it. But I do remember picking up Carrie when I saw it, and thinking at first, “This looks like a “girl” book” but then checking it out anyway because there might be dirty stuff. Besides, the girl on the cover was covered in blood. How cool was that? And when I got right into that infamous first chapter in the girls’ locker room at the school… Uh… Ummm….
To be honest, at that age, despite my burgeoning interest in sexuality, was still a little unclear on the whole feminine hygiene issue, and so the scene rather confused me a bit. It kind of shocked me, but it didn’t stop me from coming back to the book. But I did not read it all the way through at that time. It would be several years later – sometime in the early ‘80s is my guess – after I had read many other King books and seen the De Palma film a number of times, before I finally read the full Carrie novel thoroughly.
Aaron: I feel the urge to outline the plot of Carrie a little bit, to bring some newcomers up to speed, but of course that’s ridiculous. Even if you’ve never read the novel, or seen any of the films derived from it, or seen the short-lived Broadway musical, there have still been over four decades of parodies, jokes, and references to this story. If you have consumed any pop culture within the last forty years, you’re likely familiar with the touchstones of this story. Also, the obvious question; why would anyone unfamiliar with Carrie be reading this site?
We all know the plot; social misfit with religious extremist mother is the victim of a cruel prank, leading to carnage and mass fatalities as her burgeoning telekinetic powers are unleashed on her classmates. I bet, even to those who haven’t read the book or seen the movie, that a lot of the blanks in that description have already been filled in from memory. Like the fact that Carrie’s powers begin manifesting themselves during puberty, which arrives with unfortunate timing while Carrie is showering in the school locker room. Or the detail that Carrie’s final revenge on her classmates occurs at prom, where she’s just been crowned prom queen before being doused in pig’s blood. Or even the fact that she’s been asked to the prom by one of the most popular boys in school, who was prompted to ask Carrie by his girlfriend who feels guilty for her part in Carrie’s continual humiliations. How many lines can still be quoted by the uninitiated? “They’re all gonna laugh at you!” “I can see your dirty pillows.” The specifics of this 42-year-old story have been thoroughly absorbed into the pop culture consciousness.
That being said, as someone with a great familiarity with Stephen King’s works, and having seen the film several times, there were still a few surprises to be had. I’d never read this book, but I had read plenty of King’s other stories and novels from around the same period, and still I was a bit surprised with how rough this novel is. There’s something unpolished and brutal about the writing here, and while I pointed that out as a slight negative when discussing his short stories, I found it to be completely appropriate here. Stephen King was less than a decade out of high school when he wrote this story, putting him at maybe the perfect perspective to write a horror novel about teenagers in high school. He was old enough to view the dramas and concerns of teenagers with some mature hindsight (and more than a little contempt), and yet young enough to remember how it actually felt at the time, when so many hormones are rushing through your body that you feel everything more sharply than you will ever again.
Carrie is a bruised book, full of pain and sadness and some of the worst people imaginable. If the characters in this novel aren’t the ugliest King has ever written, he sure tops himself in terms of quantity, by having nearly everyone we meet come across as selfish, cruel, manipulative, and pathetic. To be sure, most of the adults we meet seem like decent enough people, but they remain blind to the horrible acts being committed by their children, and when they are made aware, as in the principle when he learns of Carrie being taunted for getting her period, they are laughably spineless and ineffectual. And as for the kids themselves, the best that can be said of most of them is that they simply don’t care about anybody else, and tease Carrie simply because other kids are doing it. It’s hard to hold that against them, though, because I think that’s the default setting for most people in their teens, when it can often feel like you’re the only one going through what everyone in the world has and will go through. I certainly have shameful memories of going along with some teasing of some random kid I didn’t really know. Nothing near the level of what happens in Carrie, but I think it’s a pretty universal part of growing up that your fear of being seen as the ‘other’ often causes you to go along with the tribe in their attacks on those unlucky enough to be chosen.
