Carrie
by Stephen King
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Book Summary Information
Author: Stephen KingEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-09-01
ISBN: 1416524304
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Pocket
Book Reviews of Carrie
Book Review: The Beginning
Summary: 4 Stars
*Carrie* is the book that made Stephen King rich (the book was bought for $400,000 by a paperback publisher, if I remember correctly), and that's a pretty good start for a writer, not to say miraculous start. So what's the book about?
I suspect everyone knows, more or less, what the novel is about: a bullied girl with psychokinetic powers seeks and finds revenge. Now, to the good stuff.
The book is written in several voices: there's the classic third person narrative focused on characters, but there are also a number of excerpts from various sources, such as books, written by researchers or witness of the "Carrie White Event", inscriptions found on walls or in notebooks, Q&A from trials, and etc. This is very interesting because you get several points of view, all with their own style and focus, and it keeps the prose dynamic, as none of these things is sufficiently long to bore you.
The writing is good, apart from minor editing flaws (such as redundant adverbs - -ly words - and repetition of the exact same word, usually an adverb, in two sentences, back to back, and a few typos, "valuting" instead of "vaulting" and such). I understand why King had some reserves about his first (published) novel, but don't be afraid, it's really minor and unless you're very critical of writing, you may not even notice.
The novel touched me on a personal level because I have always hated bullying with a passion, having witnessed far too much of it. The 1999 introduction to the book, by King himself, lets you know that he too was a witness to school horrors of the sort.
The narrative isn't strictly linear, meaning you go back and forth (but not much, never so much as to disorient the reader) and that's a good technique because you get given hints about the "future", yet don't know enough to actually guess what will unfold. King wrote the novel in 1973-4, but in the book you'll find references to books from 1982, relating events from 1979 (in the future, at the time of King's writing). I found it really enjoyable to move from a point of view to another, and from a time period to another. This is done seamlessly.
In conclusion, this is a good novel. The true horror of it, I found, was that bullied children, in our world, do not have super powers to defend themselves. *Carrie* seems to herald the advent of school-shooting; what psychokinesis fails to do in our world, guns will do.
Summary of Carrie
A modern classic, Carrie introduced a distinctive new voice in American fiction -- Stephen King. The story of misunderstood high school girl Carrie White, her extraordinary telekinetic powers, and her violent rampage of revenge, remains one of the most barrier-breaking and shocking novels of all time.
Make a date with terror and live the nightmare that is...Carrie
Why read Carrie? Stephen King himself has said that he finds his early work "raw," and Brian De Palma's movie was so successful that we feel like we have read the novel even if we never have. The simple answer is that this is a very scary story, one that works as well--if not better--on the page as on the screen. Carrie White, menaced by bullies at school and her religious nut of a mother at home, gradually discovers that she has telekinetic powers, powers that will eventually be turned on her tormentors. King has a way of getting under the skin of his readers by creating an utterly believable world that throbs with menace before finally exploding. He builds the tension in this early work by piecing together extracts from newspaper reports, journals, and scientific papers, as well as more traditional first- and third-person narrative in order to reveal what lurks beneath the surface of Chamberlain, Maine.
News item from the Westover (ME) weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1966: "Rain of Stones Reported: It was reliably reported by several persons that a rain of stones fell from a clear blue sky on Carlin Street in the town of Chamberlain on August 17th."
Although the supernatural pyrotechnics are handled with King's customary aplomb, it is the carefully drawn portrait of the little horrors of small towns, high schools, and adolescent sexuality that give this novel its power, and assures its place in the King canon. --Simon Leake
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