Cbr11bingo Not my wheelhouse
I don’t like being scared. Never have. When I was a kid, I had to leave the room if a commercial for a scary movie or show came on. I never wanted to go to haunted houses at Halloween, and I would avoid trick or treating at houses where it looked like someone was going to try to scare me. A few cannonballs ago, I reviewed Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which is a dark story but not exactly horror. One of my kids was on an R.L. Stine kick a few years ago, so I read a few of those with him and thought they were super weird and creepy. Horror is definitely not my wheelhouse, but I figured if I was going to read there, I might as well go to the master of the genre, Stephen King, and what better introduction to horror than his classic debut novel, Carrie.
When the movie Carrie came out in 1976, I would have been 11 or 12, and I remember seeing ads for it and being totally freaked out. I most assuredly did not want to see this movie (still haven’t), but Carrie is an iconic film. It’s part of the culture and over time, you pick up enough references to it to piece the story together even if you haven’t seen it. For those unfamiliar, Carrie is the story of Carrie White, an outcast teenager in Chamberlain, Maine, who has been bullied all her life by classmates and her own mother, who is a controlling, vindictive, nutjob holy roller. After an especially ugly episode in the girls’ locker room at school, two important developments occur: good girl Sue Snell feels ashamed for her part in the incident and tries to come up with a way to make it up to Carrie, and Carrie begins to demonstrate telekinetic powers. Thus begins the collision course leading to the worst prom of all time.
A couple of things surprised me as I read this book. First of all, the fact that this prom is going to end in horror and tragedy is made clear from the first pages of the book. I don’t mean that King hints at it or foreshadows. I mean that it is spelled out that a tragedy happened on prom night killing scores of students and others and that Carrie White was the cause. This is a pretty bold move on King’s part. One might expect him to keep things secret so that you keep wondering and reading; and yet, I found that I was still curious to know the hows and whys of it all. King keeps his readers interested by his creative use of flashbacks and “scientific studies.” Narrations shifts among recollections of survivors, the thought processes in characters’ heads, excerpts from scientific tracts on telekinesis, AP news flashes, and excerpts from the state’s White Commission investigation after the tragedy. The reader eventually knows all, sees all, in a way that the actors in this drama cannot.
The other aspect of this story that surprised me is that it is female-centric. Billy Nolan and Tommy Ross are important but their involvement comes at the urging of their girlfriends, for better or worse. The story centers, of course, on Carrie, but it’s her relationships with her mother and with the girls at her high school that influence her self-perception and her actions. Carrie is between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, her crazy mother thinks everything to do with femininity and female-ness is dirty and evil. Breasts are “dirty pillows,” and Carrie getting her period is a sign of the devil. On the other hand, Carrie is a teenaged girl in the local high school with other girls who are interested in everyday things like boys and their own looks. Carrie’s presence is practically offensive to them, as Carrie is drab, ugly, pimply, fat, a “pig.” Carrie’s ignorance of her own bodily functions, of getting a period, unleashes a fit of anger and hatred towards her; even the nice girl and teacher are kind of disgusted by Carrie. The more I think about these relationships among women, the more impressed I am with King’s writing on it. It gets to the dichotomy between sinful Eve and virginal Mary, the impossible position women are put in where we are either sluts or prigs. Our blood and our bleeding are necessary for life and for reproduction — it is what makes us “women”, but it’s “dirty” and needs to be secret. There is a great essay on this in Emilie Pine’s essay collection Notes to Self.
Carrie, as Sue Snell points out in the story, is/was not a monster. She was a victim, betrayed by pretty much everyone around her and by her own body. Her actions at the end are terrible, powerful, violent, but I still felt sympathy for her. While horror is not my wheelhouse, I am giving it a second thought based on Stephen King’s Carrie.