These brief musings aside, reading this novel didn’t really bring anything to the surface. High school was not a pleasant time for me, and as a young man I was quick to move past it, and as a full-fledged adult I’ve mostly made my peace with any lingering resentments tied to that period. That said, I’m also a fairly nostalgic person, still reading authors I loved at that age (clearly, as evidenced by this entire series of writings), still watching movies from that period, still listening constantly to the music of my high school years. And yet, perhaps because I had never read this novel before, I found it stirred no memories nor brought about any maudlin remembrances. Rik, I know we’ve already gone over your experiences with this book, but I’m a bit curious. As someone who would have had a more adolescent connection to the book, and also someone with more awareness of the time period the novel takes place in, how did you react to reading the novel again? Were you able to identify at all with the characters, or did it bring up any memories of your own teenage years? Do you think the characters are unlikable, as I had said, or do you think that’s just my age and general annoyance with teenagers talking?
Rik: Well, apart from acquiring some lifelong friends my last couple of years, I liked very little of high school, and sadly, there is enough failure wrapped up in it for me that I will never be able to get past certain elements of it. And reading Carrie again did resurrect for me, however faintly, the ghosts of abusive or otherwise abrasive personalities with whom I also had to deal in attending middle and high school in the late ‘70s. I was certainly no Carrie White (but damn, if I only had access to her power, some assholes would pay with their lives; hell, I'd like that power today), but I had my run-ins with the occasional bully over the years. It always blew my mother’s mind that my smart mouth didn’t have me getting beat up constantly, but I never was, and part of that was being wise enough (most of the time) to either partner with the right-sized buddy at some moments or to show them just enough pure crazy at other moments.
When I finally read Carrie all the way through back then, I remember thoroughly despising each and every character who got in Carrie’s face, but I also remembered not having nearly as much empathy for Carrie in the book because of King’s descriptions of her as being overweight and his use of such adjectives as “bovine” in describing a look she gives. As a result, this makes me feel as implicit in their horrid behavior towards her as someone like Sue Snell, who does regret her actions and goes overboard in trying to correct them. On the opposite end, I had nothing but empathy for Sissy Spacek’s Carrie in the movie version, probably because I saw Badlands pretty young, and thus, always had a little crush on Spacek, however strange some others thought she might look. It speaks volumes for my own hypocrisy, since I am now as overweight now in my early fifties as I used to be underweight in my early twenties, but even more for the double standard of Hollywood, that they wouldn’t cast an actress that truly fit the character as written in the book. While she may have still fulfilled the “oddness” of Carrie White’s personality, and may also not have been conventionally “pretty” by Hollywood’s rigorous standards of the time, Spacek was nowhere near the Carrie White physically described in the book.
Reading Carrie again was a bit like watching Dazed and Confused for the first time on its release. I liked the film at the time a good bit less than many other friends who totally got into it right away. For me, it was because many of the characters were just a little too close to the surface at the time, especially Parker Posey’s Darla. I love Posey, but her character frightens the hell out of me. And I knew several girls just like that in school in the ‘70s. And Carrie, the book even more than the movie, is chock full of horrid, hazing Darlas. It took me a couple more showings to fully get into Dazed before I really started to love it for what it is.
To answer your question about the squadron of unlikeable people in the book, I believe there are people for whom to hang out a shingle of hope. Not every character is completely ugly, even if their original actions might be construed as such. I mentioned Sue Snell, of whom I do believe feels real remorse for her actions even if I believe she does go a little overboard in trying to get her boyfriend to ask Carrie to the prom. Couldn’t she have simply apologized and genuinely tried to befriend and understand Carrie instead? (If she had, I suppose we wouldn’t have the story as it is.) Miss Desjardin laughs at Carrie at first but then feels guilt for it and practically goes fire and brimstone on the girls who perpetrated the shower prank. The principal, too, while acting in protecting the school, still takes up battle against Chris’ lawyer father on behalf of Carrie. Sue’s boyfriend, Tommy Ross, too is shown to be a deeper character than perceived by most people, and without any motivation of his own in the humiliation of Carrie. I feel that while most of the characters we meet are motivated by the variety of sins you described earlier, and are indeed some of the ugliest people he has delineated in his writing, that much like real life itself, there are always good people (or at least the rudimentary elements of them) to be found when you scratch the surface.
