Sympathy for the Devil
And forgetting Carrie White may be a bigger mistake than anyone realises . . .
Stephen King, Carrie
It begins in a high school girl’s shower. It begins with rocks falling from the sky. It begins with blood and fear. And it will end there too.
Stephen King’s first novel is one of the books I am revisiting rather than reading for the first time, though it is one of the ones with a very large gap since I first read it. Revisiting it around fifteen years later has changed my perspective on it dramatically.
When I first read this, I had read only a handful of other King books: Night Shift, The Shining, a failed attempt at ‘Salem’s Lot, maybe even Christine or The Dead Zone. Carrie I picked up early on for a couple of reasons: it was his first book, and I like doing things in order; and it was mercifully short. The Stand, to this day, intimidates me, and my second copy of It is a wrist-breaking hardback. Carrie on the other hand was shorter, and fine to read. Many of my memories of it are filtered through King’s excellent On Writing, where he gets into detail about the craft of stories and takes Carrie as his case study, but other memories persist: the obvious moments, like the ending, but bizarre moments too like Assistant Principal Morton getting a blood blister after trapping his thumb in the filing cabinet. But overall, the impression was that it was good, and left nothing more than a certainty that I had read it. Returning to it has changed this view drastically.
Of all his books, this feels most like King condensed to his purest form in many ways. The obsessions that will appear in other books are baked into the crust right from the off, to the power of blood, the inner thoughts in italicised brackets and even the poisonously religious matriarch who so often crops up in his stories. Yet at the same time, much of what is in here is very unlike him as well.
The choice to tell backstory and foreshadow with epistolary elements feels as at once both like padding with how he dances around spoiling the book’s ending, but also effectively hints at what is to come. Maybe on a first read back in ’74, without knowledge of the infamous ending, this may have been a more effective storytelling choice. It’s hardly King’s fault that the de Palma film, with the iconic Sissy Spacek, burned the story’s ending into anyone’s brain with even a passing familiarity of the story. This foreshadowing however is used much more effectively in other books, often where King will introduce a character, get us to fall in love with them, tell us he’s going to melt them, and then promptly melt them. Later he will embed it more thoroughly into the text rather than dropping in a magazine interview or book extract. Remove those, and you have a lean novella or novelette.
(Having said that, I made my wife read this particular book and she had no knowledge of how the book ended, so what do I know?)
Those epistolary elements also feel characteristic of early King. A trick he will still occasionally use, but perhaps most prominent in The Shining and It, where whole chapters and sections of their respective books are devoted to excavating history for its characters and readers alike. But even there, Jack Torrence or Mike Hanlon doing the hard work feels like a natural part of the narrative. Here, without a historian, writer, journalist or detective in the mix, it simply provides an excuse to go into micro fictions without the worry of having expositional scenes that might be harder to weave naturally into a story. It could be the nerves of a young writer making sure you understand the ramifications of a certain scene by stopping and pointing out the details.
And yet.
Despite every criticism you can lay at this book’s door, there is an undeniable visceral power to it. A sense of dread (maybe even enhanced by knowledge of de Palma’s film) pervades even those opening pages, as the pudgy and pathetic Carrieta N. White is drawn inexorably to her Prom Night.
Maybe it’s something that grows with time. King wrote this, inspired by two girls in his school who were similar to Carrie (and met similarly short ends) but by this was point in his life was working in a school teaching English. He could see the bullying from the other side. Yes, of course his wife Tabitha helped him get into the female point of view, but those experiences at the front of the classroom must surely also inform his choices. Myself, writing as someone who works in education, maybe that’s why the book hit me harder now than it did when I was a teenager, blind to girls and their struggle, when all I wanted was a girlfriend (never mind that I gave away my copy of Carrie to my then girlfriend, that’s beside the point).
It’s hard to quantify what that power is though. Maybe it’s not rage (not the book, the feeling), but sympathetic rage. Many of us have been bullied at one point or another, and fantasised about what we would do if we had the power to do so. But Carrie’s action should not be cathartic – yes, thing’s for her were probably not going to get better in life, but was it worth all those others dying horribly?
Though there was violence in American schools long before Columbine, and King would even write his own novel of a school shooter in Rage, it’s not a huge leap to read Carrie’s actions as that of a school shooter. Though the myth that the two murderers of Columbine were bullied has been challenged in recent years, revealing them to be pathetic, anti-social proto-incels who had an axe to grind for seemingly no reason, it is easy to see why the bullying myth from Columbine pervades – it makes a sick sort of sense, explaining why two teenagers would do what they did. Columbine ended with 13 dead. With Carrie White, twenty-five years before, we have the same myth told as story: a girl, horrifically bullied breaks and destroys the institution that destroyed her. Where Columbine is a senseless tragedy, King invites us in, similar to the more ethically clear-cut The Dead Zone, to see, feel and understand the inner mind of someone who then kills. At any point, is what Carrie does justified?
The book offers no clear morality, besides Sue Snell, and we are left to ponder our own reactions to the bullies, the grown-ups and to Carrie White.
There is an excellent book called My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf, which expresses the sentiment better than I could in describing Dahmer that seems apropos for Carrie White as well:
It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent. Once Dahmer kills, however – and I can’t stress this enough – my sympathy for him ends.
– Derf Backderf, My Friend Dahmer
Observations and Connections
Oddly, though published in 1974 the story itself is set five years later in 1979, with the epistolary elements of the book very definitely cementing that fact. Is this a fact unique to British printings, which may have been printed later? Answers on a postcard please for an otherwise almost inexplicable choice.
Of all King’s books, this is one that feels the most neglected in its integration with the overall King universe. Whereas everyone knows a criminal gets sent to Shawshank, or has heard of Derry’s child murders, or read even a Paul Sheldon novel, Carrie for being the mass murder of a whole high school of seniors barely even registers. This despite other characters in later books displaying similar variations of the shiny psychic powers seen here.
UP NEXT: Small town vampires come to ‘Salem’s Lot.
Deeper Thoughts for the Horror Inclined 