Carrie

I often struggle with narratives where there is such overt, cruel, and public bullying happening over a long period of time. It speaks to such a large societal failure to deal with such instances that it beggars belief. 

I thought I would feel the same way about Carrie, but I don't. She and her family are so messed up that people don't know what to do about them. Sue and Tommy, for good reasons or not, actually make an attempt to help her. And when it all goes to hell it does so in such a way that it becomes hard to feel that much pity for Carrie in the end. 

It's a tense, fast, terrible story that never really tries to surprise you but always has you hooked in anyways. Super good read.

As a lifelong Stephen King fan, somehow I’ve never read Carrie. It’s one of those things where I’ve picked up all the plot points through cultural osmosis, I’ve seen the movie (the good one), I’ve talked about it with my friends as though I know about it. But I’ve never held the physical copy in my hands until last week.

I liked it. I don’t really have a ton to say about it. It was an extremely short read, and there were a lot of precursors to what would become eventual King hallmarks – overly religous fanatical whackjobs; bullies that were strangely too smart and/or too psychopathic to be believable; and entire towns being destroyed as a way to end the book like a Lovecraftian cleansing bolt of lightning. Happy to finally have read it.