Carrie (novel)

Carrie is the first published novel by American author Stephen King, released in 1974. Set in the town of Chamberlain, Maine, the plot revolves around Carrie White, a friendless high school girl from an abusive religious household who has telekinetic powers. After a cruel prank pulled by one of her bullies on prom night, Carrie decides to take revenge.

King wrote Carrie with the intention of submitting it to be published originally as a short story for the men's magazine Cavalier following the suggestion of a friend that he write a story about a female character. Though King initially gave up on Carrie due to discomfort and apathy, and felt it would never be successful, his wife Tabitha convinced him to continue writing, and rescued the first three pages of the story from the trash. He followed her advice and expanded it into a novel. King based the character of Carrie on two girls he knew in high school and enjoyed fabricating the documents for the narrative. After Doubleday accepted Carrie to be published, King worked with editor Bill Thompson to revise the novel.

Carrie was published on April 5, 1974, with a print run of 30,000 copies, and a paperback edition was published by New American Library in April 1975. The paperback edition became a best seller, particularly after the release of the 1976 film adaptation, reaching four million sales. The novel received generally positive reviews, both contemporaneously and retrospectively. Carrie, King's debut novel, helped launch his career and achieve him mainstream success. It has also been credited with reviving mainstream interest in horror fiction and being influential among contemporary horror writers. Three film adaptations have been released, with one getting a sequel, while a musical adaptation premiered in 1988, and a television miniseries is in production.

Plot

In 1979, Carietta "Carrie" White, a 16-year-old girl in Chamberlain, Maine, is ridiculed for her weight, her clothes and the unusual religious beliefs instilled by her fanatical mother Margaret. One day while showering after physical education class, Carrie has her first period. As Margaret has never taught her about menstruation, Carrie panics, believing she is bleeding to death. Her classmates, led by a popular girl named Chris Hargensen, mock her and throw tampons and sanitary napkins at the hysterical Carrie. The gym teacher, Rita Desjardin, intervenes and attempts to comfort Carrie before sending her home for the day.

While walking home, Carrie unconsciously uses telekinesis to push a taunting child from his bicycle. Realizing what she has done, Carrie recalls childhood incidents in which other unusual events occurred, including a time when stones fell from the sky as a response to abuse from her mother. Carrie wonders if she can make such things happen at will.

Arriving home, Carrie tells her mother that her menses have started and blames Margaret for never explaining menstruation to her. Margaret believes that Carrie's sinfulness caused her to begin menstruating and locks her in a closet as punishment.

The next day, Desjardin reprimands the girls who bullied Carrie and gives them a week's detention. Chris refuses to comply and is punished with suspension and exclusion from the prom. After her influential father fails to reinstate her, Chris decides to take revenge on Carrie. Another girl involved in the incident, Sue Snell, asks her boyfriend Tommy to invite Carrie to the prom as a way of atoning for the locker room bullying. Carrie is suspicious at first, but accepts. Learning that Carrie will be attending prom, Chris persuades her boyfriend Billy and his gang of greasers to gather pig's blood while she prepares to rig the prom queen election in Carrie's favor. Her plan is to humiliate Carrie in front of the whole school by rigging buckets of blood to fall on her during the coronation of prom queen.

Carrie begins preparing for prom night, all while secretly learning to control her telekinetic powers. Margaret realizes that her daughter has inherited the same telekinetic abilities Margaret's grandmother possessed and attributes them to witchcraft, but is initially too frightened to address the issue directly. Instead she begs Carrie not to attend the prom, considering it an occasion of sin. Carrie uses her powers to thwart Margaret's attempts to stop her.

At prom, Carrie finds herself accepted by her peers for the first time and loses some of her self-consciousness as she interacts with them. Tommy finds himself curiously drawn to Carrie and realizes he is falling in love with her. Surprised to see her name on the ballots for Prom King and Queen, Carrie has a premonition that she should not vote for herself, but Tommy convinces her that she deserves to win. Carrie and Tommy are elected prom queen and king by a single vote. At the moment of the coronation, Chris, who is hiding in the wings, releases the buckets, covering Carrie in blood. Tommy is hit by a falling bucket and knocked unconscious. In shock, Carrie flees the building amid the laughter of the other students, unaware that many of them are reacting out of horror.

Outside, Carrie grows angry and decides to use her powers to humiliate them as she herself was humiliated. She seals the gym and activates the sprinkler system, inadvertently sparking some ungrounded wires that electrocute several of her classmates. The wiring sparks a fire that eventually ignites the school's fuel tanks, destroying the building in a massive explosion. Only a few staff and students, including Desjardin, narrowly escape. Tommy dies in the blaze, having never regained consciousness.