I think it should be mentioned early on here that Carrie is a novel written in the epistolary form, that is as a collection of other writings outside of just the normal prose style. An epistolary is comprised of a tale through the use of documents, such as letters, sections of other (often imaginary) texts, poems, newspaper articles, quotes, and diary entries, for examples. Since we are in the Halloween season, it is most appropriate to point out that one of the most famous examples of an epistolary novel is Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Although I had read Carrie previously, I had quite forgotten that the book was written in this style, and it took me a little while to warm to its form, as it were. In actuality, the book is about half written in this style, as there are also long sections of the normal King prose at play, but it is still a drastic change, especially late in the book when it turns for a bit into court transcripts in the aftermath of the school tragedy. Aaron, did you enjoy this change of pace from King’s usual style? Did you like the epistolary form, or did you get confused in the switches in style as I did in a few places?
Aaron: The epistolary nature of Carrie was actually the one thing I knew about the book, aside, of course, from the plot elements that made it into the movie. In fact, I was under the impression that the entire novel was going to follow in that style, while in fact I think it was slightly less than half epistolary, with the rest being typical King prose. I had expected the novel to be comprised of diary entries from her classmates, letters, and new reports, and I had expected this assembled story to move more or less chronologically towards the fatal dance at the end. The prose portions do move in a strictly chronological fashion, but the epistolary aspects jump around slightly, as almost all of them were written years after the main events of the novel.
That was the most surprising aspect of the novel for me, actually. I’ve spoken before about King’s tendency to foreshadow coming disaster with quick throwaway lines announcing some imminent disaster or character death, and I’ve said this doesn’t always sit well with me. In Carrie, the prose sections are interrupted by memoirs, interviews, and academic research into Carrie White, many of which directly divulge the fates of most characters long before the book reaches that point. I felt it was a successful tactic here, and it added an overall sense of dread, because we kept seeing these articles, and multiple books, written about Carrie White, and while I expected local newspaper articles, I hadn’t expected the numerous sources that actually make up the epistolary aspects of this book. And then another thing; I looked at the date of publication. I knew Carrie had been published in 1974, so it immediately struck me as odd when I realized the book took place in 1979. Combined with the survivors memoirs, the academic history, and the national news coverage, it gave the idea that we may be watching a small high school drama, but whatever came of it was going to spiral out of control and affect the entire country, and quite possibly the world.
The tension is heightened eventually by the fact that, as you said earlier, we do meet some kind and good people in this book. I would say that, tellingly, most of the decency happens away from Carrie White. Carrie’s not present when Ms. Desjardin punished the students for teasing her, she never hears what the principle does to stand up for her, and Sue Snell never apologizes or tells her of her plan. In fact, when Carrie is present Ms. Desjardin slaps her, the principle is insensitive to her pain and keeps getting her name wrong, and Sue Snell takes part in the horrific lockerroom teasing. If we’re to see these characters through Carrie’s eyes, none of them come off as heroic. But then things do change, and there is some decency waiting just before the storm.
