A Quick Note on the Audio: This was my first time using Substack’s built-in audio recording tool. The last five minutes get wonky-speed up and clip a bit. I’m not sure why, and I decided the thoughts on there were important enough to leave it. Sorry to the listeners. I’ll work on my audio editing skills so it won’t happen again.
If you’re new here, this is a new section of Kindling, The Barrens, a Stephen King book club. If you’d like to join in, just read this intro here. We’re just getting started, experimenting as we go, so things are likely to change, but the overall goal is simple. We’ll talk books, what we liked, what we didn’t, what surprised us. This is meant to be a conversation, so please, join in! Write your own response reviews if you have a Substack. Reply to other people’s comments. Happy reading!
Constant readers, this was the book that started it all. Carrie, the story of an ostracized teen girl with telekinetic powers. With that back story, she could have been a superhero, some kind of incredible force for justice. But this is King’s world, so instead, she was a mass murderer. What kind of strange mind would think of such a thing? Where did it come from? Let’s start there, shall we?
The Inspiration
I’ve watched interviews, read the story of the life changing book deal that came out of publishing Carrie in On Writing, but I don’t think anything compares to the way he said it in his forward in the audiobook. Here it is, in Stephen King’s own words.
Before I had completed two pages, ghosts of my own began to intrude, the ghosts of two girls, both dead, who eventually combined to become Carrie White. I will not call either by her true name here. They were unfortunates in life, and do not deserve to be chewed over, even in such a humble introduction as this, in death.
I will call one of them Tina White, and the other Sandra Irving. Tina went to Durham Elementary School with me. This was a bucolic, four room country school with perhaps sixty pupils in all. Tina was pudgy and quiet, so back-rowed you could cry.
There is a goat in every class, the kid who is always left without a chair in musical chairs, the one who winds up wearing the KICK ME HARD sign, the one who stands at the end of the pecking order. This was Tina. Not because she was stupid (she wasn't), and not because her family was peculiar (it was) but because she wore the same clothes to school every day.
After Christmas one year, she came to school with a new outfit, eyes bright and eager, heart vulnerable and expectant. But instead of praise, the kids at school teased her mercilessly. Fourteen-year-old Stephen King didn’t partake in the “hazing”, but he also didn’t stop it. That reality haunted him for years after. For all I know it still does.
Sandra Irving lived about a mile-and-a-half from the house where I grew up. There was no father in the picture, only a german shepherd with the absurd name of Cheddar Cheese. Mrs. Irving hired me one day to help her move some furniture … I was struck by the crucifix hanging in the living room, over the Irving couch. If such a gigantic icon had fallen when the two of them were watching TV, the person it fell on would almost certainly have been killed.
That religious fervor, the strange mode of worship that differed in some way from his own Methodist upbringing, shaped the religious themes of Carrie, embodied in her mother, Margaret White.
Both Tina and Sandra died prematurely, before they reached 30 years old, one by suicide, the other from an epileptic seizure in her apartment where she lived alone in the same town her and King went to high school. These two ghosts were what haunted King’s mind, and where the story of Carrie White emerged. But it wasn’t a story he was eager to write.
I was frightened both of the world of girls I would have to inhabit, it was a world I knew almost nothing about, and of the level of cruelty I would have to describe. I was also afraid to revisit what I had not the wit or moral courage to stop.
He wrote a few first pages, then tossed them into the trash and went to watch TV. His wife Tabby asked him what he had been working on. If you don’t know how this goes, his wife rescued those pages from the trash can, told him he really had something and should keep going. That book ended in a life changing publishing deal, and set King on a path to become one of the most influential and prolific writers of the 20th century.
He ends his forward with this one wish.
Sometimes, quite often in fact, I wish that Tina and Sandy were alive to read it. Or their daughters.
The Locker Room
“PER-iod!”
It was becoming a chant, an incantation.
What a crazy way to start a book, but the scene has to happen for many reasons. Firstly, we learn about every character and the role they play to bring the bloody prom night to fruition.
