I thought my prom was “bad” in that it all felt overhyped, my feet hurt the whole evening, I swear my hair ended up hurting from all the pins I had stuck in it, and I got into a fight with my friends at Safe Grad and ended up walking home from the high school carrying my prom dress in a backpack (I was supposed to get a ride home with said friends). However, it didn’t end in flames or death so you know what? I made out better than the kids in the two books that make up this review!
Carrie, Stephen King (published 1974)
Carrie was read as part of my ongoing desire to fill in some of the blank spaces I have when it comes to my reading of the Stephen King bibliography. I have no desire to read everything, but I did want to loop back and read some of the books that I had passed over before. Since April, 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication, I felt even more so that now was the time to read the book.
The book is set in 1977 and into the 1980s, the story is told through narration and then reports/excerpts from fictional books, and transcripts from characters being interviewed about the events of the book. Plotwise the book follows Carrie, an outcast at her high school and very much the kid who does not fit in. But Carrie is not a regular girl, Carrie has telekinetic (or TK) powers and after she gets pushed to the very limit by an act of cruelty, she snaps. And she snaps explosively.
This is Stephen King’s first novel, and while I felt like I was seeing some echoes of what was to come the book stands on its own. It also dodges in my opinion, one of my often (but not always) complaints about King books not having the best endings. In this one, King sticks the landing. Possibly because this is on the shorter side of his novels, it reads fast and furious like some of his novellas or longer short stories.
To be clear this book is brutal in a lot of places. We know from the start of the book there is going to be a body count, and wow there is a body count. King weaves together a lot of different points of view to tell the story, sometimes doubling back in time to fill in some of the blanks. All the stories more or less converge together as the story goes along, showcasing the horror that the characters are experiencing. (There is a part in the novel, around downed power lines that I have not been able to stop thinking about, and it’s been days since I read that bit.)
Overall I would say that it’s a banger of a book. It’s brutal, it’s mean, it balances a lot of characters who are complicated (I was rooting for Carrie, but I found myself sympathetic to Sue Snell because wow, I’ve been the girl trying to be a “good girl” for some self-serving reason), and it’s tense! I knew what was going to happen, I knew the pig blood was coming, but I still sat down and read the entire part II of this novel in one day. Could not put it down. It’s not King at his absolute best (very few first novels are), and it does … show its age at parts in some of the character’s slang, general attitudes, and descriptions.
But I think even if you know the story from the movie, or just from references all over pop culture the book is worth a read. Those familiar with King’s works may, like me go “Oh, I see echoes of these characters later on.” I think that Mrs. White, Carrie’s mom shares some of the same literary DNA as Annie Wilkies, and of course, Carrie is not the only King character to have powers of the mind.
The Weight of Blood, Tiffany D. Jackson (published 2022)
Stephen King has described writing his vampire novel ‘Salems Lot as racquet-ball: “’Salem’s Lot itself was the ball and Dracula was the wall I kept hitting it against, watching to see how and where it would bounce, so I could hit it again. As a matter of fact, it took some pretty interesting bounces, and I ascribe this mostly to the fact that, while my ball existed in the twentieth century, my wall was very much a product of the nineteenth.”
I feel like Tiffany D. Jackson played her own game of racquetball with Carrie as her wall. Her ball took some very
interesting bounces as she used the framework of a not as integrated as it seems Georgia high school/community, and what happens when a biracial young woman has some extraordinary powers and is pushed to the breaking point by her peers and community. The basic framework is there, bullied outsider teen girl who can do amazing things with her mind, prom night gone wrong, multiple POVs that are mixed in with fictionalized accounts of what happened (I loved that the framing device was a transcript of a podcast).
In this case, while the wall was the product of the 1970s, the ball very much exists in the present. While the book is set in 2014 (sidebar how was that ten years ago? It feels like yesterday), it feels incredibly timely, in the way it addresses racism and the United States. In fact racism and its place in America’s history plays a huge role in this novel. Maddy’s father is white, while Carrie had an overbearing religiously fanatic mother, Maddy has an overbearing, racist and religiously fanatic father. He’s forced Maddy into passing as white, and not allowing her to embrace her full heritage When she is “outed” at school it triggers acts of aggression and racism that just pile up. While all this is going on the book details the town’s history of segregation, a history that has continued into the present with there being a black-and-white prom. Because as this is a story inspired by Carrie, there is of course a prom.
The town this story takes place in might be fictional, but the treatment of the black citizens is based on reality and is horrifying. I also had no idea that segregated proms would still be a thing, but a very cursory Google search shows that into the 2000’s it was still a thing, and my faith in humanity is such that I would not be surprised to hear it was still going on.
This novel moves fast, but I do feel the characters got more fleshed out then in Carrie and had more depth to them. I was very invested in these characters and liked that they were complicated people for the most part. Yes, there was some more… just straight up villainous characters, and I was rooting for some of them to get their just deserts. And oh, just deserts are doled out in this book, maybe not in the same level of graphic detail that happens in Carrie, but this book gets pretty brutal at moments.
I feel like both books resonate in the sense that who hasn’t had a “wouldn’t it be nice to have powers and just show the people who are making me miserable play?” I think both books serve as a reminder of how being kind can change a person’s life for the better, and doing the opposite can … well can cause ripple effects that bring out more hate and upset.
