Carrie

Rating:
Summary: Best Yet
Review: I have read many Stephen King books and when I read this one I automatically labeled it as his best. It was short but fast paced. The main character was portrayed with a lot of detail instead of a few vague references. Every character was shown in this manner. This book shows the horrible reality of how people are sometimes treated. This book was his first and his best. Though his others are great in their own ways.

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Rating:
Summary: Not bad...
Review: 4 his first book, it wasn't all that great. It was detailed in some ways but it was not entirely detailed. Don't get me wrong. I mean it's still pretty enjoyable because it's original but Mr. King could have done better.

Rating:
Summary: Carrie- By: Stephen King
Review: I thought that this book was totally dumb from beginning to end. It had absolutely no plot whatsoever. The movie was way better than the book. It was about this girl named Carrie (of course) who was tormented by all of her classmates. Eventually when you get farther into the story you and her discover that she has these powers called telekinisis. Towards the middle of the story a popular guy named Tommy Ross asks her out to the prom. So when they get there people are staring at them. They win high school king and queen and when they get up on the stage, what happens is unbelieveable. I don't recommend this book to anyone. ...

Rating:
Summary: How Surprising What A Dissapointment King's First Book Is.
Review: Stephen King's first novel Carrie is about a girl (Carrie) who is tormented by her classmates, made fun of by her teachers, and beaten by her religious mother. The novel has SO MUCH plot, and it is SO intriging, but it's not done well at all. The book is a flat, boring thing, from one of the best writers of all time. The book has the largest amount of dull, cardboard-cutout chatecters ever to be stuffed in one book. I mean, Brian De Palma's film version had GREAT charecter developement, (and also featured Halloween's PJ Soles, OH YEAH!!!!) and it was a very touching peice of work, you really felt sorry for Carrie. In the movie, Carrie is a misunderstood but sweet girl who simply needed some freinds, but in the book she was a WIERDO!!!! I will say that I saw the film before I read the book, but it only proves that the movie is one of the few film adaptions that is better than the novel (I read Pet Semetary, and was dissapointed with the film, I read Cujo, and was VERY dissapointed with the film), but Carrie, the movie, is WAY better than the book. I know I sound like one of those people who would rather watch a movie than read, but I love to read, and I love Stephen King's work, but this was one flat out dissipointment.

If you enjoyed the novel Carrie, I would recomend the novels The Shining, Salems Lot, Pet Semetary and The Stand.

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Brett Michael Roberts

Rating:
Summary: The beginning of the King
Review: I tried to read King's first novel years ago and just couldn't for some reason. I have no idea why. After reading The Shining, however, I thought I'd give it a try again and am very glad I did. The Shining was very good but I was a bit disappointed that some of the key scenes from the original movie wasn't in it. (that's Hollywood for you.) Not so with Carrie. That movie gave me the creeps as a kid and so did the book at 25! It's a fast read (200 pages) and jam packed full of action and suspense. The best part of this book by far is the character development. I felt so....bad is the only word I can think of....for Carrie in the end. The book really makes you understand and feel sorry for what she has had to endure throughout her short life. I'm not a very emotional person, but that just about made me tear up a little. That's what I look for in anything (books, movies, music, art)....some kind of emotion, whatever it may be. This one touches a few: it makes you very sad, at times mad, horrified, and scared. I've heard a rumor that King actually threw this book away after writing it and his wife retrieved it and made him send it in. If it's true, the entertainment world as we know it owes a great thanks to Tabitha King. Could you imagine a world that never had a Stephen King? Scary.

Rating:
Summary: An effectively harrowing and haunting read
Review: I picked up "Carrie" after a 15-year hiatus from Stephen King's fiction (although I read his memoir on writing last year and enjoyed it a lot), and it was a slap in the face reminding me that I need to read more of his stuff. "Carrie" is a heavy articulation of the inexplicable and how we react to what we don't understand. And, given the recent spate of revenge-style schoolyard shootings across the country, "Carrie" also sticks out as a prescient social commentary. If only we'd listened.

