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Ahahah! Yeah, it was a really quick read. So, what did you think?

At first I was really irked by how caricatural the teenage characters all seemed. While I understand bullying can get way out of and, I didn't understand why he made it so easy even for the reader to dislike Carrie and think she was good for nothing. Once we got to meet her mother and hear of her childhood, it got more interesting and I finally let myself just get into the story. I just accepted that there would be some caricature and got over it.

The story wasn't very scary. It wouldn't give me nightmares. It felt a little too unreal for that without being quite creepy enough to freak me out. But the thought of all the bullying and ensuing violence still was dreadful.

As for the writing, the thoughts interrupting sentences sometimes bugged me. In some places they were nice, but in others they just made me stumble in my reading without bringing much. Overall, it was still a good story with wonderful use of foreshadowing.

Well, I've actually read the book before, but it was a long time ago. I actually really like the way King used the interrupting telepathic (CARRIE CARRIE) stuff. I like to think the way it interrupts your reading is the very kind of way it would interrupt your thinking if suddenly someone else was blasting something in your mind. It makes you stop and rethink things to make sure you're not jumbling, which is much how I think it would affect your thinking.

I never disliked Carrie. Not on the first read, and not this time. I always felt bad for her. I was bullied as a child, and my first experience with my period was a very public one (shower changing room at my grandmothers condo pool, and I was 10 and had no idea what was going on) and I was bullied because I was labeled "Advanced Special Needs" (which basically meant I was two grades ahead of everyone else my age) and because I was chunky, so I really, really sympathized with Carrie right from the get-go.

He is a little bit over the top with the TK thing. I do think telekinetic power is a thing that can be found and to some degree possibly trained or understood better, but I don't believe it could ever, ever manifest itself in the way Carrie was using it. Not without causing an aneurysm in the telekinetic.

For me it was a little scary, though, because of how close to home a lot of that s**t Carrie went through in school hit with me. Mine was all in grade school - my mom put me in home schooling before high school because the schools were doing nothing about my constantly being abused - some of the teachers were emotionally and psychologically abusive to me, too, including one principal who used to frequently compare me to his slightly younger son. I've been half-tempted to hunt him down and sue him because I'm pretty sure him constantly comparing me to a boy is why I get gender dysphoria some days and a part of why I now suffer from clinical depression and have to take medication just to function as a normal human being.

King is always really good with his foreshadowing, I find. He's always been one of my heroes, as a fellow writer. I don't necessarily try to emulate him, but I take elements I like from his writing and try to adapt them into my own style. But I also take inspiration from Tolkien, and from Jacqueline Carey and Sara Douglass, as well as Peter Straub.

But yeah, speaking as someone who had a really shitty experience with her peers in her youth, I always connected with Carrie as a person.

Also, you have to remember it was like the late 60's, early 70s when King was writing that book. A lot of teenagers actually were still kind of smooshed into those kind of caricature molds by their parents (one way or the other) in that time period. Things have changed a lot since the book was published in 1974. Its been like 42 years.

I have read the first one, its my goal to read them all next year.

Im ninety nine percent sure we have salems lot and Insomnia in our Geek room, Hearts in Atlantis i'm not so sure. It's just that my to be read shelf is, quite literally, double stacked at this moment, and don't even get me started on my kindle. they will get read this year, though, I absolutly promised myself, and him.

Steven King gets accused of writing caricatures a lot. There is some truth to this, because as anyone who has read multiple Steven King books can attest, King tends to recycle the same stock characters over and over again. Case and point, this video:



The misguided religious zealot (Carrie's mom) is a big stock character within the Steven King universe as well. That being said, I don't think that characters have to be likable or redeemable to be believable and realistic. I was bullied in school too and I have to say, King's portrayal of the bullies was pretty spot on accurate. Victimizing people is often the only bonding activity practiced amongst a group of friends and without a victim they have nothing to do or talk about. No bully within the group will have an objection to it because then they will become an outcast and subsequently, the new victim.

Ah, I feel like I've been misunderstood? I felt sorry for Carrie too, and it was great to see her finally stand up for herself and enjoy the prom. I was kind of angry she couldn't even get that, knowing the prom would be ruined and become a catastrophe. There was a twisted satisfaction in parts of the destruction scenes, when she walked away from her home, mostly. She's an interesting character, in the end.

It's just in the first few pages that I really felt she was far too caricatural. Now that I think about it, it must have been written from the point of view of her bullies, which would explain why she seemed to have no personality of her own. She would scream, moan and stumble but that's about it until she got out of that shower room. It annoyed me not so much because I didn't relate to the character (I don't mind not being able to relate, and in the end I did), but because it felt to me like King, by depriving her of language, was saying this character deserved to be bullied and was somehow a lesser human. (Only for a few pages, of course.) It angered me that she seemed to have no personality and no redeeming qualities. She does have both, but they didn't show at all for those first pages, and the lack of words on her part made it seem worse.

The novel turned out better than I expected afterwards, and I didn't mind the other caricatures as much, even though they felt like shortcuts at times.