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Carrie Mass Market Paperback – August 30, 2011
| Stephen King (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Carrie White may be picked on by her classmates, but she has a gift. She can move things with her mind. Doors lock. Candles fall. This is her power and her problem. Then, an act of kindness, as spontaneous as the vicious taunts of her classmates, offers Carrie a chance to be a normal...until an unexpected cruelty turns her gift into a weapon of horror and destruction that no one will ever forget.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAnchor
- Publication dateAugust 30, 2011
- Dimensions4.16 x 0.76 x 6.85 inches
- ISBN-100307743667
- ISBN-13978-0307743664
- Lexile measure850L
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“A master storyteller.” —The Los Angeles Times
“Guaranteed to chill you.” —The New York Times
“Gory and horrifying.... You can't put it down.” —Chicago Tribune
“[The] most wonderfully gruesome man on the planet.” —USA Today
“Eerie and haunting—sheer terror!” —Publishers Weekly
“Shivering, shuddery, macabre evil!” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Stephen King has built a literary genre of putting ordinary people in the most terrifying situations. . . . he’s the author who can always make the improbable so scary you'll feel compelled to check the locks on the front door.” —The Boston Globe
“Peerless imagination.” —The Observer (London)
About the Author
www.stephenking.com
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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. The stones fell principally on the home of Mrs. Margaret White, damaging the roof extensively and ruining two gutters and a downspout valued at approximately $25. Mrs. White, a widow, lives with her three-year-old daughter, Carietta.
Mrs. White could not be reached for comment.
Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow. On the surface, all the girls in the shower room were shocked, thrilled, ashamed, or simply glad that the White bitch had taken it in the mouth again. Some of them might also have claimed surprise, but of course their claim was untrue. Carrie had been going to school with some of them since the first grade, and this had been building since that time, building slowly and immutably, in accordance with all the laws that govern human nature, building with all the steadiness of a chain reaction approaching critical mass.
What none of them knew, of course, was that Carrie White was telekinetic.
Graffiti scratched on a desk of the Barker Street Grammar School in Chamberlain:
Carrie White eats shit.
The locker room was filled with shouts, echoes, and the subterranean sound of showers splashing on tile. The girls had been playing volleyball in Period One, and their morning sweat was light and eager.
Girls stretched and writhed under the hot water, squalling, flicking water, squirting white bars of soap from hand to hand. Carrie stood among them stolidly, a frog among swans. She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks, her wet hair completely without color. It rested against her face with dispirited sogginess and she simply stood, head slightly bent, letting the water splat against her fl esh and roll off. She looked the part of the sacrificial goat, the constant butt, believer in left-handed monkey wrenches, perpetual foul-up, and she was. She wished forlornly and constantly that Ewen High had individual—and thus private— showers, like the high schools at Westover or Lewiston. They stared. They always stared.
Showers turning off one by one, girls stepping out, removing pastel bathing caps, toweling, spraying deodorant, checking the clock over the door. Bras were hooked, underpants stepped into. Steam hung in the air; the place might have been an Egyptian bathhouse except for the constant rumble of the Jacuzzi whirlpool in the corner. Calls and catcalls rebounded with all the snap and flicker of billiard balls after a hard break.
“—so Tommy said he hated it on me and I—”
“—I’m going with my sister and her husband. He picks his nose but so does she, so they’re very—”
“—shower after school and—”
“—too cheap to spend a goddam penny so Cindi and I—”
Miss Desjardin, their slim, nonbreasted gym teacher, stepped in, craned her neck around briefly, and slapped her hands together once, smartly. “What are you waiting for, Carrie? Doom? Bell in five minutes.” Her shorts were blinding white, her legs not too curved but striking in their unobtrusive muscularity. A silver whistle, won in college archery competition, hung around her neck.
The girls giggled and Carrie looked up, her eyes slow and dazed from the heat and the steady, pounding roar of the water. “Ohuh?”
It was a strangely froggy sound, grotesquely apt, and the girls giggled again. Sue Snell had whipped a towel from her hair with the speed of a magician embarking on a wondrous feat and began to comb rapidly. Miss Desjardin made an irritated cranking gesture at Carrie and stepped out.
Carrie turned off the shower. It died in a drip and a gurgle.
It wasn’t until she stepped out that they all saw the blood running down her leg.
From The Shadow Exploded: Documented Facts and Specific Conclusions Derived from the Case of Carietta White, by David R. Congress (Tulane University Press: 1981), p. 34:
It can hardly be disputed that failure to note specific instances of telekinesis during the White girl’s earlier years must be attributed to the conclusion offered by White and Stearns in their paper Telekinesis: A Wild Talent Revisited—that the ability to move objects by effort of the will alone comes to the fore only in moments of extreme personal stress. The talent is well hidden indeed; how else could it have remained submerged for centuries with only the tip of the iceberg showing above a sea of quackery?
We have only skimpy hearsay evidence upon which to lay our foundation in this case, but even this is enough to indicate that a “TK” potential of immense magnitude existed within Carrie White. The great tragedy is that we are now all Monday-morning quarterbacks . . .
“Per-iod!”