Realizing what she has done, Carrie's sanity snaps. She begins to make her way home, causing destruction as she goes. She opens a gas main, resulting in explosions that level Chamberlain's downtown, then tears down live electrical lines that kill those who have left their homes to investigate. Her powers cause many townsfolk, including Sue, to instinctively sense Carrie's presence as she approaches. Sue leaves her home to find Carrie in hopes of stopping her.

Carrie returns home to kill Margaret, who in turn lies in wait to murder Carrie. Margaret rambles about the night of Carrie's conception, a sin she believes is the root of Carrie's evil. She stabs Carrie with a kitchen knife, but Carrie uses her powers to stop Margaret's heart. Mortally wounded, Carrie makes her way to the roadhouse, where she sees Chris and Billy leaving town. After Billy attempts to run over Carrie, she takes control of his car and sends it into a wall, killing both him and Chris.

Following Carrie's psychic signal, Sue finds the dying Carrie in the woods. Carrie believes Sue set up the prank at the prom. Sue invites Carrie to search her mind via telepathy, and Carrie sees that Sue wished her no ill will. Sue, still tethered to Carrie's mind, experiences Carrie's final moments before death.

The incident in Chamberlain, labeled the "Black Prom," makes national news with 440 reported casualties, including the majority of the graduating seniors. The rest of the town, unable to recover financially or emotionally from the tragedy, begins to shut down, with many survivors relocating. Desjardin and the school's principal blame themselves for not reaching out to Carrie sooner and resign from teaching. A congressional commission investigates the Black Prom to discover what truly happened, concluding they must prepare for future incidents.

Sue Snell is scapegoated and blamed for triggering Carrie. In response, she writes a memoir recounting her experience and expressing sympathy for Carrie, while haunted by experiencing Carrie's death.

The novel ends with a letter from an Appalachian woman about her four-year-old daughter, who has begun to exhibit telekinetic powers. She compares the child to her grandmother, who also possessed these powers, and concludes that the child is destined to be even more powerful.

Style and themes

Carrie is a horror novel as well as an example of supernatural and gothic fiction.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> It is in part an epistolary novel:Template:Sfn the narrative is organized around a framing device consisting of multiple narrators, and a collection of reports and excerpts in approximate chronological order.Template:Sfn It has been argued that this structure is used to indicate that no particular viewpoint, scientific or otherwise, can explain Carrie and the prom night event.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Carrie deals with themes of ostracism, bullying, coming-of-age and the consequences of not conforming to societal norms.<ref name=witch-hunting>Template:Cite journal</ref> A driving force of the novel is Carrie's first period in the shower.Template:Sfn<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Following the massacre, Sue is subject to the same exclusion as Carrie, despite her altruistic motives.Template:Sfn John Kerrigan and Victoria Madden have both observed that throughout the novel, Carrie is often associated with the pig, which are considered "disgusting" animals.<ref name=witch-hunting/>Template:Sfn

Another theme is vengeance.Template:Sfn Kerrigan considers Carrie to be an example of a revenge tragedy.Template:Sfn Ray B. Browne argues that the novel serves as a "revenge fantasy",Template:Sfn while novelist Charles L. Grant has stated that "[Stephen] King uses the evil/victim device for terror".Template:Sfn Some scholars have argued that Carrie is a social commentary.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Linda J. Holland-Toll has stated that "Carrie is about disaffirmation because society makes the human monster, cannot control the monster, yet still denies the possibility of actual monster existence while simultaneously defining humans as monsters".Template:Sfn

Background

Stephen King, the author of Carrie, pictured Template:Circa

By the time of writing Carrie, King lived in a trailer in Hermon, Maine with his wife Tabitha and two children. He had a job teaching English at Hampden Academy, and wrote short stories for men's magazines such as Cavalier.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Carrie was originally a short story intended for Cavalier.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn King had started conceptualizing the story after a friend suggested writing a story about a female character.Template:Sfn

The basis of the story was King imagining a scene of a girl menstruating for the first time in the shower similar to the opening scene of Carrie and an article from Life about telekinesis.Template:Sfn As he wrote the opening shower scene, King experienced discomfort due to not being female and not knowing how he would react to the scene if he were female. He also felt apathy toward Carrie when writing the scene. After three pages, King eventually threw away the manuscript of the story. The next day, Tabitha retrieved the pages from the trash and convinced King to continue writing the story with input from her.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn<ref name="the-wrap"/><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> King was ultimately able to emotionally connect to Carrie through the influence of two girls he knew. One was constantly abused at school due to her family's poverty forcing her to wear only one outfit to school. The other was a timid girl from a devoutly religious family.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

