Carrie (novel)
Carrie is the debut horror novel by American author Stephen King, released in 1974. Set in the town of Chamberlain, Maine, the plot revolves around Carrie White, a friendless high school girl from an abusive religious household who has telekinetic powers. After a cruel prank pulled by one of her bullies on prom night, Carrie decides to take revenge.
King wrote Carrie with the intention of submitting it to be published originally as a short story for the men's magazine Cavalier following the suggestion of a friend that he write a story about a female character. Though King initially gave up on Carrie due to discomfort and apathy, and felt it would never be successful, his wife Tabitha convinced him to continue writing, and rescued the first three pages of the story from the trash. He followed her advice and expanded it into a novel. King based the character of Carrie on two girls he knew in high school and enjoyed fabricating the documents for the narrative. After Doubleday accepted Carrie to be published, King worked with editor Bill Thompson to revise the novel.
Carrie was published on April 5, 1974, with a print run of 30,000 copies, and a paperback edition was published by New American Library in April 1975. The paperback edition became a best seller, particularly after the release of the 1976 film adaptation, reaching four million sales. The novel received generally positive reviews, both contemporaneously and retrospectively. Carrie, King's debut novel, helped launch his career and achieve him mainstream success. It has also been credited with reviving mainstream interest in horror fiction and being influential among contemporary horror writers. Three film adaptations have been released, with one getting a sequel, while a musical adaptation premiered in 1988, and a television miniseries is in production.
Plot
In 1979, Carietta "Carrie" White, a 16-year-old girl in Chamberlain, Maine, is ridiculed for her weight, her clothes, and the unusual religious beliefs instilled by her fanatical mother Margaret. One day while showering after physical education class, Carrie has her first period. As Margaret has never taught her about menstruation, Carrie panics, believing she is bleeding to death. Her classmates, led by a popular girl named Chris Hargensen, mock her and throw tampons and sanitary napkins at the hysterical Carrie. The gym teacher, Rita Desjardin, intervenes and attempts to comfort Carrie before sending her home for the day.While walking home, Carrie unconsciously uses telekinesis to push a taunting child from his bicycle. Realizing what she has done, Carrie recalls childhood incidents in which other unusual events occurred, including a time when stones fell from the sky as a response to abuse from her mother. Carrie wonders if she can make such things happen at will.
Arriving home, Carrie tells her mother that her menses have started and blames Margaret for never explaining menstruation to her. Margaret believes that Carrie's sinfulness caused her to begin menstruating and locks her in a closet as punishment.
The next day, Desjardin reprimands the girls who bullied Carrie and gives them a week's detention as punishment. Chris refuses to comply and is punished with suspension and exclusion from the prom. After her influential father fails to reinstate her, Chris decides to take revenge on Carrie. Another girl involved in the incident, Sue Snell, asks her boyfriend Tommy to invite Carrie to the prom as a way of atoning for the locker room bullying. Carrie is suspicious at first, but accepts. Learning that Carrie will be attending prom, Chris persuades her boyfriend Billy and his gang of greasers to gather pig's blood while she prepares to rig the prom queen election in Carrie's favor. Her plan is to humiliate Carrie in front of the whole school by rigging buckets of blood to fall on her during the coronation of prom queen.
Carrie begins preparing for prom night, all while secretly learning to control her telekinetic powers. Margaret realizes that her daughter has inherited the same telekinetic abilities Margaret's grandmother possessed and attributes them to witchcraft, but is initially too frightened to address the issue directly. Instead she begs Carrie not to attend the prom, considering it an occasion of sin. Carrie uses her powers to thwart Margaret's attempts to stop her.
At prom, Carrie finds herself accepted by her peers for the first time and loses some of her self-consciousness as she interacts with them. Tommy finds himself curiously drawn to Carrie and realizes he is falling in love with her. Surprised to see her name on the ballots for Prom King and Queen, Carrie has a premonition that she should not vote for herself, but Tommy convinces her that she deserves to win. Carrie and Tommy are elected prom queen and king by a single vote. At the moment of the coronation, Chris, who is hiding in the wings, releases the buckets, covering Carrie in blood. Tommy is hit by a falling bucket and knocked unconscious. In shock, Carrie flees the building amid the laughter of the other students, unaware that many of them are reacting out of horror.
Outside, Carrie grows angry and decides to use her powers to humiliate them as she herself was humiliated. She seals the gym and activates the sprinkler system, inadvertently sparking some ungrounded wires that electrocute several of her classmates. The wiring sparks a fire that eventually ignites the school's fuel tanks, destroying the building in a massive explosion. Only a few staff and students, including Desjardin, narrowly escape. Tommy dies in the blaze, having never regained consciousness.
