Carrie

Well, I finished Carrie in a marathon session. It's pretty short- my copy has about a hundred and eighty pages.

Warning: Spoilers!

First impressions- I liked it. I haven't actually read it before, so it was interesting to see some similarities it shared with the other Stephen King books I've read.

The first of those similarites was the quite noticable- one of King's greatest strengths is the way he juxtaposes quick shots of what a character is thinking as he or she reacts to their enviorment. This happens quite a lot in Carrie.

The structure of the novel makes it appear to be composed from various books and publications, all dealing with the strange events surrounding Carrie. I liked this format. It reminded me a little bit of Dracula, another epistolary novel.

The titular character, Carrie, is a young, very unpopular high-school girl who gets her first period at a late age in the gym showers. The cruel way the other students treat her (I can still hear the awful cries of "Plug it up, plug it up!" from the schoolgirls in question) is only the beginning in an awful journey that will end in massive loss of life for a small town.

Carrie is disturbing, I think, because of how sympathetic Carrie really is. She is the ultimate outsider, dominated by an extremely religious mother who locks her in a closet, and really wants to be accepted most of all. She is utterly pitiful, even as she wields a frighteningly powerful form of telekinesis.

Interestingly, the now-famous buckets of blood dumped on her at the prom are not the final bit of abuse that sets her off. Instead, it is a shrill laugh, a symbol of the torments that she has already undergone, that pushes her on her path of destruction, a path that culminates in a heart-rending death scene.

Carrie seems a little rough around the edges, not as smooth as King's later novels, but it still is powerful, with a -heroine? Maybe- who is as pitiful as she is powerful. A good read.

Next- Salem's Lot.