King believed Carrie would not be successful, thinking it would not be marketable in any genre or to any audience.Template:Sfn He also found writing it to be a "waste of time" and found no point in sending out what he perceived as a failed story. King only continued writing it in order to please his wife and because he was unable to think of anything else to write.Template:Sfn When King finished the first draft, Carrie was a 98-page-long novella that he detested. In December 1972, King decided to rewrite Carrie and strive for it to become novel-length. He wrote in fabricated documents that were purported to be from periodicals such as Esquire and Reader's Digest, imitating their style accordingly, a process that King found entertaining. After Carrie was accepted by the publisher Doubleday, King revised the novel with editor and friend Bill Thompson.Template:Sfn The original ending of Carrie had Carrie growing demon horns and destroying an airplane thousands of miles above her. Thompson convinced King to rewrite the ending to be more subtle.Template:Sfn

Publication

The cover for the 1975 paperback edition of Carrie does not feature the title or the author's name.

King's manuscript for Carrie was given to editor Bill Thompson in November 1973. Seeing potential in the novel, Thompson convinced Lee Barker, executive editor of Doubleday, to accept it. In 1973, after much revision, advanced copies of Carrie were sent to salesmen to secure an advance.Template:Sfn Eventually, the novel was approved for an advance of $1,500.Template:Sfn Thompson convinced Doubleday to boost the advance to $2,500, moderately high for a debut novel at the time,Template:Sfn and it was announced to King via telegram.Template:Sfn With a print run of 30,000 copies, the hardback edition of Carrie was ultimately published on April 5, 1974.<ref name="the-wrap">Template:Cite web</ref>Template:Sfn Although Carrie was marketed as an "occult" novel, trade reviewers called it a horror novel, unusual for the time.Template:Sfn

On May 3, 1974, Carrie was received by the publishing company New English Library and was read overnight by president Bob Tanner. Tanner sent a copy to the parent company, New American Library, which then offered Doubleday $400,000 for rights to mass-market paperback publication of Carrie,Template:Sfn of which King received $200,000.Template:Sfn New English Library published Carrie in May 1974,Template:Sfn and New American Library published Carrie under its Signet Books imprint in April 1975. With the goal of persuading the reader to buy the book, New American Library designed the novel to be "double-covered". The original cover of the paperback edition did not feature the title or the author's name; it consisted of the face of a girl in front of a silhouette. Behind the cover was a two-page picture of New England on fire, with the title and author's name on the far right. New American Library planned for the girl's silhouette to be scored to allow the reader to see the burning New England picture. The printers refused to produce the technique, and the edition was published without the scoring.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Since initial publication, Carrie has remained in continual print and has been published throughout Europe.Template:Sfn On March 26, 2024, a British publishing company Hodder & Stoughton published the 50th anniversary edition of Carrie, which included a new introduction by Margaret Atwood.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>

Reception

The hardback edition of Carrie sold modestly; it was not an instant best seller.Template:Sfn<ref name=NyTimesBest>Template:Cite news</ref> Sources of the number of sales for the hardback edition vary, ranging from 13,000 copies to 17,000 copies.Template:Sfn In contrast, the paperback edition sold well. In its first year, the edition sold one million copies.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn The sales were bolstered by the 1976 film adaptation, totaling four million sales.<ref name=NyTimesBest/><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>In 1976 Carrie became a New York Times best seller, debuting on the list in December and remaining on it for 14 weeks,Template:Sfn peaking at number 3.Template:Sfn

Carrie received generally positive reviews and has become a fan favorite. Several critics considered it an impressive literary debut.Template:Sfn Harold C. Schonberg, writing as Newgate Callendar for The New York Times, stated that despite being a debut novel, "King writes with the kind of surety normally associated only with veteran writers".<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> The Daily Times-AdvocateTemplate:'s Ina Bonds called Carrie an "admirable achievement" for a first novel,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> and Kirkus Reviews wrote that "King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum".<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> Bob Cormier from the Daily Sentinel & Leominster Enterprise wrote that the novel could have failed because of the subject matter, but did not, and thus found King to be "no ordinary writer".<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Various critics wrote that the plot will scare readers,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> with Library Journal declaring the novel "a terrifying treat for both horror and parapsychology fans".<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> Mary Schedl of The San Francisco Examiner wrote that Carrie "goes far beyond the usual limitations of the [horror] genre" to deliver a message about humanity.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Publishers Weekly praised the novel for its sympathetic portrayal of Carrie.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> Both Joy Antos of Progress Bulletin and Gary Bogart of Wilson Library Journal wrote of enjoying Carrie despite the foregone conclusion.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> Nonetheless, Booklist stated that reading the novel required a "willing suspension of disbelief and taste".<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>

