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Carrie
by Stephen King
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Signet (1975-04-01)
ISBN: 0451131134
EAN: 9780451131133
Paperback
SKU: 419
Condition: Good
Comments: Binding: Softcover. Condition: Good. Slight wear along spine.
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Editorial Reviews
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Amazon.com
Why read Carrie? Stephen King himself has said that he finds his early work "raw," and Brian De Palma's movie was so successful that we feel like we have read the novel even if we never have. The simple answer is that this is a very scary story, one that works as well--if not better--on the page as on the screen. Carrie White, menaced by bullies at school and her religious nut of a mother at home, gradually discovers that she has telekinetic powers, powers that will eventually be turned on her tormentors. King has a way of getting under the skin of his readers by creating an utterly believable world that throbs with menace before finally exploding. He builds the tension in this early work by piecing together extracts from newspaper reports, journals, and scientific papers, as well as more traditional first- and third-person narrative in order to reveal what lurks beneath the surface of Chamberlain, Maine. News item from the Westover (ME) weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1966: "Rain of Stones Reported: It was reliably reported by several persons that a rain of stones fell from a clear blue sky on Carlin Street in the town of Chamberlain on August 17th." Although the supernatural pyrotechnics are handled with King's customary aplomb, it is the carefully drawn portrait of the little horrors of small towns, high schools, and adolescent sexuality that give this novel its power, and assures its place in the King canon. --Simon Leake
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Product Description
A modern classic, Carrie introduced a distinctive new voice in American fiction -- Stephen King. The story of misunderstood high school girl Carrie White, her extraordinary telekinetic powers, and her violent rampage of revenge, remains one of the most barrier-breaking and shocking novels of all time. Make a date with terror and live the nightmare that is...Carrie
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Customer Reviews
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Carrie
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-07-15
I've been one of Mr. King's "Constant Readers" for years. However, my reading of his tales began with Gerald's Game and, until this past year, I never read anything published before it.
I now realize how unfortunate that was! The past few months have allowed me to rediscover Stephen King in an entirely new light. I finished Carrie this evening from my Kindle. (I've been THRILLED about all the classic King works popping up reguarly, as of late, in Kindle format. KEEP THEM COMING AMAZON!) While it hasn't been my favorite of the older works (Hey I read It and The Stand during this team; tough acts to follow to say the least!) it was an utterly captivating read. The printed version is some 200 pages, and it did feel such. It's a must read, for... well... anyone.
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carrie review
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-05-22
Carrie
By Sai Hendrij
Stephen Kings Carrie is a book of the horror genre; it describes the isolation of teenage youth at an evanescent level. Basically often unseen by anyone who is not a teenager themselves or someone who can relate to that feeling. That's the main reason I recommend it to the teenage public more so than adults and much more so than the younger audiences.
To start, Carrie is a teenage girl who still has not reached puberty. Until now on her sixteenth year and with it has come a new type of power. The TK gene in her body is growing and is now taking affect and when her mother and the whole student body takes their cruel jokes a little too far Carrie will pull the strings in the biggest and worst, first, and last joke of her life
Overall review
All in all I thought that Carrie was an awesome book. Considering the fact that horror stories are the only ones I can really get into. I think Stephen King did a great job especially for such an old society he lived in. I feel that I should also commend on the news articles that switch time schemes from the past and present without being confusing about what was still happening. It was also a different kind of way of building suspense up to the pinnacle of the story.
This is a book you should definitely read.
Recommended for ages 15+
For alcohol sexual references and violence
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Great First Novel
Rating  (4)
Date: 2008-05-08
The first novel from Stephen King shows the beginnings of what most people have come to love in his works, but the book has lost some of its impact as the years have gone by. Still a really good read and considerably short compared to most King novels. Great place to start if you have never read Stephen King before (if there is anyone out there who hasn't)
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Suprising but good
Rating (4)
Date: 2008-04-12
Good story idea, especially for a guy to write. I was suprised at how the writting style is different from stephen's other works, this is more like a story and has articles from witnesses and other people added in. Very easy to read, I read it in about a 6 hour car ride.
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A Foreboding of Future History: The Consequences of High School Hell
Rating (4)
Date: 2008-03-02
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
In 1974 Stephen King an impoverished high school English teacher, so poor that he couldn't even afford a telephone; when CARRIE was accepted for publication by Doubleday he received the news via telegram. The book received mixed reviews and the hardback printing sold less than thirteen thousand copies--but when it went to paperback in 1975 CARRIE became a publisher's dream, selling over a million copies in the first year alone.
The core story of a person possessed of unexpected powers who takes revenge on tormenters was not new, but King gave it an unexpected and remarkably insightful twist: he stripped it of supernatural overtones and set his tale in the hot-house and hormone-driven world of high school, where a herd mentality leads students to bully and torment any student who seems outside the norm. And Carrie White is very much outside the norm: unattractive, not particularly smart, and the daughter of a highly neurotic and abusive mother whose religious hysteria has warped both Carrie and herself.
When a particularly nasty episode of taunting occurs during gym class, Carrie comes to the full attention of gym teacher Miss Desjardin, who punishes the other girls involved with a lecture and a series of after school phys-ed detentions. One of the students, Sue Snell, is both embarassed and ashamed of her participation in the incident and resolves to make it up to Carrie: she has her boyfriend, Tommy, take Carrie to the prom. Another student, Chris Hargensen, refuses detention and is barred from the prom--and decides to make use of Sue's kindly gesture to exact revenge: she creates a truly hideous prank designed to complete Carrie's humiliation for once and all.
What neither girl, nor any one else, knows is that Carrie has discovered she has the ability to move objects at will: she is telekinetic, a gift she herself has only recently discovered. When Chris' prank is indeed successful, Carrie's powers emerge full-force and she turns on her tormenters, both real and imagined, turning the prom into a holocaust and continuing on to lay waste to much of the town.
Although he has created a number of exceptionally well-written novels, with 'SALEM'S LOT perhaps the most obvious example, Stephen King is not a literary writer per se, and this early work has more than its share of awkwardnesses. But there is no denying its power: CARRIE has a direct and very raw power that remains chilling more than a quarter of century after it was first published: dark, furious, visceral. It is a fast and very compelling read, a novel you pick up and then do not set aside until, exhausted, you reach the final page.
It also taps into something that we now see on in our newspaper headlines with depressing regularity: a growing wave of school violence. Over the years there had been a number of attacks on public schools, with perhaps the most infamous being the 1927 Bath School bombing, but such incidents were extremely rare and usually involved a disgruntled adult as culprit... until the 1980s and 1990s, when they became and sadly remain shockingly commonplace, with the 1999 Columbine massacre simply one of the most notorious of recent memory.
King could not foresee the future, could not know that such real life horrors were in the offing--but, as he indicates in a forward to the current edition of the book, he well recalled the pack mentality of school children and their cruelty to any one they considered an outsider. It is also worth noting that he was himself a high school teacher at the time he wrote the novel, and he was doubtlessly aware of the viciousness of high school bullies from an adult standpoint as well. In creating CARRIE, he seems to have tapped into the underlying rage that would explode at Columbine, Redlake, and too many other schools to count.
It is not surprising, therefore, that CARRIE's dark tale of high school brutality and horrific revenge makes it a novel frequently banned from public school libraries. But this may actually be a mistake. Although the details of the story are the stuff of fantasy, CARRIE contains a warning: even a mouse will attack if it feels cornered, and where the hyper-intense emotions of adolescents are concerned, that attack can be horrific indeed. It is a lesson, sadly, that our teenagers have been very slow to learn.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
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