Revisiting "Carrie"

[j d worthington]

Well, I finished a re-read (for the first time in 25 years) of Stephen King's Carrie; and I must say that it holds up surprisingly well... For one thing, King's prose seems more controlled, oddly, less rambling; I wouldn't quite call it lean, but it's certainly much more focused, and there's very little wasted there. I also like the conundrum he presents with Carrie, who is both victim and more than a bit of a monster at the end, yet always engages the reader's sympathy. He also has some lovely moments that simply caught me up with the way they're expressed:

The late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil and sweet as childhood, slanted through the high, bright gymnasium windows.

(This while the preparations are going on for the Prom, when you already have the knowledge of how tragically wrong things are going to go.)

Kenny's high-pitched cackle drifted back on the redolent darkness that trembled at the edge of summer.

(Following the trip by Billy Nolan and his friends to the farm to collect the blood... so "redolent", given the light touch of the "coppery" smell of the blood, is a nice touch.)

In the sudden, brief silence, she heard something within her turn over. Perhaps only her soul.

(This is a particularly nice one, as what has "turned over" could be an intuition of the horrors about to take place at the school or, as King indicates elsewhere, perhaps the first stirrings of a child within. Or perhaps it is Sue Snell's soul....)

Or this, from Sue's last meeting with Carrie, where they have a brief telepathic rapport:

And then the light was gone, and the last conscious thought had been
(momma i'm sorry where)
and it broke up and Sue was tuned in only on the blank, idiot frequency of the physical nerve endings that would take hours to die....

She began to run, breathing deep in her chest, running from Tommy, fro the fires and explosions, from Carrie, but mostly from the final horror -- that last lighted thought carried swiftly down into the black tunnel of eternity, followed by the blank, idiot hum of prosaic electricity.

Which last (plus the idea of her pregnancy) makes the following passage both more poignant and more horrifying, as a result.

There are also a couple of other nice touches I enjoyed (though I'll admit one may be seen as a bit of a flaw, perhaps) in his nods to HPL... not only in his mentioning Lovecraft in a couple of passages, but with such little things as mention of "the Eye that Watcheth, the hideous three-lobed Eye" (p. 90) or this:

Crickets chirruped mindlessly and a whippoorwill
(whippoorwill somebody's dying)
called in the great stillness of morning.

Which proves to have a double meaning a moment later. (This last, aside from featuring in HPL's "The Dunwich Horror" was indeed, apparently, a genuine folk belief in some areas of Massachusetts, which is where he came across it.)

The fact is, King pulled off a rather difficult stunt with such an early novel, because from the first page you have a good idea what's happened in general outline, and by early on in the book, you've a good idea of which characters survived... yet this doesn't lessen the tension or suspense at all; rather, it increases it. His use of the various documents from the reports, news stories, books, etc., dealing with "the Carrie White affair" also are very skillfully used to increase that tension quite well, as it gives the reader the helpless feeling of frustration about how prone the investigators are to ignore the possibility of this not being unique. The final letter at the end is also, I think, a nice touch, as there's more similarity to Carrie there than simply another telekinetic waiting in the wings....

Overall, I'm very impressed. It's been a long time since I've read Carrie, but I'd always recalled liking it... on rereading it, I'd say that, while it has some flaws, it really is an amazing performance for so early in his career... and, frankly, much, much more taut, tight, and focused than his later work tended to be....

 

[blacknorth]

Interesting post, JD - the lines you cite strike me as the kind of writing that a modern editor would want to cut. Yet they offer second sight into the text, even on first acquaintance, and are common to the very best horror: often mystifying insight, deeply embedded, which connects, not neccessarily with the reading experience, but with the sense experience of the story. Genuinely authentic.

I suppose it's like finding a very good poem scattered throughout a novel, enriching it enormously.

 

[j d worthington]

Thanks for the feedback. Though I'd not forgotten about this post, I had pretty much written it off as having gone into the dustbin of "non-interest" that swallows so many things in forums.

I'm not a big King fan, to be honest -- I tried rereading some of his other work not long before tackling Carrie, and found it to be almost impossible for me to get into -- too much fat there, and not enough good prose. (Then again, I was going through an extremely trying time, so perhaps this is unfair to King. However, I also recall losing interest in a great deal of his material later in his career, for precisely those same reasons, so perhaps the judgment would stand even now.) But this one... as I said, it has its flaws, but I really couldn't help but be impressed with what a strong book it was in various ways; and the fact that it not only held my interest at a point where I was more than a bit jaded with King to begin with, but even struck me with how tightly it was woven and the beauty of some of the writing, says to me there's more there than with so much of his work.

(For example, one of the things I had tried rereading was 'Salem's Lot -- formerly a favorite from my original reading. I found it almost unreadable last time around, frankly dull as could be; and as for the writing itself... out of a book of some several hundred pages' length, I found what I would estimate to be about three pages of truly good writing -- that is, writing which simply caught me up and took my breath away with its beauty, precision, and sheer power of imagery, metaphor, and insight. Had the entire novel -- or even a major portion of it -- been written with such power... my gawd, what a wonderful book that could have been!)

 

[blacknorth]

I'm not much of King fan either - to me he's like a whimsical Fred Pohl on a very, very bad day.

 

[j d worthington]

Well, that's a disturbing connection I certainly hadn't made...