Retrospectively, Carrie has received appraisal. Michael R. Collings and Adam Nevill declared that the plot holds up decades after publication. Collings attributed it to focus and conciseness,Template:Sfn and Nevill attributed it to the characterization and structure.<ref name="GuardianLegacy">Template:Cite news</ref> In his literary analysis, Rocky Wood called the plot "remarkably short but compelling".Template:Sfn Michael Berry of Common Sense Media lauded the characterization and said that the epistolary structure "lend[s] a sense of realism to the outlandish proceedings".<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> While both Grady Hendrix and James Smythe similarly praised the story, Hendrix felt that the writing was awkward much of the time,<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> and Smythe found the epistolary-style extracts to be the "worst [and slowest] parts of the novel".<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Although Harold Bloom found the characterization and style to be unremarkable, he thought the novel had strong imagery and said that "Carrie at the prom sceneTemplate:Nbsp... is a marvelous culmination of melodrama."Template:Sfn

Legacy

Template:See also Template:Multiple image Carrie launched King's career as an author;Template:Sfn the $200,000 King received when Carrie was accepted for mass-market publication allowed King to quit his job as a teacher and become a full-time author.Template:Sfn The novel established King as a horror writerTemplate:Sfn who wrote about "the supernatural, the dark, and the bizarre".Template:Sfn Following CarrieTemplate:'s publication, King underwent a six-month period of prolific writing.Template:Sfn During this period, King wrote rough drafts for Blaze and 'Salem's Lot, the latter of which became his second published novel, being published in 1975.Template:Sfn Both Carrie and its 1976 film adaptation brought King into the mainstream,Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn and he has since become one of the most successful authors in the modern era,<ref name=GuardianLegacy/> with his novels consistently becoming best sellers.Template:Sfn

For decades prior to the 1970s, horror literature had not been in the mainstream; Carrie is credited as one of four novels to create a contemporary mainstream interest in horror literature.Template:EfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn This interest was especially bolstered by the subsequent adaptation.Template:Sfn Carrie has been influential among contemporary writers, with writers such as Sarah Pinborough, James Smythe, and Sarah Lotz claiming to be influenced by Carrie.<ref name="GuardianLegacy" /> Joanne Harris refers to her 2023 novel, Broken Light, as "an homage to Carrie".<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The prom scene when Carrie is covered in pig blood has been referenced in pop culture, with examples including Monsters University, My Little Pony comics, and horror media such as It Follows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Treehouse of Horror.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> Author Jeff VanderMeer said of CarrieTemplate:'s influence:Template:Blockquote

Carrie has received three film adaptations and a musical adaptation.Template:Sfn The first film adaptation, directed by Brian De Palma and starring Sissy Spacek in the title role, was released on November 3, 1976, to critical acclaim and commercial success,Template:Sfn<ref>Template:Cite Metacritic</ref> and is considered a noteworthy example of 1970s horror films and a major contributing factor to King's success.Template:Sfn A sequel to the 1976 film adaptation titled The Rage: Carrie 2 was released in 1999 to mixed reviews.Template:Sfn<ref>Template:Cite Metacritic</ref> From May 12 to 15, 1988, a musical adaptation was performed five times by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Virginia Theater before closing. It was a commercial and critical failure, losing more than $7 million, among the most expensive failures by Broadway theatre.Template:Sfn A 2002 film adaptation received negative reviews,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and a 2013 film adaptation received mixed reviews.<ref>Template:Cite Metacritic</ref> An off-Broadway revival of the musical was performed from March 1 to April 8, 2012.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> The television series Riverdale aired an episode titled "Chapter Thirty-One: A Night to Remember" in 2018 based on the musical.<ref name="riverdalecarrie">Template:Cite magazine</ref> In 2024, Mike Flanagan was announced to be helming a television adaptation of the novel with Amazon MGM Studios.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

See also

• The Fury, a 1976 novel with a similar premise and its 1978 film adaptation, also directed by De Palma
• Jennifer, a 1978 film with a similar premise

Sources

• Template:Cite book
• Template:Cite book
• Template:Cite book
• Template:Cite book
• Template:Cite book
• Template:Cite book
• Template:Cite book
• Template:Cite book
• Template:Cite book
• Template:Cite book
• Template:Cite book
• Template:Cite book
• Template:Cite book
• Template:Cite journal
• Template:Cite book
• Template:Cite book
• Template:Cite book
• Template:Cite book
• Template:Cite book

Further reading

• Shih, Paris Shun-Hsiang. "Fearing the Witch, Hating the Bitch: The Double Structure of Misogyny in Stephen King's Carrie" in Perceiving Evil: Evil Women and the Feminine (Brill, 2015) pp. 49–58.

External links

• Official website for Carrie the Musical
• Identification characteristics for first edition copies of Carrie
• Carrie at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database