Two reasons. One, this is Stephen King's first published work. Do I review it from the perspective of a new reader, or from the perspective of an old reader, or as something in between - as somebody who's read a few of King's more recent works, and none of his older stuff? I fall around the middle of that spectrum, right?
Two, is there enough here to review? There might be more interesting material here to discuss. Pardon the existential crisis, but I'm beginning to think that simply critiquing a book - quantifying it, or putting my own admiration of it on a sliding scale - is not enough here.
Carrie is weird. Not in tone: this is the prose I'm used to from King. It hasn't changed much in forty years. Not the genre: realism with a hint of magic is one of my favorites, after all.
It's the message, and the way it's delivered. Carrie follows titular character Carrie White, picked on by her classmates for her entire life, and constantly subject to the fundamentalist Christian rantings of her mother. The story (short, for a King novel) includes two major scenes - both examples of taunting Carrie that go too far - and the fallout from them. And then it's all over. I read it in a couple of days.
This should be pulp. The cover of my edition is graphic-novel style: simple low-quality drawings with expressive fonts. But as I've come to discover with King lately, this author has a knack for sophisticated messages (it's what makes his horror so powerful), as well as top-notch storytelling.
I mean it, top-notch. The pace is usually breakneck, and the prose is great. And King leaves no stone unturned: he takes time to round his characters out as much as possible. In one example, a character hears the garbled shoutings of a nearby pedestrian before she falls unconscious. The pedestrian is then given a backstory and several friends within the next few pages. King explores every cranny of his story as he tells it.
Having chiefly read (and enjoyed) Under the Dome, I should note that King's science fiction does not differ greatly from his horror. Dome may even count as a horror novel with sci-fi elements; they are similar in tone, and even in events (nice town with several major characters introduced before disaster strikes the whole community).
The biggest difference between Under the Dome and Carrie is that the latter feels like King-lite. It's early, and it's short, because it was King's first novel. But the story does not contain as many morally reprehensible characters as Dome. No Big Rennie to have qualities that other characters like but the readers despise. No, the characters are... more open, not only with the reader, but with other characters. Evil is not omnipresent here.
Cruelty is. Carrie is violent, and it feels like a cathartic (and horrific) comeuppance for what she endures throughout her whole life. And life is cruel to the other characters, too. All the high school girls notice that life after high school will be cookie-cutter, boring, pointless. Life stops after they leave their hometown, or they never leave and life stops anyway. Futility reigns.
Where was I? Oh, futility - like writing a relevant review of Carrie. It has aged well (song titles make it a period piece, as well as fashion styles, but little else), and it's arguably aimed at King's youngest audience, high schoolers. How much you like it depends on your taste for horror; the conclusion is not as gory as other King stories, but it has its fair share of blood, and the final fate of Carrie's classmates is strong. Most excellent is that King's voice is present from the beginning. He had written long enough by this point, it seems, that he knew what kind of stories he liked to tell. That enthusiasm is contagious, which makes me want to read more of him.
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