One of the most touching portions of the book comes when Carrie arrives at the prom. You were not wrong to find Carrie unsympathetic initially, as she’s written as a fairly unattractive person, not just physically but personality-wise as well. She’s described as "bovine," and has a habit of responding to everything with an animalistic "ohuh" noise. Once we get into her head a little, we start to see that she’s a normal, if incredibly stunted, young woman, bright and somehow hopeful, but in the early going it’s also not hard to see why she would be so ridiculed. Once the novel gets to the prom, we’re primed for a great disaster, and Carrie herself assumes this is all the lead-up to some new prank, but what happens is a surprise to Carrie, and the reader. Carrie is accepted.A few kids are mocking, but for the most part everyone is more than happy to accept Carrie. She’s instantly made to feel welcome, to the point that, apparently, she was voted Prom Queen genuinely, and not as part of Chris Hargensen’s revenge plot. Because as it turns out, Carrie wasn’t the focus of everyone’s rage and ridicule. I found this to be a surprisingly realistic development, and I think it’s a viewpoint more kids should be made aware of. When my daughter (quickly approaching her teen years) comes home from a bad day, upset about something some kid has said or done, I often tell her that the other kid is probably at home having a similar conversation with their parents. In school, everyone is miserable, and everyone is dead certain that no one else is suffering. So that moment, when Carrie realizes that maybe not everyone is plotting against her, was truly moving, and it makes the tragedy to come that much more heartbreaking.
Of course, some people are plotting against Carrie, though only one person seems to really care. Chris Hargensen has taken her punishment for teasing Carrie especially hard, and while most of the girls are content to take their punishment and grumble about it, Chris fights back. First with her father, who threatens a lawsuit against the school if his daughter isn’t allowed to go to prom, and if Ms. Desjardin isn’t fired, and then by recruiting her bad-boy boyfriend to help exact revenge on Carrie herself.
This was the most troubling aspect of the book for me, the relationship between Chris and Billy Nolan. They are both just the worst human beings imaginable, and their relationship quickly descends from Chris’ childish affections for the bad boy, into actual domestic violence and sexual assault. Chris doesn’t quite realize how bad Billy actually is, and continues to think she’s the one in control. There’s also the somewhat icky, if not altogether unrealistic, intimation that Chris gets off on the violence and seediness. No doubt it’s a combination that exists in real life, and probably fairly commonly, but it was still unpleasant to read, and added to the general nastiness of the book.
Feel free to add your own thoughts, Rik, but also I have a question for you. I knew this book had been published in 1974, so I found it jarring when I realized the prose section of the novel takes place in 1979, while the epistolary sections come from at least the 1980s. I first had to double-check the book’s copyright to make sure I was correct. I’m curious as to your thoughts on this. When I realized what King was doing with the timeline, it gave the book a somewhat sci-fi tinge, and heightened the sense that something world-changing was about to happen.
Rik: Yes, jarring is the correct term. I cannot properly say what my reaction was to this reading the book in the years within the (even projected) timeframe of the novel, but I can tell you that right now it is more than a little jarring. I am not one to agree that just because a film takes place in a future timeframe that it necessarily makes a “science fiction” story, because there should be other qualifiers that would make it that. You can tell a romantic story that takes place five years in the future, and without some other aspect – possibly technological or sociological, or even a time travel angle – to make it clearly the type of tale one would regard as a science fiction story, you would then just have a basic romance that happens to occur in the near future. That is not science fiction.
Carrie, however, does have the telekinesis gimmick, which as an unexplained and unverified phenomena of the mind (there are claims as to its reality, of course, but there are also a zillion claims of time travel and body transference) would, for lack of a separate distinct genre, grant it some admission into the science fiction category. The story as told, though, is clearly one of horror. I think if the story hinged more on Carrie being tested over her powers in a laboratory by a government research group or some such organization, then a greater claim to science fiction could be made. I know you only said that elements of the epistolary nature of the novel gave it a slight sci-fi tinge, but I felt it important that any possibly deciding to read the book after going through this discussion understand that such a novel will not be encountered. With its emphasis on the traumatizing effect of Carrie’s upbringing, and the carnage at the prom and afterwards, Carrie is squarely in the horror genre.
Here’s something that rereading the book truly brought to the fore for me: the invasion of my too deep memories of the film into my reading now. While I have not read the book in over thirty years, I have probably watched Carrie at least twenty times, if not more, in that span. It is my second favorite De Palma film – Blow Out (1981) being my favorite. When I was first reading my mom’s copy of the book in small sections, but not the whole thing, as a teenager, I had not seen the film, so everything was new. When I finally sat down to read the entire book in the ‘80s, I had indeed watched it numerous times by then, so that full reading was already intruded upon by the style and tone set by De Palma.