The catcall came first from Chris Hargensen. It struck the tiled walls, rebounded, and struck again. Sue Snell gasped laughter from her nose and felt an odd, vexing mixture of hate, revulsion, exasperation, and pity. She just looked so dumb, standing there, not knowing what was going on. God, you’d think she never—
“PER-iod!”
It was becoming a chant, an incantation. Someone in the background (perhaps Hargensen again, Sue couldn’t tell in the jungle of echoes) was yelling, “Plug it up!” with hoarse, uninhibited abandon.
“PER-iod, PER-iod, PER-iod!”
Carrie stood dumbly in the center of a forming circle, water rolling from her skin in beads. She stood like a patient ox, aware that the joke was on her (as always), dumbly embarrassed but unsurprised.
Sue felt welling disgust as the first dark drops of menstrual blood struck the tile in dime-sized drops. “For God’s sake, Carrie, you got your period!” she cried. “Clean yourself up!”
“Ohuh?”
She looked around bovinely. Her hair stuck to her cheeks in a curving helmet shape. There was a cluster of acne on one shoulder. At sixteen, the elusive stamp of hurt was already marked clearly in her eyes.
“She thinks they’re for lipstick!” Ruth Gogan suddenly shouted with cryptic glee, and then burst into a shriek of laughter. Sue remembered the comment later and fitted it into a general picture, but now it was only another senseless sound in the confusion. Sixteen? She was thinking. She must know what’s happening, she—
More droplets of blood. Carrie still blinked around at her classmates in slow bewilderment.
Helen Shyres turned around and made mock throwing-up gestures.
“You’re bleeding!” Sue yelled suddenly, furiously. “You’re bleeding, you big dumb pudding!”
Carrie looked down at herself.
She shrieked.
The sound was very loud in the humid locker room.
A tampon suddenly struck her in the chest and fell with a plop at her feet. A red flower stained the absorbent cotton and spread.
Then the laughter, disgusted, contemptuous, horrified, seemed to rise and bloom into something jagged and ugly, and the girls were bombarding her with tampons and sanitary napkins, some from purses, some from the broken dispenser on the wall. They flew like snow and the chant became: “Plug it up, plug it up, plug it up, plug it—”
Sue was throwing them too, throwing and chanting with the rest, not really sure what she was doing—a charm had occurred to her mind and it glowed there like neon: There’s no harm in it really no harm in it really no harm— It was still flashing and glowing, reassuringly, when Carrie suddenly began to howl and back away, flailing her arms and grunting and gobbling.
The girls stopped, realizing that fission and explosion had finally been reached. It was at this point, when looking back, that some of them would claim surprise. Yet there had been all these years, all these years of let’s short-sheet Carrie’s bed at Christian Youth Camp and I found this love letter from Carrie to Flash Bobby Pickett let’s copy it and pass it around and hide her underpants somewhere and put this snake in her shoe and duck her King again, duck her again; Carrie tagging along stubbornly on biking trips, known one year as pudd’n and the next year as truck-face, always smelling sweaty, not able to catch up; catching poison ivy from urinating in the bushes and everyone finding out (hey, scratch-ass, your bum itch?); Billy Preston putting peanut butter in her hair that time she fell asleep in study hall; the pinches, the legs outstretched in school aisles to trip her up, the books knocked from her desk, the obscene postcard tucked into her purse; Carrie at the church picnic and kneeling down clumsily to pray and the seam of her old madras skirt splitting along the zipper like the sound of a huge wind-breakage; Carrie always missing the ball, even in kickball, falling on her face in Modern Dance during their sophomore year and chipping a tooth, running into the net during volleyball; wearing stockings that were always run, running, or about to run, always showing sweat stains under the arms of her blouses; even the time Chris Hargensen called up after school from the Kelly Fruit Company downtown and asked her if she knew that pig poop was spelled C- A- R- R- I- E: Suddenly all this and the critical mass was reached. The ultimate shit-on, gross-out, put-down, long searched for, was found. Fission.
She backed away, howling in the new silence, fat forearms crossing her face, a tampon stuck in the middle of her pubic hair.
The girls watched her, their eyes shining solemnly.
Carrie backed into the side of one of the four large shower compartments and slowly collapsed into a sitting position. Slow, helpless groans jerked out of her. Her eyes rolled with wet whiteness, like the eyes of a hog in the slaughtering pen.
Sue said slowly, hesitantly: “I think this must be the first time she ever— ”
That was when the door pumped open with a flat and hurried bang and Miss Desjardin burst in to see what the matter was.
From The Shadow Exploded (p. 41):
Both medical and psychological writers on the subject are in agreement that Carrie White’s exceptionally late and traumatic commencement of the menstrual cycle might well have provided the trigger for her latent talent.
It seems incredible that, as late as 1979, Carrie knew nothing of the mature woman’s monthly cycle. It is nearly as incredible to believe that the girl’s mother would permit her daughter to reach the age of nearly seventeen without consulting a gynecologist concerning the daughter’s failure to menstruate.
Yet the facts are incontrovertible. When Carrie White realized she was bleeding from the vaginal opening, she had no idea of what was taking place. She was innocent of the entire concept of menstruation.