We have Carrie, humiliated in front of her peers in such a vulnerable way. We meet Chris, the bully of the school who goes on to execute the final mocking plan that sets the town on fire. Guilt ridden Sue Snell, without whom Carrie would never have been at prom, commits her crimes here. Miss Desjarden, seeing the cruel way Carrie is treated, sets out on punishing the girls, and Chris in particular. Without her, the bloody revenge plan would never have unhatched.
All of it is centered around menstrual blood, the thing that Carrie’s mother believes is the result of sin. I get the sense that things had been quiet around the White household for a long time. They had their dinners and their pies and their fervent prayer times. Until Carrie’s first period, it seems that she’s been a meek, defenseless figure, at the mercy of everyone around her. After, she will never be the same.
An Unlikeable Main Character
I’ve heard King say that one of the things he dislikes most about that early book is the fact that Carrie White is unlikeable. I have to agree. She isn’t someone I’d like to hang out with or take to dinner. But I think the story works because we feel bad for her. Even in the outrageous carnage of prom night, I felt that the town got what they deserved.
Maybe that’s just me.
Take those early scenes though, the ones told from the perspective of Carrie’s neighbor. Little three-year old Carrietta White, the unfortunate daughter of a mad-woman bent on hiding the female form from her own little girl. The reign of stones on the house after her mother brings her inside. We understand why she is what she is. Even in the end, I felt pity.
Blood, blood, and more blood
If you’ve read a lot of Stephen King, then you know that his books can go strange places. A story can take totally unexpected turns, drag on too long, or (one of the bigger criticisms of his work) have a terribly unsatisfying ending.
Fortunately for us, Carrie is not one of those books. There are many reasons for this, but I think a big one is the theme of blood that carries through. It works particularly well because of the religious themes (think blood of Christ) that feature heavily.
We begin in a locker room, a 16 year old girl bleeding in front of all her peers in the shower. A girl who doesn’t even understand what is happening to her, without the sense to hide it, or run to a bathroom stall.
Carrie turned off the shower. It died in a drip and a gurgle.
It wasn’t until she stepped out that they all saw the blood running down her leg.
The revenge taken on her by Chris Hargensen: pig’s blood. That works in two ways. A biblically unclean animal slaughtered, the blood dumped on Carrie at senior prom when she takes the crown that Chris believes should have been hers. In a way, it’s like a perversion of the blood of Christ that washes your sins away. Carrie, whose mother believes she is evil for going to prom at all, is bathed in pig’s blood, a symbolic picture of the sin and filth that she has been taught to fear and repent of her entire life.
Blood, fresh blood. Blood was always at the root of it, and only blood could expiate it.
She was a big woman with massive upper arms that had dwarfed her elbows to dimples, but her head was surprisingly small on the end of her strong, corded neck. It had once been a beautiful face. It was still beautiful in a weird, zealous way. But the eyes had taken on a strange, wandering cast, and the lines had deepened cruelly around the denying but oddly weak mouth. Her hair, which had been almost all black a year ago, was now almost white.
The only way to kill sin, true black sin, was to drown it in the blood of
(she must be sacrificed)
a repentant heart.
And then at the end, Sue Snell finds Carrie dying, tries to reconcile, to repent and remove the guilt she’s felt ever since the first scene of the book. And as Carrie dies, so does the baby Sue held in her belly.
The after-image began to fade reluctantly, leaving a blessed, cool darkness in her mind that knew nothing. She slowed, halted, and became aware that something had begun to happen. She stood in the middle of the great and misty field, waiting for realization.
Her rapid breathing slowed, slowed, caught suddenly as if on a thorn—
And suddenly vented itself in one howling, cheated scream.
As she felt the slow course of dark menstrual blood down her thighs.