Chief among these was the presence of John Travolta in the Billy Nolan role. Perhaps it is because he went on to become a huge movie star and cultural icon, but it was hard for me to read the Billy parts without picturing Travolta on every page. Certainly I know the other characters by the actors who played their parts by look and name, but he is the only one who completely overrode the written version to remain rooted in my mind in the part. Sissy Spacek is so different from the Carrie in the book that I never imagined her once while reading, and this might because she is described and fleshed out as a character far more than Billy is in the text.
I do not want to get into a discussion at length of the first film version here, Aaron, for that is the topic of the next piece that we will post. But it does lead me to ask how easy it was for you to separate the quite famous film – which you have already said you have seen several times – when reading through the novel. You mentioned there were still several surprises to be had in the reading, but how did the film color your reception on the page of some of the most famous scenes, such as the school prom or Carrie’s ultimate confrontation with her mother?
Aaron: Before I go into your question, let me offer a quick defense of my “sci-fi” descriptor. I agree that the book is clearly horror, and any reading that resulted in it being classified as science fiction would be completely off base. However, the jumping ahead in time, and the intimations we get of how telekinesis has been treated by the scientific community, did give me some X-Files vibes. Or, as I actually thought while reading the book, it reminded me of The Shop, the shadowy government agency that shows up in a couple of Stephen King books and short stories, most notably in Firestarter. We get hints in some of the epistolary passages of Carrie that scientists have isolated the genetic mutation that leads to telekinetic power, and that mandatory testing of all children is a distinct possibility. This put me in mind of The Shop studying and training telekinetic kids for their own nefarious purposes, which is pretty close to what happens in Firestarter. In fact, given King’s occasional tendency to write novels covering similar ground, almost as if he’s playing “what if?” with a scenario he finds too rewarding to limit to one narrative path, I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire idea for Firestarter and The Shop came out of unused ideas for Carrie.
As for your question, put simply; it didn’t color my perception of the book all that much. Unlike you, I’ve probably only seen the movie a handful of times, and the last time was about two or three years back when I showed it to my wife, who had never seen it before. I don’t have quite the familiarity with the film to the point where it superseded my own interpretation of the characters, with only one major exception; Billy Nolan. The Carrie White in the book is so different from Sissy Spacek in the movie (though she is great in the movie) that I didn’t have any trouble mentally distancing the book from the film. For the rest of the characters, they’re described and portrayed pretty close to what they ended up casting in the film version, and so I have to admit that I did picture Piper Laurie as Carrie’s mother, or William Katt as Tommy.Ross. The only time this caused any disparity was with Billy Nolan, who, as played by John Travolta, is a bit of a no-good doofus, entirely wrapped around Chris’ fingers. In the movie Billy is clearly a bad kid, but, well, he’s also doofy young John Travolta, so he never feels dangerous. By contrast, Billy in the book is absolutely dangerous, more dangerous than any of the characters seem to realize, and I think his awfulness struck me harder because I kept picturing Travolta in that role.