While other reviewers have been bothered by the narrative's melange of fictional, narrated segments and purportedly factual excerpts from trial transcripts, academic publications, etc.--and even what looks like a Xerox of a coroner's report--I think it's crucial to understanding one of the levels on which King's novel works so well. Part of what's at stake in "Carrie" is the relationship between fact and fiction, and how this relates directly to our understanding of what we can and cannot know, what we can and cannot explain. The cross-examinations of Carrie's friend Sue Snell drive this point home toward the novel's end; Sue is repeatedly asked how she "knew" what she is telling the court, given the haziness of the evening's events, and all that she can reply is, How do we "know" anything? This plays powerfully throughout one's experience of King's novel, because it begs a discussion of how something that we know is fiction (and thus not "true") can have such a powerfully visceral effect on us (read some of the many reviews on this site for evidence of how effective the horror in "Carrie" is). This is big game for a novel written so early in a writer's career, and King handles it well, opening up all sorts of questions that demand answers but that resist those answers with hostility.

Recent events have shown just how accurate King's portrayal of the cruelties of the American high school experience has been, and he is also right on the money with a media critique (the tragedy's survivors are turned into celebrities and memoirists, and Reader's Digest chimes in with a ridiculous "Drama In Real Life" contribution). Where the coolness quotient is the center of every high school, beware of those on the margins. King's conclusion is even more ominous in its suggestion that this cycle is unbreakable.

And what about that surprising conclusion? What's most amazing about it, perhaps, is that it's not a surprise, not one bit of it. From fifty pages into the novel, King has already told us who will die (hundreds of high school students, most of whom have been terribly cruel to the protagonist, and a few others from the town), who will be responsible (Carrie herself), and how it will be done (a tragic fire in the high school on Prom Night). The true test of his authorly mettle is that you read on anyway, and you are unable to stop. It's not surprises and expectations that push the reader of "Carrie" to the end; it's more like a voyeuristic need to actually see what we've already been told. This marks King off--along with Highsmith, maybe--as the truest heir to Edgar Allen Poe in American letters.

Even the few moments that ring slightly false or unfriendly in this novel (high schoolers thinking like four-star generals, for example, or the pretty drastic portrayal of Christian fundamentalists) are never less than interesting. "Carrie" is a powerful and powerfully disturbing look at how people try to come to grips with those different to them, and how often and catastrophically they fail.


Rating:
Summary: Fast, engrossing read about injustice and tragedy
Review: This is the first major novel of Stephen King and I suppose in a certain way it shows if you consider it in relation to his later books. Stephen King has often referred to his earlier works as "raw." However, in the case of this book I think that "rawness" lends to the story rather than detracts from it. The story also adheres to an episodic approach, jumping between Associated Press write-ups, fictitious book quotes, and interviews with people after the fact by an investigatory committee. All of that worked really well in this book when interspersed with the events as they had taken place. In a lot of books that kind of approach can be distracting but it worked perfectly in Carrie.

My one complaint: some of the characters are meant to be high school kids and yet their thought processes were sometimes a little too adult sounding. This is not to say there are not very mature high school kids, of course, but rather I just do not feel that they made sense in the context of this book. One example: Susan Snell. Relatively speaking she was a flat character in the story and yet her thought patterns were shown to have a depth probably beyond her years. (Again: this is not impossible, I just think some of the characterizations did not fit with the story. Rather they were blatant attempts to move the story forward by introducing the plot points.) This, however, is a small overall criticism of the book.

This is definitely a book where, in a lot of ways, you root for Carrie White. She was an anti-hero in the truest sense of the literary term. For anyone was ever picked on in school or witnessed this happening to others, you cannot help but feel immense sympathy for Carrie. And her actions, while violent and catastrophic, are ultimately understandable. And it is that understandibility that raises the book from being a just a simple horror novel to one of tragedy. The book also makes you consider, however briefly, what makes people like Carrie. The focus of the book is not on her power - that is actually incidental to the plot. The focus is on Carrie herself and what fashioned her into the human being she eventually becomes. It shows how children can be formed by the events of their crucial years and how that formation can go disastrously wrong. Overall the book is about injustice: injustice to Carrie White in how her parents raised her, injustice in a school system that has a derived system of cliques, injustice in a world that will not recognize the birth of something new even when it leads to potential danger.

