Carrie by Stephen King.
Title: Carrie.
Author: Stephen King.
Genre: Fiction, horror, epistolary novel, paranormal, fantasy.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: April 5, 1974.
Summary: Carrietta N. "Carrie" White is a viciously bullied misfit high school girl, the abused daughter of a religious fanatic, who uses her newly discovered telekinetic powers to exact revenge on those who torment her, while in the process causing one of the worst local disasters in American history.
My rating: 7.5/10
My Review:
♥ Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow.
♥ The girls stopped, realizing that fission and explosion had finally been reached. It was at this point, when looking back, that some of them would claim surprise. Yet there had been all these years, all these years of let's short-sheet Carrie's bed at Christian Youth Camp and I found this love letter from Carrie to Flash Bobby Pickett let's copy it and pass it around and hide her underpants somewhere and put this snake n her shoe and duck her again, duck her again; Carrie tagging along stubbornly on biking trips, known one year as pudd'n and the next year as truck-face, always smelling sweaty, not able to catch up; catching poison ivy from urinating in the bushes and everyone finding out (hey, scratch-ass, your bum itch?); Billy Preston putting peanut butter in her hair that time she fell asleep in study hall; the pinches, the legs outstretched in school aisles to trip her up, the books knocked from her desk, the obscene postcard tucked into her purse; Carrie on church picnic and kneeling down clumsily to pray and the seam of her old madras skirt splitting along the zipper like the sound of a huge wind-breakage; Carrie always missing the ball, even in kickball, falling on her face in Modern Dance during their sophomore year and chipping a tooth, running into the net during volleyball; wearing stockings that were always run, running, or about to run, always showing sweat stains under the arms of her blouses; even the time Chris Hargensen called up after school from the Kelly Fruit Company downtown and asked her if she knew that pig poop was spelled C-A-R-R-I-E: Suddenly all this and the critical mass was reached. The ultimate shit-on, gross-out, put-down, long searched for, was found. Fission.
♥ A first-year teacher, she still believed that she thought all children were good.
♥ I wanted to cry but it was too real to cry about, not like the movies.
♥ "It's not very important. High school isn't a very important place. When you're going you think it's a big deal, but when it's over nobody really thinks it was great unless they're beered up."
♥ She began to walk back toward the school, her stomach churning unhappily. Little Miss Sorority, Suzy Creemcheese. The Nice Girl who only doe It with the boy she plans to marry - with the proper Sunday supplement coverage, of course. Two kids. Beat the living shit out of them if they show any signs of honesty: screwing, fighting, or refusing to grin each time some mythic honcho yelled frog.
♥ In the wake of two hundred deaths and the destruction of an entire town, it is so easy to forget one thing: We were kids. We were kids. We were kids trying to do our best..."
♥ "You were kids," he said. "Kids don't know what they're doing. Kids don't even know their reactions really, actually, hurt other people. They have no, uh, empathy. Dig?"
She found herself struggling to express the thought this called up in her, for it suddenly seemed basic, bulking over the shower-room incident the way sky bulks over mountains.
"But hardly anybody ever finds out that their actions really, actually, hurt other people! People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it. Lots of kids say they feel sorry for Carrie White - mostly girls, and that's a laugh - but I bet none of them understand what it's like to be Carrie White, every second of every day. And they don't really care."
♥ Tommy Ross didn't love her; she knew that. This was some strange kind of atonement, and she could understand that and respond to it. She had lain cheek and jowl with the concept of penance since she had been old enough to reason.
♥ "I don't know what got into us, any of us. It makes me feel like I don't even know my own mind."
♥ But sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It's what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutterball when you're bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love.
♥ Carrie's face lit up, he said. She told him that would be fine. Just fine.
This is the girl they keep calling a monster. I want you to keep that firmly in mind. The girl who could be satisfied with a hamburger and a dime root beer after her only school dance so her momma wouldn't be worried...
♥ And if there was enchantment, it was not divine but pagan
(momma untie your apron strings i'm getting big)
and she wanted it that way.
♥ With a sigh she began to massage her arms absently. They were cold and prickly. It was twelve after ten and there was no reason, really no reason, to feel that the world was coming to an end.
♥ They were trapped
(trapped)
and the word echoed intoxicatingly in her mind. They were under her thumb, in her power. Power! What a word that was!
♥ And so Chamberlain drifted into the streets.
They came like an invasion from the graveyard that lay in the elbow crook formed by the intersection of the Bellsqueeze Road and Route 6; they came in white nightgowns and in robes, as if in winding shrouds (Mrs. Dawson, she of the now-deceased son who had been a very funny fellow, came in a mudpack as if dressed for a minstrel show); they came to see what happened to their town, to see if it was indeed lying burned and bleeding. Many of them also came to die.