Carrie
by Stephen King
Summary
Carrie White, sixteen and relentlessly bullied at her Chamberlain, Maine high school, gets her first period in the girls' locker room shower with no idea what is happening to her, since her fanatically religious mother Margaret has taught her nothing about her own body and treats menstruation as punishment for sin; her classmates pelt her with tampons while chanting at her, a scene the book returns to as the origin of everything that follows. Around the same time Carrie discovers she has telekinesis, a power that has apparently run faintly through her whole life without her understanding what it was. Out of a halfhearted guilt, popular girl Sue Snell arranges for her own boyfriend Tommy Ross to take Carrie to the senior prom, and for one evening Carrie actually enjoys herself and is voted prom queen. But another classmate, Chris Hargensen, still furious over an earlier punishment tied to the shower incident, rigs the crowning moment with her boyfriend Billy Nolan, dumping two buckets of pig's blood over Carrie in front of the whole school. Humiliated past any restraint, Carrie uses her power to lock the gymnasium doors, electrify the wet floor with the sprinklers, and burn the building down, killing most of her graduating class. She walks home through a burning town, kills her mother in what reads as self defense after Margaret stabs her first, and finally dies herself, bleeding out alone in a parking lot as the town collapses into fire around her. King frames the entire novel with fictional newspaper clippings, court testimony, and excerpts from a later book about the events, revealing early on that Carrie dies and letting a reader watch the town's official explanations fail to account for what actually happened. A closing exchange of letters between two survivors hints that the same telekinetic trait may already have surfaced in other families before Carrie and could surface again.
The book is short and relentlessly paced, alternating between straightforward narrative of Carrie's last day and the fabricated documentary fragments, a structure new to horror fiction at the time that builds dread through certainty rather than surprise, since a reader already knows how the night ends and reads on only to see exactly how it happens.
Historical Context & Significance
Doubleday published Carrie on April 5, 1974, in a modest hardcover printing of thirty thousand copies. King, twenty six and teaching high school English while broke, had thrown the manuscript's first three pages in the trash, convinced he could not write convincingly from a teenage girl's point of view, and only kept going after his wife Tabitha retrieved the pages and told him they were good. New American Library then bought the paperback rights for four hundred thousand dollars, King's half of which, two hundred thousand dollars, ended years of near poverty overnight; the mass market edition sold a million copies in its first year and roughly four million total once Brian De Palma's 1976 film, starring Sissy Spacek, carried the story to a far wider audience.
No literary prize marked the book, which was reviewed respectfully rather than enthusiastically on release. Writing under the pen name Newgate Callendar, critic Harold C. Schonberg credited King, in his debut novel, with a surety normally associated only with veteran writers, a judgment that has aged well given everything King wrote afterward.