Realizing what she has done, Carrie's sanity snaps. She begins to make her way home, causing destruction as she goes. She opens a gas main, resulting in explosions that level Chamberlain's downtown, then tears down live electrical lines that kill those who have left their homes to investigate. Her powers cause many townsfolk, including Sue, to instinctively sense Carrie's presence as she approaches. Sue leaves her home to find Carrie in hopes of stopping her.
Carrie returns home to kill Margaret, who in turn lies in wait to murder Carrie. Margaret rambles about the night of Carrie's conception, a sin she believes is the root of Carrie's evil. She stabs Carrie with a kitchen knife, but Carrie uses her powers to stop Margaret's heart. Mortally wounded, Carrie makes her way to the roadhouse, where she sees Chris and Billy leaving town. After Billy attempts to run over Carrie, she takes control of his car and sends it into a wall, killing both him and Chris.
Following Carrie's psychic signal, Sue finds the dying Carrie in the woods. Carrie believes Sue set up the prank at the prom. Sue invites Carrie to search her mind via telepathy, and Carrie sees that Sue wished her no ill will. Sue, still tethered to Carrie's mind, experiences Carrie's final moments before death.
The incident in Chamberlain, labeled the "Black Prom", makes national news with 440 reported casualties, including the majority of the graduating seniors. The rest of the town, unable to recover financially or emotionally from the tragedy, begins to shut down, with many survivors relocating. Desjardin and the school's principal blame themselves for not reaching out to Carrie sooner and resign from teaching. A congressional commission investigates the Black Prom to discover what truly happened, concluding they must prepare for future incidents.
Sue Snell is scapegoated and blamed for triggering Carrie. In response, she writes a memoir recounting her experience and expressing sympathy for Carrie, while haunted by experiencing Carrie's death.
The novel ends with a letter from an Appalachian woman about her four-year-old daughter, who has begun to exhibit telekinetic powers. She compares the child to her grandmother, who also possessed these powers, and concludes that the child is destined to be even more powerful.
Style and themes
Carrie is a horror novel as well as an example of supernatural and gothic fiction. It is in part an epistolary novel: the narrative is organized around a framing device consisting of multiple narrators, and a collection of reports and excerpts in approximate chronological order. It has been argued that this structure is used to indicate that no particular viewpoint, scientific or otherwise, can explain Carrie and the prom night event.Carrie deals with themes of ostracism, bullying, coming-of-age and the consequences of not conforming to societal norms. A driving force of the novel is Carrie's first period in the shower. Following the massacre, Sue is subject to the same exclusion as Carrie, despite her altruistic motives. John Kerrigan and Victoria Madden have both observed that throughout the novel, Carrie is often associated with the pig, which are considered "disgusting" animals.
Another theme is vengeance. Kerrigan considers Carrie to be an example of a revenge tragedy. Ray B. Browne argues that the novel serves as a "revenge fantasy", while novelist Charles L. Grant has stated that " King uses the evil/victim device for terror". Some scholars have argued that Carrie is a social commentary. Linda J. Holland-Toll has stated that "Carrie is about disaffirmation because society makes the human monster, cannot control the monster, yet still denies the possibility of actual monster existence while simultaneously defining humans as monsters".
Background
By the time of writing Carrie, King lived in a trailer in Hermon, Maine with his wife Tabitha and two children. He had a job teaching English at Hampden Academy, and wrote short stories for men's magazines such as Cavalier. Carrie was originally a short story intended for Cavalier. King had started conceptualizing the story after a friend suggested writing a story about a female character.The basis of the story was King imagining a scene of a girl menstruating for the first time in the shower similar to the opening scene of Carrie and an article from Life about telekinesis. As he wrote the opening shower scene, King experienced discomfort due to not being female and not knowing how he would react to the scene if he were female. He also felt apathy toward Carrie when writing the scene. After three pages, King eventually threw away the manuscript of the story. The next day, Tabitha retrieved the pages from the trash and convinced King to continue writing the story with input from her. King was ultimately able to emotionally connect to Carrie through the influence of two girls he knew. One was constantly abused at school due to her family's poverty forcing her to wear only one outfit to school. The other was a timid girl from a devoutly religious family.
King believed Carrie would not be successful, thinking it would not be marketable in any genre or to any audience. He also found writing it to be a "waste of time" and found no point in sending out what he perceived as a failed story. King only continued writing it in order to please his wife and because he was unable to think of anything else to write. When King finished the first draft, Carrie was a 98-page-long novella that he detested. In December 1972, King decided to rewrite Carrie and strive for it to become novel-length. He wrote in fabricated documents that were purported to be from periodicals such as Esquire and Reader's Digest, imitating their style accordingly, a process that King found entertaining. After Carrie was accepted by the publisher Doubleday, King revised the novel with editor and friend Bill Thompson. The original ending of Carrie had Carrie growing demon horns and destroying an airplane thousands of miles above her. Thompson convinced King to rewrite the ending to be more subtle.