The tract on the table is forgotten the moment Carrie speaks. She has left her pie untouched, explaining that it brings her out in spots, and her mother has just told her the spots are the Lord’s chastisement. Then the girl says it: Tommy Ross has invited her to the Spring Ball, he will come in to meet Momma first, he has promised to have her home by eleven. Margaret White throws her lukewarm tea in her daughter’s face. A slap follows, and talk of boys sniffing like dogs. And then the pie pan lifts off its trivet and hurls itself across the room, and the teacup flies past Margaret’s head and shatters above the stove, and the big woman drops to her knees with her hands over her hair. Carrie by Stephen King is famous for a prom, but its real battlefield is this kitchen.
A Mother at War With Her Own Body
The White household is the novel’s great creation. Margaret has made a church of the bungalow: services of two or three hours on three days a week with herself as minister and Carrie as the whole congregation, a mail-order crucifix four feet high, Tennessee Ernie Ford singing seafaring hymns on the phonograph while Carrie sews at a treadle machine. King gives the mother a history, told through fragments of her life before marriage: the daughter of roadhouse owners, a father shot in a bar, a sudden turn to revival meetings, a husband who carried a Bible to his building site. What emerges is not a stock fanatic but a woman so terrified of desire that she has turned her own body, and then her child’s, into enemy territory.
That makes the horror double-edged. Carrie is ashamed of her breasts because she has been taught to be, and the novel tracks the slow, astonishing moment when she begins to refuse the shame. An early evening scene, in which the treadle presses itself down and the needle begins to dip and flash while her mother stares, is quietly one of the best things King has written. Nothing breaks. A thread is cleared. And both women understand that the balance of power in the house has shifted for good. The scenes that follow, as Carrie sews her own gown from velvet she paid for herself, carry more suspense than any of the later fireworks in Carrie by Stephen King.
What Stephen King Gives Sue Snell
The counterweight is Sue Snell, one of the girls who joined in the cruelty of the locker room and the only one who cannot forgive herself. King follows her into the back seat of her boyfriend’s car on the evening afterwards, where guilt arrives tangled up with a dread of her own future: the country club, the yellow pill cases, the tidy suburban life in which she will never again have to look at anyone like Carrie. It is a startlingly bleak passage for a horror novel, and it gives her decision to ask Tommy to take Carrie in her place a motive that is generous and selfish at once.
Tommy himself is drawn with real warmth. The scene where he crosses a study hall to ask, and Carrie flinches as if expecting a blow, then accuses him of a trick, then says yes with something like anger, is written with tenderness. Sue’s later memoir, quoted at intervals, keeps returning to one plea: that they were all children making children’s mistakes. Carrie by Stephen King never quite decides whether to believe her, and that ambivalence is one of its strengths.
The Price of Knowing Too Much
The famous device of Carrie by Stephen King, the false scholarship and testimony stitched between the scenes, is a mixed blessing. Its best passages have the chill of a real inquiry, all hedging officials and witnesses who cannot explain how they knew. Its worst are lectures. One long stretch argues that the gift is inherited on the model of haemophilia, complete with royal family trees, and it reads like a debut novelist proving he has done homework the story did not need.
The climax has a related problem. Once the lights go out on the dance, Carrie by Stephen King widens from one girl to a whole burning town, with gas stations, hydrants and power lines, and the spectacle starts to crowd out the person. The pity the book has earned so carefully is briefly mislaid in the body count. The eye that lingers on the girls’ bodies, in the showers and elsewhere, has also aged badly, as has the oddity of a 1974 novel set in a near-future 1979 whose world looks exactly like 1974. Readers should also know that mass death, sexual coercion, the racial and antisemitic language of the period, cruelty to a child and the slaughter of animals all appear.
Where Stephen King Found Carrie
King, born in Maine in 1947, was teaching English at Hampden Academy and living in a trailer in Hermon with his wife and two small children when he began the story. It started as a short piece for Cavalier, the men’s magazine that bought his early stories, after a friend suggested he try a story with a woman at its centre. He built Carrie from two girls he had known at school, one mocked for her poverty and the other from a fiercely devout home, and from a Life magazine article about telekinesis. He also gave his heroine his own birthday, 21 September.
The book was a slow starter in hardback and a sensation in paperback, selling a million copies in its first year. Brian De Palma’s film pushed it onto the New York Times list in December 1976, where it climbed to number three. The novel’s first period scene remains one of the most adapted openings in horror: a 2013 remake, a television movie, an unofficial sequel, and a new series from Mike Flanagan that arrived on Prime Video this month. The scholar Caroline Bicks studied the earliest drafts of Carrie by Stephen King in King’s own papers, an experience she describes in Monsters in the Archives.
After the Last Page
The rough edges are real: a lecture where a scene should be, a finale that grows too large for its heroine, a gaze that has not aged well. Yet the kitchen, the sewing machine and Sue’s bad conscience are the work of a writer who already knew where fear lives. Carrie by Stephen King remains a short, savage novel about what happens when a community decides one girl does not count.
Readers drawn to its outcast at the centre will find an older cousin in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, another being made monstrous by rejection. Joanne Harris has called her novel Broken Light a homage to King’s book, with a middle-aged woman’s anger in place of a teenager’s, and John Farris’s The Fury pursues the same idea of psychic power in a young mind that others want to control.
Every town has a girl like Carrie. This one learned too late what she could do.