Carrie: The Review

I had to read Carrie by Stephen King for school. I enjoyed the book, but sadly, I can’t talk about what I liked about the book for my English class. I have to talk about the writing style and stuff like that. Since that’s no fun, I decided to write about what I thought of the book here.

Margaret White: She was such a creep. And a jerk. Ugh. Everything she did in the book was worth a facepalm. She didn’t even have a justifiable back story. She took “Lifetime movie woman” to a new extreme.

Chris: In my mind, I was yelling profanities at her whenever King was writing about her. Her boyfriend and her dad both knew about her ways, but didn’t really try to stop her? Really? By the end of the book, I just shrugged that she died.

Carrie: I’m not sure if she was supposed to be parodying angsty teenage girls for thinking of herself as ugly, yet at the prom she was pretty, but that’s what she came off as. She was the most sympathetic character in the book. I don’t get why at the end, she didn’t just kill Chris and the other bullies. She didn’t have to kill the entire population of Chamberlain. Especially if she could mind read and stuff. Why didn’t she just do that to know who was laughing at her? That was kind of a crappy move.

And on a semi-random note, I remembered this from the IJBM from TV tropes for Sabrina the Teenage Witch while reading Carrie going psycho on everyone:

"I know The Libby comes from this show and I was certainly tortured by enough girls like her in high-school, but I could never feel any satisfaction whenever Sabrina defeated her with magic. To me, bullying comes from an imbalance of power and since Sabrina is a pretty much an omnipotent goddess, it was her that came off as the bully when she used this advantage against a mortal high-school girl. On The Secret World Of Alex Mack, Alex, too, had magical powers but she refused on principle to use them for petty revenge against her Libby (The decent thing to do.) You know, in general, it just bugs me that on this show (following Bewitched) witches have god-like powers like time travel and without the need for spells or potions or anything like that. Not only is it not like that in folklore, it's really boring dramatically.”

That kinda describes the Carrie VS Chris Conflict. I mean, bullying for years, versus killing someone? But still, Chris was annoying so Carrie using her powers gets justified.

It bugged me how the main moral seemed to be “Don’t bully people, because they might go psycho on the whole school and they might hurt you,” not “Don’t bully people, because they have feelings, too.” Then again, I don’t think Stephen King writes for morals.

And Carrie reminds me of Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult. Or the other way around, seeing as the latter was written in like 2007. Basically:

Book	Carrie	Nineteen Minutes
Setting	Maine	New Hampshire
People nice to bullied victim, who later unknowingly caused bullied victim to get revenge.	Sue/ Tommy	Josie
Things that should and probably count as sexual harassment.	The shower scene.	Peter getting pantsed at lunch.
The story telling style.	Newspaper article scrapbook with science articles on telekinesis.	Flashbacks and flashforwards with psychological assesments.
Jerk boyfriend dying.	Billy.	Matt.
Bullied Victim dying.	Carrie getting fatigue from overusing powers.	Peter suffocating himself at the prison.

 

The only different stuff were Carrie had a religious mom, while Peter didn’t.