What to make of that ending…Sue Snell paid the price with the rest of them. She didn’t get to escape just because she tried to make up for what she did to Carrie White. There’s some hint there that she wasn’t really pure in motive the way she put on. I don’t know what to make of her urging Tommy to go to prom with Carrie.
And there is something else here too. A shadow of Margaret White’s past. After all, she got pregnant with another baby before Carrie, and she miscarried, believing it was God’s punishment for giving into sin with Carrie’s father. But after marriage they “fell” again and Carrie was conceived. Sue is in the same boat in some ways. The circle of death and blood is sealed there.
Do any of you have thoughts on her?
Mommy Dearest
What an unbelievable portrayal of religious mania, mental illness, and abuse. There is something so dark about violent and psychotic mothers in horror fiction. This character gets to me on so many levels. You can feel her insanity, her fervor, and for me, her language gets me more than the disturbing spiritual and physical abuse she doles out.
Stephen King has a way of painting some of his more insane characters (Annie Wilkes from Misery for example, Trash Can Man from The Stand), giving us that yucky, skin-crawly feeling just by the strange way they word things.
Dirty pillows.
Jesus Is Watching
Jesus watches from the wall,
but his face is cold as stone,
and if he loves me as she tells me,
why do I feel so all alone?
-A poem by Carrie White
The religious element of the story is one of the most terrifying aspects. Imagine for a moment if this was removed. The story becomes much less scary. Sad and strange of course, but it loses a lot of the punch without the fervent worship, devil talk, and enforced prayer times in Margaret White’s household.
“And Eve was weak and loosed the raven on the world,” Momma continued, “and the raven was called Sin, and the first Sin was Intercourse. And the Lord visited Eve with a Curse, and the Curse was the Curse of Blood.”
Margaret White’s religion is focused totally on sex and blood and pregnancy. Her brand of Christianity is altered to center around that. Instead of Adam eating an apple, the sin is intercourse. The curses that followed: the Blood (menstruation), childbearing, and murder.
Carrie’s Source of Power
As soon as I met Margaret White, I knew what she would think about Carrie’s telekinetic powers. And later, we find out that it’s not only Carrie who had these powers.
Oh, she knew the Devil’s Power. Her own grandmother had it. She had been able to light the fireplace without even stirring from her rocker by the window. It made her eyes glow with
(thou shalt not suffer a witch to live)
a kind of witch’s light. And sometimes, at the supper table the sugar bowl would whirl madly like a dirvish.
It turns out her grandmother had the same gift, but Margaret believes it was from the devil. We are reading this account after, and understand that there is a scientific explanation for her powers, that they are not inherently evil, but some work of the mind that is not yet understood, but is documented from time to time.
Those excerpts make the story morally grey. After all, we know that in the end, Carrie’s telekinetic powers were not something she was out of control of. They were genetic as it turns out, and not the work of a demon. They were something she had honed, and in the end weaponized against the people who hurt her. She is, at least in my mind, the villain after all, and not just a pitiful girl plagued by some misunderstood powers.
Sue Snell
Sue Snell is a strange character, but a relatable one in certain ways. In the opening scene, she participates fully in humiliating Carrie, and she stands in opposition to Chris, the only other girl from the locker room that the story follows. We know she felt bad about what she did. She spends the rest of the book trying to make it up to Carrie.
“You’re bleeding!” Sue yelled suddenly, furiously. “You’re bleeding, you big dumb pudding!”
Carrie looked down at herself.
She shrieked.
Sue is dating Tommy Ross, one of the most popular guys in school, and their relationship has just taken a turn. They slept together, and throughout the course of the story, we learn that Sue Snell is pregnant.
She’s battling her feelings of guilt over what she did to Carrie. More than that, she is deeply disturbed by her tendency to conform, to do what everyone around her is doing, especially Chris Hargensen, the leader of the popular girls and Sue’s best friend. The locker room incident and the events that follow break their friendship.
I don’t know if I’m reaching here, but I see some strange interplay between Margaret White’s own past and Sue’s present.
