Carrie White is no ordinary teenage girl. Between her ultra-conservative Christian mother and her school bullies, she’s never really had a chance to shine. When she gets invited to prom by one of the most popular boys in school, it seems like a dream come true. Of course, it absolutely is, and her tormentors have something brewing. But something dark sits within Carrie, and prom night is the perfect opportunity for it all to come to the surface.

Starting and ending in blood, Carrie is one of those books that let the world know they had a new King (pun intended) of horror. There’s a certain charm in how tentative Carrie is – the words and form of an author trying to make a bestseller, not quite sure of how far he can go.

In my edition, we have a foreword that goes into where King pulled the inspiration for Carrie from, and it’s quite clear that he’s always been a people watcher. She is drawn from two girls at his school when he was young, neither with happy endings to their real-life stories. He has an insight into the concrete jungle that is a schoolyard full of catty teenagers, and for a man who was in his 30s (at the time) it shows a rare insight.

Carrie provides a sad protagonist, and it’s worth noting that while some criticism attaches to her characterisation and the depiction of teenage girls, that’s how teenage girls are. I was one, once, and the absolute unmatched cruelty of your peers can be the worst kind of weapon. Carrie is not unrealistic, and her journey to some version of appreciating herself before it all goes down in flames is fascinating.

Carrie is genuinely a sweet girl making the absolute best of a bad situation. She tries her absolute best not to look the gift horse in the mouth when it comes to Tommy’s invitation to the prom, and she really is trying to make sure she uses her powers for good.

Her journey and experiences with her mother are terrifying, and I cannot even begin to imagine the level of shame that would come with such a home life. Carrie’s mother is a force to be reckoned with in her own right, trying to control something that cannot be controlled, and overreaching to the point that she dooms herself.

Her admission of how she enjoyed conceiving Carrie adds a lot to her character as well: forever atoning for something that she could not control nor should she feel guilty for. But that’s part of the point, really – the guilt that women, as a whole, feel and merely for existing.

Chris is a (perhaps underrated) villain as well. She is a young woman with immense power over her peers and boyfriend in a very different way to Carrie, and is even more insidious and threatening. She is nasty to the furthest possible degree, and lures the others into her nastiness with a wide-eyed, daddy’s girl approach. You can see the parental influence in her, but you can also see a web made of lies and tangle-eyed innocence. She is well-written, and, more importantly, realistic.

Tommy and Sue also make for a formidable pair. They are sweet in their naive attempt to make it all better following the scene in the shower room, and Tommy’s heart especially is in the right place. The clarity of Sue’s atonement and the way that she then writes, as an adult, about how she’s forever tied to a boy she loved in high school cuts deep. It’s clear that she wants to become a person outside of the incident, and yet she hasn’t been given that opportunity.

I think there’s also something to be said for the themes that get pulled out in this book. There are so many layers for what is, realistically, quite a short novel. There’s the concept of agency and how women end up becoming the subjects of their own derision as well as that of other girls, and how women are so willing to tear each other down.

The novel also reflects how insidious women can be in their approach to each other, and just how much they can play the long game. It leads to a genuine sense of dread because it is so realistic, and so utterly terrifying. The iconic scene with the pig’s blood has stayed in the social milieu for so long because it is an honest possibility. The ability of cruel women to hold grudges is renowned, and there’s a certain vehemence in how this book plays it out.

The beginning and the ending both being in blood also makes for a great touch. Women spend so much of their lives making themselves pretty, making themselves sterile, and Carrie doesn’t allow for that. It pulls out all the rot and copper-smelling regret and throws it all out on display. Realistically, King treats his female characters as human, which is what so many female characters in literature lack.

The newspaper clippings and entries that intersperse the book were definitely something innovative in a horror novel at the time, too. You see flashes of the early ‘and they would be dead within the chapter/hour/book’ that we get from King as a constant reader stamp, and the kind of inner monologue that gives a (very difficult to replicate) view into our characters’ minds.

While it’s not a perfect novel, Carrie is a good indicator of what King would become. It still holds a shuddering realism that I think some later books don’t capture quite as much. We still have Tabitha King, King’s wife, to thank for this one, of course. She’s the one who fished it out of the bin when Stephen wasn’t sure if it was quite good enough. What a different world we would have had if she’d left it there!