Book Review: The Weight of Blood, by Tiffany D. Jackson
A woke rewrite of Carrie.
Katherine Tegen Books, 2022, 416 pages
When Springville residents-at least the ones still alive-are questioned about what happened on prom night, they all have the same explanation . . . Maddy did it.
An outcast at her small-town Georgia high school, Madison Washington has always been a teasing target for bullies. And she's dealt with it because she has more pressing problems to manage. Until the morning a surprise rainstorm reveals her most closely kept secret: Maddy is biracial. She has been passing for white her entire life at the behest of her fanatical white father, Thomas Washington.
After a viral bullying video pulls back the curtain on Springville High's racist roots, student leaders come up with a plan to change their image: host the school's first integrated prom as a show of unity. The popular white class president convinces her Black superstar quarterback boyfriend to ask Maddy to be his date, leaving Maddy wondering if it's possible to have a normal life.
But some of her classmates aren't done with her just yet. And what they don't know is that Maddy still has another secret . . . one that will cost them all their lives.
The Weight of Blood is a straight-up, shameless rewrite of Stephen King's Carrie, set in the BLM era. So that being said, I am going to spoil the hell out of it (and Carrie) because I assume you all know the story. (And just in case you don't, this version spells out early on how it's going to end, framing "the Springville High School Massacre" as an event being described in books, interviews, and true crime podcasts years after the fact. They even name-check "fiction author Stephen King" at one point.)
There have been several adaptations of Stephen King's debut novel, in which an outcast girl with a crazy mother gets bullied and humiliated until she...
... snaps.
Tiffany Jackson's rewrite is a beat-for-beat copy of King's story, complete with the climactic prom scene, except she turns it into a woke YA love story in which the psychic girl is almost completely absolved of any guilt for slaughtering her high school class. Because racism.
The Weight of Blood is set in Springville, a small rural Georgia town where they still have segregated proms, and the town's history as a sundown town is still within living memory. But it's 2014, so BLM is in the news, the black students are getting uppity, and the town's football hero is a black high school quarterback dating a white girl.
Madison "Maddy" Washington is the child of a single father, not a single mother. Her father is a religious nut, like every version of Carrie's mother, a demon-haunted Jesus-freak who takes out his own "sins" and obsessions on his daughter. But in Jackson's rewrite, Maddy's horrible secret is that she is mixed-race; her father is a white supremacist who was "seduced" by Maddy's black mother, who disappeared shortly after Maddy was born. He has raised Maddy to pass at all costs, and never, ever admit to being black. The catalyzing event in The Weight of Blood is Maddy being caught in the rain, and her meticulously-straightened hair instantly frizzing into a huge afro and revealing her shame to her classmates.
She proceeds to get bullied and taunted, and when the school's mean girl is caught on video throwing pencils into her hair, it goes viral, resulting in Springville appearing on CNN and drawing social media protests. So the mean girl's best friend talks her boyfriend, the black football player, into asking Maddy to the prom and making it the town's first integrated prom. To prove they aren't racist and Springville doesn't have these problems.
Like I said, if you've read or seen any version of Carrie, there will be no surprises in how the prom turns out.
This book was okay, but it's basically a woke fanfic rewrite. In this version, Maddy actually starts researching psychokinesis when she realizes what she can do. Her handsome prom date initially goes with her just because his girlfriend asked him to, as in King's book, but he quickly falls in love with Maddy, and she with him, as they realize they are actually kindred spirits.
When Maddy is humiliated at the prom (in this version, by having white paint dumped on her - get it?), she doesn't immediately snap. Instead she is escorted outside with her angry, protective date, only to be confronted by racist cops who start beating black high school students. This is what causes her to unleash her psychic powers and wipe out half the town.
In the written and movie versions of Carrie, she goes home after the big carnage scene and is confronted by her mother, who tries to kill her and is killed by Carrie instead. Jackson's version copies that scene, but Maddy has matured, come into her power, and thrown off the shackles of her father's racism and religious mania and tries to reason with him. And when he fails to kill her, he shoots himself instead.
Small details like this throughout the book annoyed me because one of the things King illustrated in his novel was that Carrie, while a victim, was not always sympathetic. She was a freak, an outcast, a girl who didn't know how to dress or even manage basic hygiene, and had no social skills. This was not her fault, of course, but she wasn't an ugly duckling waiting to blossom into a swan; she was a poor, abused kid raised by an insane mother who happened to be capable of killing people with her mind. The prom massacre and her subsequent rampage through town may appeal to anyone who's ever been the unpopular kid dreaming of some fiery, cinematic vengeance against all those assholes who picked on you, but it's also made clear, in King's narrative (and in most of the movie versions) that at some level, Carrie knows what she's doing and she gleefully mows down everyone in sight, not just the people who picked on her. It's a spectacular, well-earned bloody vengeance but it also makes Carrie scary and a little bit evil.
Maddy Washington, by contrast, sort of goes into a fugue state, and her rampage (even if she does kill hundreds of people) is made as justified as possible. In the end, we are seemingly meant to blame institutional racism for the Springville Massacre. (One of the podcasters researching Maddy's story even makes this point explicitly, just in case the reader didn't get it).
As a smaller, more petty complaint, I didn't like the writing much, which used far too many dialog tags, and I got tired of Maddy and several other characters constantly "whimpering."
Did I enjoy this book? It was okay. But King did it better in 1974, and his characters were more believably fucked up.