Margaret got pregnant outside of marriage before Carrie was ever born. But she miscarried, and her and Carrie’s late father swore never to do “it” again. Only they do, in a moment of weakness, and Margaret becomes pregnant with Carrie.
In many ways, Margaret White plays the role of prophet in the book, predicting what Carrie brings to fruition. An early letter to a friend of hers details the following:
“It is,” Margaret declares near the end of her letter, “the oney [sic] way you & That Man can avoid the Rain of Blood yet to come. Ralph & I like Mary & Joseph, will neither know or polute [sic] each other’s flesh. If there is issue, let it be Divine.”
Of course, the calendar tells us that Carrie was conceived later that same year.
-Stephen King, Carrie
This isn’t the only excerpt from the past in the book. The entire narrative is littered with before and after shots, from those who were present at prom and those who knew the White family, before and after prom night.
We get to see into Sue’s mind through the autobiographical book she wrote as an adult, as well as interviews given to newspapers. There, we see the long-lasting damage her role in Carrie’s final break has had. Her last line in the book is telling.
It might not be amiss to close this book with a few lines from another Bob Dylan song, lines that might serve as Carrie’s epitaph: I wish I could write you a melody so plain/that would save you, dear lady, from going insane/That would ease you and cool you and cease the pain/Of your useless and pointless knowledge…
From My Name Is Sue Snell
The Bully
“Period!”
The catcall came first from Chris Hargensen. It struck the tiled walls, rebounded, and struck again.
There’s our introduction to one of the main antagonists. In a strange way, I hate her more than Margaret White. Maybe it’s because Carrie’s mom comes off as seriously broken, both mentally and spiritually. She is cruel, but she believes she is doing the right thing (regardless of how deranged that belief really is). Chris is cruel, the spoiled brat of a local lawyer, and she always gets her way.
Despite that, she is still a teenage girl, and I got the sense that as her plot to get back at Carrie over her cancelled prom ticket takes shape, she realizes she is in over her head. But she is stubborn, desperate to look cool in front of her older boyfriend. Once the wheels are in motion, there’s no backing out.
Nineteen-year-old Billy Nolan starts out wrapped around Chris’ finger. But after he leads the charge in slaughtering pigs for their blood (a scene that reminded me of Lord of the Flies), the power dynamic changes. Before Carrie kills Billy and Chris, we find them in a hotel. Billy has started to progressively amp up his abuse of Chris, and when he finds out about the burning town, everyone dead at prom, it’s no different.
Behind him, wavy and distorted, Chris Hargensen sat on the floor, wiping blood from her split lip.
I have a feeling that had Chris survived that night, her life would have ended earlier. It might not have been at Billy’s hands, but he seems like the first in what was going to be a lineup of bad boyfriends.
The Gym Teacher
Miss Desjarden takes on a sort of motherly role with Carrie, but that’s after she slaps her to get her to stop screaming. Like Sue Snell, she spends the rest of the book trying to atone for her actions, punishing the girls who participated, and finally putting Chris Hargensen in her place.
Miss Desjardin had not been able to get the image of Carrie White out of her mind all weekend. Carrie, surrounded by tampons, screaming, blubbering on the tile floor, a wet napkin plastered squarely in the middle of her pubic hair and her own sick, angry reaction before learning that Carrie was oblivious to the ancient cycle of female menstruation.
She tells Carrie what a period is, and helps get her home after the locker room incident. In part, I can’t help but think that maybe this character is King writing what he wished he could have done for the girls that inspired his story. Even if it was too late, Miss Desjarden steps in and tries to do the right thing, risking her job and a possible law suit to the school. In the end, it isn’t enough to stop Carrie from her dark descent into madness.
Carrie’s Destiny is Tragedy
This portion of the book is where we see Carrie at her strongest. It’s the only place in the story that offers a glimpse into what could have been, had Chris and Billy not interfered with their buckets of pig blood.
