Carrie

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Summary: Stephen Kings Carrie
Review: Carrie written by Stephen King is a good book. It has many things to make it fit together. For example at first when she uses her so called telekinetic powers you don't really know what it is, not until she goes to the library and checks out a book called "Telekinetic Powers". Then you kind of get the idea what she does when she either gets mad or just doesn't want someone around. Also you can picture what they're house looks like. The way you can see this is the good way Stephen King describes it. He describes it saying that they have crosses in every room and a praying room. Also about how her mother hates red, which tells you that she is really religious. Stephen King makes Carrie fit into the book perfect. He makes her have no friends and how he makes everyone hate her and make fun of her all the time. If it wasn't for those it wouldn't make sense for Carrie to have the telekinetic powers. She would not try to use her telekinetic powers to get everyone to leave her alone. She would have no reason to hate anyone because she would have a friend, and thats what would keep her together. Maybe she would use them to hate her mother with because her mother is really religious and while Carrie learns the truth about women stuff, her mother says its a sin. For example, her mother says to have breasts is a sin, but at school her physical education teacher tells her about women things and she learns its natural. Also her mother never told her about her period, but then at school after she thinks she is bleeding to death in the shower her coach tries to explain it is natural.

Rating:
Summary: dumbest book I've every read!
Review: I hated this book!
It was fine at the begining but it got really boring around the middle.
...I think if Carrie's mother wasn't so religous,then Carrie would have turned out alright.
But why did Stephen King stop half way through the book and start telling us about what people did to her when we already know.
...

Rating:
Summary: Classic
Review: This book had a deeper and more complex scare than the movie. The levels of abuse from Carrie's mother draws chills down your spine and makes you wonder how many people are in the world that are REALLY like that. I've seen the movie several times but never read the book. That was a big mistake. Carrie's revenge is much more devastating than the movie let's you believe.It reminds me of all the modern day school shootings we are experiencing today. This is a Stephen King's Classic and a must read.

Rating:
Summary: HARD TO PUT DOWN
Review: This book was very interesting and very hard to put down. It doesn't help that there are no chapters. Although a few parts were ruined by people talking about the movie, I enjoyed it very much and finished it in one day.

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Summary: In the beginning...
Review: ...we have Carrie White, the mousey, constantly put upon brunt of everyone's joke with the ferocious gift in Stephen King's first published novel. Originally released in 1974, it was a harbringer of the vicious talent King himself would demonstrate for blowing us all away book after book after book.

Carrie's is an apocraphal tale of the ultimate loser, the ultimate prank, and the ultimate revenge. It is also a razor sharp examination of the kid Cuisinart known as high-school, its often comical and cynical tone belying King's own past as a weary English teacher. Thrown into the mix is the obligatory-for-70's-horror religious allegory, with mother Margaret White an overpowering vision of evangelical madness and Carrie her sacrificial Jesus figure. And King also taps into the taboo of mysterious and often terrifying female biologogy to unforgetably shock the audience...the opening is a shower scene as worthy of timelessness as Hitchcock's Psycho.

All the King's literary touches are present: excerpts from newsclippings and after-the-fact biographies to provide different access points into the story, the italicized
(my god will I string together another awkward compound sentence)
inner-thoughts of the characters, the telegraphing of story elements to sharpen the dread of the inevitable doom to come. It's all here, and while it may be as subtle as a nuclear first strike, it's never boring and always cathartic. Upon release it proved Stephen King a force to be reckoned with, as the master of disaster draws first blood.

Rating:
Summary: Cool!
Review: Ok Carrie is my favorite Stephen King book. The moment I read about it I new I had to read the rest. Anyway, it's about a high school girl (named Carrie, duh) who is tricked and tormented by her classmates and abused by her religously nuts mother,until she learns that she is telekinetic....(later in the book, at the prom) She gets her last trick. With her power she kills most of the people, not only at the prom, but most of the town too.....
Rated: (R), for STRONG language and ... activities.

Rating:
Summary: Average debut
Review: THis debut by master Stephen King clearly showed that he was destined to stardom. But I'm not particularly his fan; I think he overwrites, he talks too much to get at his point!
Also, this stuff of all his plots happening in Maine is getting a little bit repetitive.

But, back to CARRIE. THe book is good, altough average and, according to King himself, a little bit outdated, but still a good novel.