The novel’s ending is a bit different than the one in the film, which we’ll cover in our next piece, but for the most part the difference is one of scale. The film’s big scene of carnage is the prom, while in the novel the prom is just the beginning. Carrie White almost completely destroys her town, setting fire to buildings and killing passersby as she walks home to her mother. Their reunion quickly turns fatal, as Margaret White finally follows through on her oft-repeated attempts at killing her daughter. Although Carrie is mortally wounded at this point, she still has enough energy to kill her mother and flee into the night, where she runs across Billy and Chris, killing them. Perhaps it’s my age and the fact that I’m two decades removed from high school, but I didn’t quite find this as triumphant as I think I would have in my teen years. What struck me more was the buildup to the carnage, how effectively King had taken us from unease with Carrie to outright sympathy, and how the final pages before the blood pours down from the ceiling carry a dread weight. We know what’s coming, we know it’s inevitable, we’ve even seen what the aftermath will be, but we still hope it won’t happen.Through the book’s finale, as soon as Carrie starts unleashing her telekinetic abilities, we’re presented with the idea that Carrie is broadcasting her thoughts to the town at large. Everyone that sees her, even those who have never heard of her before, know her name and the pain she is in. Following this signal, Sue Snell finds Carrie, bleeding and dying, and they share a final moment. In fact, this is almost their first moment, as the two don’t interact at all throughout the novel, outside of the group teasing in the beginning. It’s a great moment, and though I think it’s a bit narratively lumpy (the truly appropriate place to end the story is clearly with the confrontation between mother and daughter), I have to give points for turning an emotional scene into a quietly horrifying one, as Carrie forgives Sue, just in time to die and force Sue to experience the pain of her death from Carrie’s point of view. I was disturbed by Sue’s attempts to mentally untangle herself from Carrie as she realized what was about to happen.
It’s easy to see why this book has been adapted so many times; at it’s core it’s a pretty simple revenge-of-the-underdog tale, and those speak to everyone on some level. I feel like we’ve already delved into the film a bit more than we might have wanted, but that’s OK; we’ll still have plenty to say about the films. I’m really looking forward to tackling them, especially the more recent films. There’s some interesting changes to the cultural landscape that happened between the novel’s publication and when the sequel and remakes were filmed, and it should be fascinating to see how those films address them, or ignore them as the case may be.
Rik: You didn’t need to defend your “sci-fi” descriptor, because I did still agree with it in certain ways, mostly from the telekinesis angle. But I am rather glad you did offer up a small defense, because in doing so, you brought up The Shop and Firestarter, which was a point I had planned to mention, as I had a similar feeling. I am actually rather glad he moved those concepts on to the later stories for the most part, because I feel it would have weakened the novel at hand by diffusing it from its primary purpose too much. (And whatever one may think of Firestarter the movie – which I find to have been dreadfully filmed – the book is far, far better.)
I was going to react to a couple of your other points right here, and then I noticed, four paragraphs later, that all of my points were in comparison to the De Palma film, because I just watched that fresh again a couple of days ago. Since I would rather not burn up all of my thoughts right here, I think that I am going to choose to “carry” those over to the next “Carrie” installment (sorry, I had to make the horrid pun at some point, so now it is out of my system), where we will tackle that film directly, and I am sure we will reference back to the book a zillion times in the process.
I must say, while we both had mentioned how horrid we found the characters we encountered, I really enjoyed digging back into Carrie the novel again. We had entered the Stephen King realm a tad slowly in discussing a few short stories – and the tentativeness was almost purely on my own suggestion – but now having gone through one of his novels, I am eager to hit another one in the near future.
Aaron: I’m in agreement. This was a lot of fun to catch up with (an odd descriptor, considering I called the novel “bruised” and “full of pain and sadness,” but it’s true. Stephen King is (and was, even this early in his career) incredibly skilled at writing in a clear style that encourages continued reading. I read a lot of books, and although I’m not the world’s fastest reader, I make up for it in time spent reading. And yet whenever I get a new Stephen King novel, I finish it within a day or two. Granted, Carrie is a far briefer story than most of King’s published novels, but I still burned through it in two not-that-long sittings.
I have a feeling we still have more we could discuss about Carrie, but like you, I’m ready to get into the films. I’m sure we’ll be doubling back this way to discuss the source novel in our upcoming pieces. So, I’ll finish up here by saying that, yes, I look forward to covering another novel in the near future. Although maybe we should build up to tackling The Stand.
[Stayed tuned in the very, very near future for our next discussion, on Brian De Palma’s 1976 Oscar-nominated version of Carrie, here on We Who Watch Behind the Rows.]
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