Carrie begins to look at herself, her body, differently. She realizes that so much of her ugliness—the pimples, the frumpy clothes—are the result of her mother’s enforced lifestyle. She wants her to eat sweets. She forces her to dress in a way that hides any beautiful feature.
When Carrie defies Margaret and tells her she is going to the prom with Tommy, you can see her breaking through those shackles. It makes what happens next all the more tragic.
“I can see your dirtypillows. Everyone will. They’ll be looking at your body. The Book says—”
Those are my breasts, Momma. Every woman has them.”
“Take off that dress,” Momma said.
“No.”
Carrie’s fate is sealed regardless. Had she returned home to her mother without burning the town to the ground, she would have been murdered anyway, killed in the style of honor killings you read about in the Middle East, for defying her mother’s wishes.
She had been able to feel, actually feel, the Devil’s Power working in Carrie. It crawled all over you, lifting and pulling like evil, tickling little fingers. She had set out to do her duty again when Carrie was three, when she had caught her looking in sin at the Devil’s slut in the next yard over..God was not mocked…
The only way to kill sin, true black sin, was to drown it in the blood of
(she must be sacrificed)
a repentant heart.
And so Margaret White and Carrie both plan to kill each other that night, ending both of their lives in the fashion of some strange Shakespearean tragedy.
“I came to kill you, Momma. And you were waiting here to kill me. Momma, I…it’s not right, Momma. It’s not…”
What Worked For Me
The strange religiosity, Margaret White’s madness, the locker room scene, and the tension that follows with Miss Desjardin and the principal. I love the zooming in and out, the speckles of newspaper reports and autobiography, science and interviews, court records and memories. They all help from the shell of the story contained within.
The story also has the theme of blood, religious, menstrual, murder, all the main aspects of this story are tied up in blood. Vengeance. Atonement. Justice. Rage. I’m on my third read, and I’m floored by the thread throughout.
And what didn’t…
There is one very distinct pet peeve I have. Carrie White’s appearance. Take this line to describe her in the beginning:
Carrie stood among them stolidly, a frog among swans. She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks, her wet hair completely without color.
And compare it to who we see when Tommy picks her up for the dance:
“You’re beautiful,” Tommy said, and she became quite sure that nothing badc ould happen this night.
Too fast of a switch if you ask me. It doesn’t check out that this girl goes from an acne pocked outcast to a beautiful prom queen in a matter of weeks. I mean, I know that’s the storyline of a million 90’s rom-coms…but come on.
Some Questions for The Barrens
How did you feel about Carrie?
Was she a villain? Did she carry out justice? Did you like her?
Did you believe Sue Snell had good motives? And why did Tommy go to the prom with Carrie?
And of course, did you like the book? And if you did why?
I can’t wait to hear from you! If you participate in the discussion in the comments below, please read other people and comment as well. It’ll be more fun that way!
I love your post on Carrie. I immensely enjoyed the book. What kept me reading and realizing why it was a breakthrough for Stephen King is that it was unputdownable. The news stories teased us into quickly reading to the end, which we knew would be horrific and overly dramatic.
Thank you so much for this insightful and thoughtful piece. I thoroughly enjoyed reading your writing and your thoughts. I came upon the book club too late to be able to read the book in a day (certainly not with a toddler hanging around), but boy did reading this make me want to pick up the book again.
I find what I don’t like about King in his later books (say under the dome) is that everything feels sliced apart, one scene to the next, one theme to the next, action, action, things don’t click together and thematically are sometimes a bit incongruous which is why I think people are dissatisfied with the endings (I was very disappointed by the ending of the outsider, too neat for something that felt actually a bit messy unknown, literally unclear). Carrie is incredible for how it draws on themes of womanhood that are with us all, creates an entire world that feels real, elements of the story creating what I think is really a tapestry, a wholly interconnected story from start to finish (the bookending of blood, you name it). I am very excited to join the club for the next book especially now that I’ll have more time. You seriously rock for putting this together and taking the time to write up what you did—thank you!