{"id":1551,"date":"2018-07-31T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2018-07-31T01:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/?p=1551"},"modified":"2019-01-02T19:58:07","modified_gmt":"2019-01-02T08:58:07","slug":"the-constant-reader-chronicle-carrie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/?p=1551","title":{"rendered":"Constant Reader Chronicle: Carrie"},"content":{"rendered":"

Constant Reader Chronicle is a new feature that \"\"<\/a>aims to cover a single Stephen King novel, in chronological order, on a near monthly basis. It will skip novels undertaken as part of the <\/em>Dark Tower cycle\u00c2\u00a0and the <\/em>Mr. Mercedes\u00c2\u00a0novels but will otherwise cover every major work that Stephen King and that pesky Richard Bachman has committed to the page. Given that <\/em>Carrie\u00c2\u00a0is such an iconic place to begin a career, this entry will contain fairly comprehensive spoilers. The remaining entries will be spoiler rated on an individual basis.<\/em><\/p>\n

Stephen King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first published novel is the<\/em> prototypical King. The seeds of so many future books are present here, often in the most embryonic form, and Carrie<\/i> predicts a bright future for its author that came true in perhaps the most lucrative way imaginable. You have a girl with a Shine (although it is not, of course, called that yet), a small town filled with people both decent and awful, and a cavalcade of carnage concentrated in the climax. Though parts of Carrie <\/i>flirt with a form that wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ultimately come to be associated with King, this is an exquisitely realised first release.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Carrie <\/i>tells the story of a girl with latent telekinetic powers that manifest with the late onset of her period. Tired of being oppressed by her overtly religious mother and weary of the mob mentality of her schoolpeers, Carrie\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s only one humiliation away from snapping.<\/p>\n

Carrie <\/i>is one of those stories that is impossible to spoil: you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never read it or seen it, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re probably aware of how it turns out, because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s become shorthand. Even at the time, the trailers for the movie featured the fateful prom, and further back from that, the very first page tells us how it ends. Though King has always been fond of foreshadowing, Carrie <\/i>is the most blatant of his foregone conclusions. If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got this far and you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t<\/i> know that almost everyone in Carrie <\/i>dies, some in more horrible ways than others, nobody knows where you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been. Carrie<\/i>\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s narrative is interrupted with excerpts from court transcripts, pseudo-scientific textbooks, confessional memoirs, and folksy newspaper reports. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not the best approach to have taken – King could very easily have written a straight narrative without any of the scrapbooking – but it feels like it may have been trendy at the time.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The strangest element of Carrie <\/i>from the perspective of a non-American reader is that Carrie is made fun of for being overtly and publicly religious. Had she lived somewhere else in America, even with the extremist two-person sect religion that she practises, she would have been respected for that <\/i>at least. All American media that makes its way overseas paints a picture of high school being the worst experience you can have, so the rest of Carrie <\/i>checks out.<\/p>\n

Carrie <\/i>crystallises much of what King does best: he builds a town and he fills it with people, not all of whom are good or bad – but some of whom are thoroughly irredeemable. Chamberlain is not quite Jerusalem\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Lot, but there are key characters who receive the treatment that we will come to know and recognise in future books. Billy Nolan, in particular, is a well-written morally repugnant villain – he doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t care who he hurts, he just wants to hurt someone<\/i>, even his accomplice, Chris Hargensen. King has a habit of digging deep into the psyches of his villains, and he started here. Chris is a fairly standard vicious teenaged girl, but Billy is something else entirely. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re a loathsome pair, but understandably so. King works to make their villainy banal rather than cartoonish and laughable \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and their defeat provides some much needed catharsis for the tragedies that befall Chamberlain in the end.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

They stand in stark contrast to Margaret White, who is a different form of radiant evil: where Chris and Billy know they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re bad and simply don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t care, Margaret has her own twisted sense of righteousness informed by a thoroughly wrongheaded reading of the Bible. Margaret is the first of multiple \u00e2\u20ac\u0153mothers who have problems with their daughters\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s canon, and she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s one of the purest. Where the mothers in \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcSalem\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Lot <\/i>and The Stand <\/i>are needlessly antagonistic, Margaret has a basis for her actions and an entire history informing them. The book\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Margaret is properly evil, loved by her daughter despite her many shortcomings and, crucially, is actually targeted for death. Every other incarnation of Margaret White was sought out by Carrie for forgiveness and succour, but on the page Margaret must die<\/i>. Piper Laurie brings a scenery chewing flair to the role in Brian De Palma\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s film, and the musical Margaret has too much tenderness and love to sell the part the way it should properly be done. If Carrie <\/i>is about anything – and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s definitely about more than a prom gone wrong – then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s about mutually assured destruction. Everyone must go.<\/p>\n

Carrie <\/i>truly is<\/i> a tragedy. High school students can be cruel, but they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not all vindictive monsters – and, even when they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re fictional, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not exactly supposed to agitate for their violent deaths. Most of the deaths are unwarranted, but you never <\/i>think of Carrie as a monster. In this incarnation far more than any others, Carrie is not just telekinetic, but telepathic. She bleeds her psychic wounds into the town and across the page. Despite most of her dialogue being variations on \u00e2\u20ac\u0153ohuh\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153momma\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a dimensionality to the character that makes you feel for her. Surviving witnesses felt her pain, but the true centrepiece of the book is the transference passage in the novel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s climax. Why King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s adaptations are so often hit and miss is because the best parts of his work are interior. On the screen and in the musical, Sue Snell is sympathetic, but she works best when she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s empathetic. <\/i>The reason for that is Carrie herself; for all of her mousy downtrodden nature, Carrie is a girl who learns what she wants, and even starts having ideas about how to get it. Sue becomes the blank canvas upon whom Carrie\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dreams will be sketched but remain unrealised, and it is through this loss that King ultimately creates an experience as indelible as Carrie <\/i>has become.<\/p>\n

With his first three novels being Carrie, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcSalem\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Lot<\/i> and The Shining<\/i>, <\/i>Stephen King really came out swinging. Carrie <\/i>has some structural issues that King would not return to – putting the whole book on the first page works only in retrospect, and was probably wonky back in 1972 – but there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s so much that he gets so right that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s easy to see how Carrie <\/i>captured the minds of readers and is paying dividends to its audience and writer 46 years on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Constant Reader Chronicle is a new feature that aims to cover a single Stephen King novel, in chronological order, on a near monthly basis. It will skip novels undertaken as part of the Dark Tower cycle\u00c2\u00a0and the Mr. Mercedes\u00c2\u00a0novels but will otherwise cover every major work that Stephen King and that pesky Richard Bachman has committed to the page. Given that Carrie\u00c2\u00a0is such an iconic place to begin a career, this entry will contain fairly comprehensive spoilers. The remaining entries will be spoiler rated on an individual basis. Stephen King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first published novel is the prototypical King. The seeds of <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1553,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,287,285],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-constant-reader-chronicle","category-stephen-king-books","has_thumb"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1HLZ6-p1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/keep\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/Sissy-Specek-as-Carrie-009.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1551"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1708,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1551\/revisions\/1708"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}