Why ‘Carrie’ is the ultimate teen novel
As the debut book by master of horror Stephen King turns 50, Emily Bootle reads it for the first time – and finds less gory terror, more relatable adolescent melodrama
What is it about high school and horror? From Scream (1996) to Jennifer’s Body (2009) to Hulu’s horror-comedy Scream Queens (2015), it’s an all-American combination that seems immutable. There are so many reasons it works: the trope of a virginal teen girl turned evil, inherited from the Victorian Gothic; the juxtaposition of clean-cut jocks and cheerleaders with filthy, terrifying villains; the supposed safety of the institution undercut by a sense of dread.
And it also works because there are familiar, parallel horrors beyond the gory or supernatural. Puberty, bullying, dating. Effort, exhaustion, humiliation. At 16, you’d take being murdered with a chainsaw or possessed by Satan over tripping over in the corridor in front of your crush any day of the week.
What teen horror does so well is reflect the scale and intensity of its characters’ – and often viewers’ – emotional worlds. This is what struck me reading Stephen King’s
Carrie, which was published in April 1974, a debut that would shoot the author to fame two years later upon release of the film adaptation.
Not being a particular fan of horror or – forgive me – what I snobbily perceived as “beach” fiction, I’d never thought to dip into King’s extensive catalogue. But, as the enormously influential Carrie celebrates its 50th anniversary, I thought I could simply start at the beginning – and I was thrilled to discover it’s not really a “horror” at all. Rather, its horror is a vehicle for the crafting of the ultimate teen novel.
We open in Chamberlain, Maine, with 16-year-old Carrie White in the school showers. She feels embarrassed and repulsive in the presence of the other girls’ bodies, which are smooth and lean and not covered in spots.
To everyone’s surprise, including her own, she starts her period, and is taunted mercilessly, her wet hair plastered to her head, the blood dripping down her thighs and all over the dank tiles (incidentally, it was actually this first scene that made me feel most nauseous).
It turns out it’s her first period – and her mother has never told her what to expect. Periods are a sign of sexuality, and to Margaret White – a widow who spends her evenings “tatting doilies”, reading the Bible and praying ferociously – any sexuality is a sign of sin (breasts, for example, are known in the White household as “dirty pillows”).
By the end Carrie is crawling through car parks sticky with blood, grinning crazily
In a relatable fit of melodrama, Carrie thinks she’s bleeding to death. But once she learns what’s really happening, she finds that a power has been unlocked within her – not only the ability to view herself, in fleeting moments, as a normal person, even a potentially attractive young woman, but the ability to move objects with her mind.
Your immediate thought, reading of a sullen, spooky-seeming girl with a religious maniac mother and telekinetic powers, is of The Exorcist, the film version of which was released the previous year. There is crossover – screams of “devil child”, praying, the constant, doom-inciting presence of sex – but where The Exorcist quickly becomes supernaturally terrifying, Carrie remains in the realm of human dynamics.
The better comparison would be Roald Dahl’s Matilda (1988), in which a young girl from an abusive household is similarly empowered by her supernatural tendencies.
King (far left) laces the story with newspaper clips, scientific reports and police evidence, which not only foreshadow the climax but lend a matter-of-factness to the telekinesis that otherwise pushes the novel beyond the real. Although Carrie is very much at the centre, the plot is pieced together through multiple accounts, including her own, her mother’s and her schoolmates’.
By the time the book reaches its apotheosis – the Ewen High School Prom, what else? – we have a picture of a world well beyond Carrie’s own creepy experience, defined mainly by feelings of crippling shame and thoughts of the Antichrist.
There are root beers drunk after school, bad sex in back seats, jostles to be queen bee. “Your pimples are the Lord’s way of chastising you,” Carrie’s mother tells her – there’s no doubt this is a book about what it’s like to be an adolescent.
We gain additional insight on this from the inner monologue that frequently interrupts right in the middle of a sentence, in a very 2024 all-lower case, written in brackets after a line break.
King’s tendency to punctuate longer paragraphs with one- or two-word sentences no doubt contributes to his books’ reputation as “easy” reads, which is shorthand for “too easy to be good”.
But reading Carrie I found it striking how modern, how apt for the social media age this device feels when it’s deployed to register characters’ thoughts.
As Carrie waits for her prom date, a boy set up for her by a guiltridden schoolmate by way of apology, she is hopeful, but ready to be struck again by humiliation. “(he’s not coming)”, writes King, “(don’t think about it, a watched pot doesn’t boil he’ll come) / (no he won’t he’s out laughing at you with his friends and after a little bit they’ll drive by in one of their fast noisy cars laughing and hooting and yelling)”.
It’s no wonder, perhaps, that the “Stephen King” hashtag has 26 million views on TikTok.
Yet while it’s written in a style that somehow reflects the streamof-consciousness of social media, this is pure coincidence: Carrie will be relevant to teens and young adults through the decades.
It speaks to many grand themes: religion; female sexuality; the conflict of religion and female sexuality in the mid-20th century specifically.
But most of all it seems to me that it’s about feeling trapped – by the confines of your family home, by other people’s perceptions of you, by your own shame – and the violence, metaphorical or otherwise, of breaking free.
When the terrible events we’ve been waiting for finally happen, at the Prom, Carrie is once again covered in blood – an outward, stinking sign of her shame. Her subsequent destruction of everything is a teen revenge fantasy amped up to grotesque, theatrical, almost camp proportions (which, of course, teen revenge fantasies often are).
By the end Carrie is the picture of a classic horror, crawling through car parks sticky with blood, grinning crazily as her world burns to the ground.
But even then she is also just a scared teenager attempting to navigate terrors much worse than, for example, being possessed by the Devil. That’s why horrors are set in high schools – because, well, weren’t we all?