My complete list of book reviews.
Katherine Tegen Books, 2022, 416 pages
When Springville residents-at least the ones still alive-are questioned about what happened on prom night, they all have the same explanation . . . Maddy did it.
An outcast at her small-town Georgia high school, Madison Washington has always been a teasing target for bullies. And she's dealt with it because she has more pressing problems to manage. Until the morning a surprise rainstorm reveals her most closely kept secret: Maddy is biracial. She has been passing for white her entire life at the behest of her fanatical white father, Thomas Washington.
After a viral bullying video pulls back the curtain on Springville High's racist roots, student leaders come up with a plan to change their image: host the school's first integrated prom as a show of unity. The popular white class president convinces her Black superstar quarterback boyfriend to ask Maddy to be his date, leaving Maddy wondering if it's possible to have a normal life.
But some of her classmates aren't done with her just yet. And what they don't know is that Maddy still has another secret . . . one that will cost them all their lives.
The Weight of Blood is a straight-up, shameless rewrite of Stephen King's Carrie, set in the BLM era. So that being said, I am going to spoil the hell out of it (and Carrie) because I assume you all know the story. (And just in case you don't, this version spells out early on how it's going to end, framing "the Springville High School Massacre" as an event being described in books, interviews, and true crime podcasts years after the fact. They even name-check "fiction author Stephen King" at one point.)
There have been several adaptations of Stephen King's debut novel, in which an outcast girl with a crazy mother gets bullied and humiliated until she...
Click to view... snaps.
Tiffany Jackson's rewrite is a beat-for-beat copy of King's story, complete with the climactic prom scene, except she turns it into a woke YA love story in which the psychic girl is almost completely absolved of any guilt for slaughtering her high school class. Because racism.
The Weight of Blood is set in Springville, a small rural Georgia town where they still have segregated proms, and the town's history as a sundown town is still within living memory. But it's 2014, so BLM is in the news, the black students are getting uppity, and the town's football hero is a black high school quarterback dating a white girl.
Madison "Maddy" Washington is the child of a single father, not a single mother. Her father is a religious nut, like every version of Carrie's mother, a demon-haunted Jesus-freak who takes out his own "sins" and obsessions on his daughter. But in Jackson's rewrite, Maddy's horrible secret is that she is mixed-race; her father is a white supremacist who was "seduced" by Maddy's black mother, who disappeared shortly after Maddy was born. He has raised Maddy to pass at all costs, and never, ever admit to being black. The catalyzing event in The Weight of Blood is Maddy being caught in the rain, and her meticulously-straightened hair instantly frizzing into a huge afro and revealing her shame to her classmates.
She proceeds to get bullied and taunted, and when the school's mean girl is caught on video throwing pencils into her hair, it goes viral, resulting in Springville appearing on CNN and drawing social media protests. So the mean girl's best friend talks her boyfriend, the black football player, into asking Maddy to the prom and making it the town's first integrated prom. To prove they aren't racist and Springville doesn't have these problems.
Like I said, if you've read or seen any version of Carrie, there will be no surprises in how the prom turns out.
This book was okay, but it's basically a woke fanfic rewrite. In this version, Maddy actually starts researching psychokinesis when she realizes what she can do. Her handsome prom date initially goes with her just because his girlfriend asked him to, as in King's book, but he quickly falls in love with Maddy, and she with him, as they realize they are actually kindred spirits.
When Maddy is humiliated at the prom (in this version, by having white paint dumped on her - get it?), she doesn't immediately snap. Instead she is escorted outside with her angry, protective date, only to be confronted by racist cops who start beating black high school students. This is what causes her to unleash her psychic powers and wipe out half the town.
In the written and movie versions of Carrie, she goes home after the big carnage scene and is confronted by her mother, who tries to kill her and is killed by Carrie instead. Jackson's version copies that scene, but Maddy has matured, come into her power, and thrown off the shackles of her father's racism and religious mania and tries to reason with him. And when he fails to kill her, he shoots himself instead.
Small details like this throughout the book annoyed me because one of the things King illustrated in his novel was that Carrie, while a victim, was not always sympathetic. She was a freak, an outcast, a girl who didn't know how to dress or even manage basic hygiene, and had no social skills. This was not her fault, of course, but she wasn't an ugly duckling waiting to blossom into a swan; she was a poor, abused kid raised by an insane mother who happened to be capable of killing people with her mind. The prom massacre and her subsequent rampage through town may appeal to anyone who's ever been the unpopular kid dreaming of some fiery, cinematic vengeance against all those assholes who picked on you, but it's also made clear, in King's narrative (and in most of the movie versions) that at some level, Carrie knows what she's doing and she gleefully mows down everyone in sight, not just the people who picked on her. It's a spectacular, well-earned bloody vengeance but it also makes Carrie scary and a little bit evil.
Maddy Washington, by contrast, sort of goes into a fugue state, and her rampage (even if she does kill hundreds of people) is made as justified as possible. In the end, we are seemingly meant to blame institutional racism for the Springville Massacre. (One of the podcasters researching Maddy's story even makes this point explicitly, just in case the reader didn't get it).
As a smaller, more petty complaint, I didn't like the writing much, which used far too many dialog tags, and I got tired of Maddy and several other characters constantly "whimpering."
Did I enjoy this book? It was okay. But King did it better in 1974, and his characters were more believably fucked up.
My complete list of book reviews.