Product Description

The groundbreaking masterpiece that redefined the genre.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63726 in Books
• Published on: 1975-05-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Why read Carrie? Stephen King himself has said that he finds his early work "raw," and Brian De Palma's movie was so successful that we feel like we have read the novel even if we never have. The simple answer is that this is a very scary story, one that works as well--if not better--on the page as on the screen. Carrie White, menaced by bullies at school and her religious nut of a mother at home, gradually discovers that she has telekinetic powers, powers that will eventually be turned on her tormentors. King has a way of getting under the skin of his readers by creating an utterly believable world that throbs with menace before finally exploding. He builds the tension in this early work by piecing together extracts from newspaper reports, journals, and scientific papers, as well as more traditional first- and third-person narrative in order to reveal what lurks beneath the surface of Chamberlain, Maine.

News item from the Westover (ME) weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1966: "Rain of Stones Reported: It was reliably reported by several persons that a rain of stones fell from a clear blue sky on Carlin Street in the town of Chamberlain on August 17th."

Although the supernatural pyrotechnics are handled with King's customary aplomb, it is the carefully drawn portrait of the little horrors of small towns, high schools, and adolescent sexuality that give this novel its power, and assures its place in the King canon. --Simon Leake

The Sunday Times
'King is one of the most fertile storytellers of the modern novel'

Sunday Express
'One of the few horror writers who can truly make the flesh creep'

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Customer Reviews

Mildly entertaining, but of no real worth
'Carrie' was the first novel Stephen King published (April 1974), and from this short novel a career of immense commercial success was cultured which has produced some entirely entertaining and `sound' horror novels; ''Salem's Lot', 'The Shining', 'Misery' and 'IT'; some mediocre (yet still rather good) works; such as 'Christine'; and some complete dross; 'The Tommyknockers', 'Cujo' and many others, I'm sure. Where shall 'Carrie' be placed? Probably between the latter two generalisations.

The novel centres around a sixteen-year-old girl, Carrie White, who is the issue of a religious fundamentalist mother with whom she lives with. She is routinely bullied at school by her peers and generally lives a deeply unhappy life; she does, however, posses the gift (?) of telekinesis which enables her to manipulate objects and people around her. The book is short (just over 200 pages) and is told through the third person and some `academic' book extracts, magazine articles and the like in a tepid hint at realism.

A distinguishable King theme can be discerned in this early novel: childhood; but unlike some of his worthier latter attempts in this field, his treatment of it in Carrie is a resounding failure in every department. As hinted at in the synopses above, this book is set in that oft exploited institution; The American High-School. Since I am no historian on such matters, I'm not sure if by the mid-seventies the American High-School had become the enormous and monotonous cliché it is by today, but King's adolescent characters fit every stereotype in that on-going banality of popular culture; the tormented and repressed nerd, the brainless jocks, the attractive yet amoral and loathsome girls; the list is endless, and as a result the characters feel very superficial, shallow and terribly dull. Carrie is not a protagonist capable of any sort of believable pathos, and is an immediately dismissible character. Equally bad are the overdrawn caricatures which are handled with such heavy-handedness - some are so hyperbolically overwrought (i.e. Carrie's mother, the lawyer) that they don't exhibit an ounce of believability.

Another shabby aspect of this novel is its dreadful prose; it is about as `functional' as language can get; there is a poverty of description here which makes the dammed thing such a colourless experience to read. The `academia' sounds laughably artificial and there are some truly awful lines of dialogue which inspire one to cringe one's toes; this is pulp trash in its most cheap, festering and bland state. The thematic material (such as religious fanaticism) is also poorly developed, and the whole idea of telekinesis is explored in absolutely no depth at all.

However, as an exercise in sheer page-flippery, Carrie performs in an acceptable manner; it's trash, but at least it's mildly entertaining, rather like watching cheap television, or squashing ants; beyond that it's a miserable example of horror fiction. Quite what respectable director Brian de Palma saw in this book eludes me; perhaps he enjoyed the pig-blood gimmick near the end, or maybe he's deprived of better horror fiction; in any case, do not delude yourself into believing that that the disproportionate fame this novel has achieved raises it anywhere above the lurid depths of the worst examples of best-sellerdom, it's a book I'm sure Stephen King (and I) would rather forget about.

A Lesson In Suspenseful Horror Writing
This is a short and fairly accessible debut from Stephen King, but it's full of dramatic supense, excellent characterisation and attention to detail.

It tells the story of Carrie White, a High School senior who has been bullied for most of her formative years. In addition to this, she has a very unhappy home life at the hands of her religious zealot of a Mother, who makes Carrie's life a misery by imposing her unreasonable religious rants on her passive daughter.

The story begins with a humilating event in which Carrie is the focus. Showering after a Physical Education lesson, Carrie begins to bleed, and is actually going through her first period, despite being seventeen years old. The other girls in her physical education class begin jeering and shouting, throwing Sanitary towels at Carrie, humiliating her terribly. King's narration during this encounter is superb, his descriptions are dramatic and effective, really emphasising Carrie's terror and shame.

The story progresses from here, and the reader begins to learn more and more about just how bleak Carrie's existence is, and how this bleakness leads her down the road of nuturing a rare and exceptional talent, telekinesis: the ability to move objects without touching them.

It is this skill which is at the centre of 'Carrie', and the skill which will allow Carrie to exact a horrific and terrible revenge on her fellow school pupils, in the wake of her ultimate humiliation, on Prom Night.

All of the hallmarks of great horror writing are here in this expertly-crafted debut novel from Stephen King.

The first book by Stephen King - and one of his finest!
I can't recommed this book enough. I first read it as a teenager and loved it. Recently, i was stuck for something to read and decided to revisit it, and i was not disappointed.
This is the story of Carrie White, a teenage girl who is bullied at school by her classmates, and who is bullied at home by her religous zealot of a mother. But Carrie is no ordinary girl - she has telekinetic powers........ and there is only so much she can take before she is finally pushed to breaking point.......
The style of the novel is brilliant. It is short and punchy. King flits from the third person perspective to journal to biography to newspaper reports with such skill and ease that you are constantly hooked, and eager to get back into the main story. The other effect of this style is that you can guess there is a great tragedy unfolding and you know that events are building to a climatic cataclysm - but King holds back the 'how' and 'why' from you in a very clever way.
The characters are all people you can identify with - the bullied girl, the popular, good-looking guy, the sensitive girl who is growing up, the self-centred,spoilt, spiteful girl and the list goes on. You can really relive the old feelings for school as an adult, and if you are a kid you can really identify with everything that i going on. Stephen King has captured this time of our lives so perfectly i felt i was in a picture of my past.
There are other reasons for this being a must-read horror/Stephen king book. Firstly, it is paced so well. The book isn't very long, and it certainly doesn't need to be, but there is a lot packed into it's pages. Unlike a lot of King's later work this is not over-stretched or over-characterised. This book is the essence of Stephen King - wise, witty, dark, twisted and most importantly of all - you put the book down and want more! The other point to make is that these early books of King's are all classic novels. His latter day work is nowhere as good as this, and to be fair to him, it must be hard to come up with fantastic ideas every time he puts pen to paper (or finger to word processor).
So, if you are new to horror or Stephen King then you really HAVE to read this book. This is as good an introduction to horror as you will get, and it will show you why Stephen King is one of the worlds best selling authors.
If you are Stephen King fan, then this is worth a re-visit. It will remind you why you are such a fan of his work.
This is a great book and every horror fan should have read this at least once!
Enjoy it, and be prepared for a classic climax to a book