Rating:
Summary: A bit unsteady, but enjoyable
Review: I can't hold up CARRIE as an extremely deep or enlightening novel, but it was one that I had a lot of trouble putting down at the end of the day. It takes a fairly simple premise and milks it for all that it's worth. It's not particularly frightening or scary, just a simple, tense story told very, very well.

The characterization is really nothing to write home about here. The people have their places and their actions to perform, but don't really exist in all three dimensions. I didn't find this to be a problem though, as I wasn't expecting anything particularly outstanding in this department. However, one character's shallowness did begin to annoy me after a while. The eponymous Carrie has a mother, of course, and to describe this woman as a clichéd and one-dimensional stereotype would be to pay a compliment to the characterization. I'm not particularly offended by the single portrayal of an over the top, religious, fanatical fundamentalist, but the sheer superficiality began to seriously annoy me. Now, obviously, the book is set up in a way that the reader isn't supposed to empathize with this insane woman, yet I felt as if I was being hit over the head with this crude caricature. Having a character that the audience can boo and hiss at is one thing, but to draw a person whose very presence in the story made me want to hurl the book the length of the room is another thing entirely. If she had just been a little toned down, I doubt she would have been nearly so aggravating.

The story-line is quite simple and probably known to many more people than have actually read the book (or seen the film). But this doesn't work against the book. Indeed, the story constantly undermines climactic moments, by telling us the events far in advance of their appearance in the narrative. Nearly every shocking event that occurs in the book has already been mentioned in the little asides that are scattered throughout. This is a very effective way of heightening the tension. Learning a lesson from Hitchcock, Stephen King knows that it's the suspense rather than the actual blood that keeps an audience hooked. We know precisely what's coming, but it's the journey itself that is of supreme importance. With every hint the book drops, the tension is racked up a notch. By the time I reached the conclusion, that I had already anticipated, I was completely spellbound.

CARRIE is a simple story of childhood bullying, nonconformity and revenge, with a healthy sprinkling of horror thrown in. The characters don't need to be terribly deep, because anyone who ever interacted with children know these people already and can fill in the gaps. It feels slightly uneven and sloppy in places, but that certainly isn't enough to derail the whole book. This was the first Stephen King book that I'd ever read, and based on my enjoyment of this one, it certainly won't be the last.

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Summary: A shame the movie is so famous
Review: 'Carrie' is one of those pieces of popular fiction where just about everyone knows the plot - Carrie White, bullied and scorned teenager, has such a harrowing experience of puberty that she develops telekinesis with which she punishes her tormentors with. Of course, it's not that simple and it's a tribute to King that there's still a lot to enjoy in a story where I pretty much knew the plot step by step thanks to watching the movie beforehand.

Still, it's really best to concentrate on what's good here, because the only real flaw of the story is that I knew it already. And that's not really anyone's fault but my own. First off, it's easy to read, made up of first-hand experiences of the various survivors of the Carrie White experience, which we are told through retrospective newspaper articles has become somewhat of a legend. Thankfully this doesn't make the book appear disjointed, but has the effect of leaving the reader on a cliffhanger every now and then as we get to see the experience of 'Prom Night' from various people's perspectives, not just Carrie's. Also, surprisingly, King does offer sympathy to all of his characters and is mercifully unsparing with his unflattering description of Carrie and plump and covered with pimples. This isn't a romantic tale of revenge but one of horror after all. If some of the scenes have lost their potency - I couldn't help but feel that the much-hyped shower scene of the movie at the beginning of the book would have had more of an impact at the time of writing.

The bottom line really is that for anyone who hasn't seen the movie and doesn't know the plot off by heart this is a really great and highly original book. It's just such a shame that the movie is so famous, and such a landmark in the horror field, that the book might seem to some to be redundant. Well it isn't, there are plenty of surprises, and it's a very enjoyable book with very well mounted tension and fantastic characterisation. But it's impossible to view it from an objective status if you've seen the film.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Review: I have to say that I was suprised by this book. It was my first time reading a Stephen King book, and I thought I would get confused with all the science fiction stuff, but I was confused very rarely by this book. In some ways I thought it was better than the movie because the book goes into more details of all the characters lives. I liked that it was a lot different than the movie, and I didn't feel like I was reading the movie script. I think this book is great for anyone who's a Stephen King fan. This was very good considering it was his first book.