When I moved to Stephen King’s home state of Maine, I thought it would be fun (if a bit cliché) to finally read his books in earnest, and discover how I really feel about his work. For this installment, I made sure to cover up my dirty pillows before cracking open King’s stunning, heartbreaking debut novel – Carrie.
“Jesus watches from the wall / But his face is cold as stone
And if he loves me / As she tells me
Why do I feel so all alone?”
― Stephen King, Carrie
I’ve always taken pride in buying tampons for my wife. It’s incontrovertible proof that not only does this woman live with me, but that she actually likes me for real. If she’s comfortable with my involvement in one of her most intimate routines, I must be doing something right.
Society tells me I’m not supposed to feel this way. A woman’s menstrual cycle is supposedly TMI. God forbid she brings it up at dinner. Why are men so afraid of women that we’ve done all we can to stigmatize such a natural biological truth? Is it jealousy of the ability to create life? A frantic attempt to hold onto the overwhelming privilege we’ve enjoyed for millennia? Whatever the reason, it’s an established fact: Men fear the flow.
In 1974, a year after Roe v. Wade, Stephen King leveraged these patriarchal fears to create a horror classic. Carrie is the story of a long-suffering high school girl who gets her period, learns that she’s powerful, and takes horrible revenge. Dudes who were scared shitless of Gloria Steinem were definitely going to have to change their underwear after reading this.
We meet Carrie White on one of the worst days of her life. She gets her period for the first time, in the high school locker room, in front of her merciless bullies. Not only that, but thanks to her deranged, fire-and-brimstone-spewing “momma,” Carrie had never heard of menstruation. So while her classmates behave like wolves at a slaughter, yelling “plug it up” and pelting her with tampons, Carrie is also afraid she might be dying. Her gym teacher, Miss Desjardin, isn’t much help. “She certainly would have denied that she regarded Carrie as a fat, whiny bag of lard,” King writes. “A first-year teacher, she still believed that she thought all children were good.” Later, Carrie’s mother blames her, beats her and forces her into a closet, to atone for her feminine “weakness.”
But there’s a moment in this day, occasioned by those spontaneous gym class horrors, that allows Carrie something she rarely gets. A moment of calm. The principal sends her home early, hours before her mother’s laundry shift is over. “Alone,” she marvels. It’s the only moment in this story that she gets completely to herself, where the imaginary laws of high school (fat girls are bad) and Christianity (all girls are bad) aren’t bearing down on her. And as it turns out, it’s one of the last days that Carrie, and her hometown of Chamberlain, Maine, will know peace.
As King’s first published novel, Carrie gives us a look at how the author approached his craft pre-fame. He’s never been more laser-focused on plot. Perhaps he hadn’t developed enough confidence in his ability to flesh out a world, or maybe he thought straying from the action would hurt his manuscript’s chances. Because these 290 pages are absolutely filler-free. Characters get minimal backstories. We learn nothing at all about the town. It’s just the walls closing steadily, relentlessly in on Carrie White. There’s nothing we can do about it, except mourn her inevitable fate, and marvel at her power.
“What none of them knew, of course, was that Carrie White was telekinetic,” King writes, matter-of-factly, on page 4. It’s important that we’re armed with this knowledge that Carrie can move things with her mind. From the beginning, we know that everybody is underestimating her – they’re literally playing with fire. It’s a source of hope that she could rise above these bullies at school and home. And it’s a metaphor for the power inside every marginalized person, whose outrage is the potential fuel for change.
When guilt-ridden classmate Sue Snell decides to atone for Plug-It-Up-Gate by having her archetypal boyfriend Tommy Ross ask Carrie to the prom, Carrie ignores her instincts and says yes. The walls continue to close.
Meanwhile, Chris Hargensen, alpha bully and spoiled attorney’s daughter, and her legit psycho boyfriend Billy Nolan, have a heartless and disgusting plan to break Carrie White once and for all – a stage adaptation of her locker room shame that involves buckets of pig’s blood. King accentuates the true criminal depravity going on here, how it’s much, much worse than anything that could be labeled a “prank,” by taking us along on the trip where Billy and a few buddies break into a farm in the dark of night and slit the throats of two pigs. The inevitability of the story structure makes it clear that this plan will work.
Nothing I’ve read from King so far has been as heartbreaking as Carrie’s prom night. She waits nervously for Tommy to pick her up, immune to her mother’s rants about dirty pillows and roadhouses. Tommy doesn’t just show, he treats her with genuine respect, telling her she’s beautiful and meaning it.
As the night goes on, hope awakens. She has a legitimate rapport with her date; she gets compliments on the dress she made herself; she cracks a few jokes that land. “She felt something very old and rusty loosen inside her,” King describes. “A warmth came with it. Relief. Ease.”
Of course, that feeling was going to be short-lived. Not only does the pig’s blood plot go off without a hitch, dousing the newly crowned Carrie and killing Tommy with a bucket to the skull, but the crowd laughs at the gory display. She runs, and somebody trips her. She keeps running until she reaches a field, losing her shoes along the way like Bram Stoker’s Cinderella. And in this moment, with her only options to return to the cackling devils at school or go home to a mother who is waiting patiently with a butcher knife, she wishes for death.
And then remembers her power.
King describes the destruction of Chamberlain with the same efficiency as the rest of his debut novel, and the effect is chilling. Mocked and denigrated for her life-giving body, Carrie uses it to create death instead, raining fire on her abusers like the Book of Revelations made flesh. Bodies do stunted, electrified dances. Charred corpses smell like pork.
If only this town had empathized with somebody who had it hard at home. If only they hadn’t been so cruel about something so natural. Maybe then they wouldn’t have blood coming out of their wherever.
Up next, we tackle a book I’d never heard of before buying it used for $2.99 – 1998’s small-town soap opera Bag of Bones.
THE “CATCHING UP WITH KING” RANKINGS
2. Carrie
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