Carrie

Nothing is looking up for Carrie White.

Carrieta White has always known what is it like to be an outsider. A shy, overweight girl with severe body acne, an extremely religious mother, and no social skills, Carrie has been bullied her whole life by both teenagers and the adults that are supposed to help her. Her mother, Margaret White, is an extremely religious woman who emotionally and physically abuses Carrie by beating her and leaving her in a closet to "pray" for all of the sins she has committed. Mrs. White is the founder of her own religious sect with only herself and Carrie as members. Due to this Carrie forced to her mother's cult-like sermons and is only allowed to wear long, unflattering clothing and never the color red, as it is seen as the color of woman's sin against God. Life at school is no better. A perfect target for popular girl Chris Hargensen and her clique of friends, Carrie has nobody to confide in as she deals with the turmoil of being a teenager.

Written in the style of an interview, a biography, an autobiography, and the White Commission, the story starts with Carrie White getting her period in a high school locker room and is assaulted with feminine hygeine products for not knowing what it is. This causes the girls to spend a week's worth of detention doing gym activities and for Chris Hargensen, the one who bullies Carrie the most, to be kicked out of going to the prom. This incident is also a catalyst for Carrie's telekinesis to fully manifest itself, an ability that appeared only once in her childhood in the form of raining rocks. As she slowly learns about her abilities, one of the girls involved in the locker room incident, Sue Snell, to ask her boyfriend Tommy Ross to take Carrie to the prom as a sort of penance. What happens at that prom will forever change their lives and the lives of pop culture forever.

Though the story is well-known today, it was a shock for readers in the 1970s. Never had bullying been talked about this graphically before. Stephen King, known to some critics as the "master of horror", was inspired to write the story after a daydream of an article about telekinesis and teenagers in LIFE magazine and the story of two bullied girls he went to high school with killing themselves. One of the girls was from an extremely fundamentalist home while the other was a loner who wore the same thing to school everyday. King found his inspiration of writing a female character after working as a janitor in a high school for a summer and noticing how harsh and confusing entering womanhood can be to a teenager.

The thing that makes this novel so unforgettable is the writing style King uses. The novel is split into three parts: Blood Sport, Prom Night, and Wreckage. The writing is blunt and crass, leaving nothing too horrific to be left out and making the reader feel for Carrie's vulnerable character. King will put certain words and phrases in parantheses when things happen to characters to show how people seem to distance themselves from their thoughts and true feelings. Nobody in the novel is truly nice to Carrie; not her mother, not her teachers, and not even Sue Snell, who only wants to help Carrie because she feels "kinda bad for her" about the locker room incident. Even King is harsh to her, comparing Carrie in some passages to a hog, an ox, or a bovine. The novel also has loads of religious and allegory, with Carrie's menstruation, powers, and bullying compared by some critics to Jesus Christ.

With each character coming down on Carrie and insulting her, you feel sorry for Carrie, sorry about her abusive household and her lack of friends. But more than anything you get angry at the other characters and the way that they treat Carrie. There is never a feeling of remorse for anyone else but Carrie because they are either bullying her or allowing it to happen without saying anything about it. During the prom scene and what comes after you actually start to cheer on Carrie and what happens to the people that once hurt her.

Culturally this book is unforgettable because of the way it talks about bullying from multiple perspectives. It is told from both the side of the victim and the side of the bullies. King creates a backstory for each of his characters and never leaves a character without a flaw or two. Carrie, so naive about the world due to her mother's sheltered raising, seems to lack common sense. This may lead you to get mad with her a few times about not knowing the basics of womanhood like how to put on lipstick. Chris Hargensen, the main bully, has a strict father and is in an abusive relationship with the school's delinquent Billy Nolan. Sue Snell is merely trying to get through her final year of high school and hopes to get out of their small town. Carrie's mother uses self-harm to make Carrie stay around and is a hypocrite for calling Carrie a slut for menstruating while having Carrie before being married. No character in King's universe is without sin and adds in making the whole story more flawed and realistic.

Whether you want a horror novel about telekinesis or about bullying and its effects on a person, Carrie is a great read for anyone who wants to delve deeper into the true horror that is high school.

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