If you have already read a lot of Stephen King's later works, you may find yourself not liking this book as much simply because of the different writing style or length. If, however, you want to see the evolution of Stephen King's thought (and writing) process as well as sit through a good story, pick this one up.

Rating:
Summary: Not up to King's standard, but a good read.
Review: This book is Stephen King's very first book published, and it shows. King himself threw away the manuscript but his wife saved it from of the trash and convinced him to publish it. Since this is one of his very first works, the writing style is not as good as he would become to be for novels such as Salem's Lot or The Shining. However, I would recommend that you read this book if you are a fan of either the horror genre or Stephen King. I completly agree with King when he said that he condidered it "raw". That is only because of his lack of experience in writing and had not yet discovered his full potential. Maybe it bothers me that it was written through a series of articles and he always was bringing up scientific facts to prove that it was possible. The book does, however, have some chilling moments and is a great story of how a girl gets picked on and unleashes hell on her classmates and neighbors. This is actually one of those rare exceptions for me when the movie is better than the book. I loved the movie, but you should also give the book a try.

Rating:
Summary: Possessed of a terrifying power...
Review: This is the first Stephen King book I came across and the first I've read. Therefore I knew I wasn't going to allow myself to expect much. As a horror book, it wasn't the best I was going to come across-it hardly made me flinch. But as a book in itself, it was a very worthwhile read. The book could be described as-eerie, it doesn't get to you while you're reading the story but after you put it down it will keep taunting you. The lives of those described in the book will roam around you head for days afterwards and it will make you think very deeply about the society we all live in and the frame it causes us to be trapped within.

Carrietta White has very religious parents. Infact they are fanatics of a whole religious illuminati. At a young age, the two meet in a religious ceremony and after becoming suspicious that there is a conspiracy going on in the church-they flee and get married. Unfortunately, after bearing Carrietta-both parents see her as a great misfortune for their betrayal to God after having a sexual intercourse. Carrietta's father, Ralph White dies before her daughter is born when a steel girder fell out of a carrying sling on a housing-project job in Portland. When Carietta is born, she is born a beautiful little girl to her mother's extensive disgust. Therefore she doesn't let her daughter go outside too often or let's her any freedom. As Carrie grows older she shrivels under her mother's unwillingness to love her and she feels in whole, deprived because of her mother's near-fanatical fundamentalist religious beliefs. By the time Carrie leaves for school it is all shown by her appearance. A girl with such lovely looks is covered over by an ugliness so dispicable that people tense at the showing of her face. She tries desperately to fit in to a world that turns away from her repetetively but she must stay in the religious border her mother has created for her.

What the story and news articles that has a main role in moving the story proves is that Carrie has Telekinesis, TK. It is the ability to move objects by effort of the will alone in situations of extreme personal stress. Unfortunately, the book talks about how such a wonderful posession becomes a horrifying scream at life-of her fellow schoolmates and of Carrie's own.

Sue Snell is another character who takes up a similar role in the story as the news articles do, she talks in her book about the whole event about how deeply she felt for Carrie White. She manages to dig out most of the personalities that are presented in Carrie and how social difficulties pull out Carrie's strange ability in deadly ways, ways that could have been prevented but unfortunately ends in the destruction of a quiet town.

It's a very good book for those who want a lighter Stephen King read or those who are teens. It is also a valid read for those who are looking for a Stephen King book and haven't read any of his books as of yet.

Rating:
Summary: Strong narrative and interesting story
Review: Carrie is similar to Misery in that it is a very straightforward tale without too many characters (though Misery is the extreme in having few characters). King shows his narrative power here in that the premise is fairly straightforward but he makes the story captivating and invigorating. In a sense it feels a bit like King is showing off his ability to tell a good story by not having any secrets. Via newspaper clippings and interview snippets after the present of the story the reader knows from the beginning that Carrie ends up dying, that the town is destroyed, and that the world has reacted to the events described. This bit of "non-fictional" aspect to the novel is effective and fun.

Overall Carrie is a good choice both for King fans and fans of fine storytelling.