One of her surviving classmates, Ruth Gogan, tells of entering the girls’ locker room at Ewen High School the year before the events we are concerned with and seeing Carrie using a tampon to blot her lipstick with. At that time Miss Gogan said: “What the hell are you up to?” Miss White replied: “Isn’t this right?” Miss Gogan then replied: “Sure. Sure it is.” Ruth Gogan let a number of her girl friends in on this (she later told this interviewer she thought it was “sorta cute”), and if anyone tried in the future to inform Carrie of the true purpose of what she was using to make up with, she apparently dismissed the explanation as an attempt to pull her leg. This was a facet of her life that she had become exceedingly wary of. . . .
When the girls were gone to their Period Two classes and the bell had been silenced (several of them had slipped quietly out the back door before Miss Desjardin could begin to take names), Miss Desjardin employed the standard tactic for hysterics: She slapped Carrie smartly across the face. She hardly would have admitted the pleasure the act gave her, and she certainly would have denied that she regarded Carrie as a fat, whiny bag of lard. A first-year teacher, she still believed that she thought all children were good.
Carrie looked up at her dumbly, face still contorted and working. “ M- M- Miss D- D- Des- D—”
“Get up,” Miss Desjardin said dispassionately.
“Get up and tend to yourself.”
“I’m bleeding to death!” Carrie screamed, and one blind, searching hand came up and clutched Miss Desjardin’s white shorts. It left a bloody
handprint.
“I . . . you . . .” The gym teacher’s face contorted into a pucker of disgust, and she suddenly hurled Carrie, stumbling, to her feet. “Get over there!”
Carrie stood swaying between the showers and the wall with its dime sanitary-napkin dispenser, slumped over, breasts pointing at the floor, her arms dangling limply. She looked like an ape. Her eyes were shiny and blank.
“Now,” Miss Desjardin said with hissing, deadly emphasis, “you take one of those napkins out . . . no, never mind the coin slot, it’s broken anyway . . . take one and . . . damn it, will you do it! You act as if you never had a period before.”
“Period?” Carrie said.
Her expression of complete unbelief was too genuine, too full of dumb and hopeless horror, to be ignored or denied. A terrible and black foreknowledge grew in Rita Desjardin’s mind. It was incredible, could not be. She herself had begun menstruation shortly after her eleventh birthday and had gone to the head of the stairs to yell down excitedly: “Hey, Mum, I’m on the rag!”
“Carrie?” she said now. She advanced toward the girl. “Carrie?”
Carrie flinched away. At the same instant, a rack of softball bats in the corner fell over with a large, echoing bang. They rolled every which way, making Desjardin jump.
“Carrie, is this your first period?”
But now that the thought had been admitted, she hardly had to ask. The blood was dark and flowing with terrible heaviness. Both of Carrie’s legs were smeared and splattered with it, as though she had waded through a river of blood.
“It hurts,” Carrie groaned. “My stomach . . .”
“That passes,” Miss Desjardin said. Pity and self-shame met in her and mixed uneasily. “You have to . . . uh, stop the flow of blood. You—”
There was a bright flash overhead, followed by a flashgun-like pop as a lightbulb sizzled and went out. Miss Desjardin cried out with surprise, and it occurred to her
(the whole damn place is falling in)
that this kind of thing always seemed to happen around Carrie when she was upset, as if bad luck dogged her every step. The thought was gone almost as quickly as it had come. She took one of the sanitary napkins from the broken dispenser and unwrapped it.
“Look,” she said. “Like this—”
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Product details
- Publisher : Anchor; 1st edition (August 30, 2011)
- Language : English
- Mass Market Paperback : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0307743667
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307743664
- Lexile measure : 850L
- Item Weight : 5.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.16 x 0.76 x 6.85 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #5,916 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #40 in Ghost Fiction
- #52 in Occult Fiction
- #183 in Supernatural Thrillers (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His first crime thriller featuring Bill Hodges, MR MERCEDES, won the Edgar Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Both MR MERCEDES and END OF WATCH received the Goodreads Choice Award for the Best Mystery and Thriller of 2014 and 2016 respectively.
King co-wrote the bestselling novel Sleeping Beauties with his son Owen King, and many of King's books have been turned into celebrated films and television series including The Shawshank Redemption, Gerald's Game and It.
King was the recipient of America's prestigious 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters. In 2007 he also won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife Tabitha King in Maine.
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviewed in the United States on August 29, 2021
Top reviews from the United States
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There's a back-and-forth with the books and studies about telekinesis and the prom-night horror. This was written in the days before the internet and cable TV pundits, who would have beaten the dead horse of an incident like this for all its worth and then some--if it were to happen in 2016. Oh, and cyberbullying! Can you imagine how the kids at school would have made Carrie's life hell on Facebook?
A must-read and the ultimate revenge tale for anyone who's ever been picked last in gym class, given a wedgie, been the butt of a cruel and horrifying group joke, or just tormented period (ugh, no pun intended). It is quite heartbreaking every time when Carrie's world gets better for a couple of hours and then she has the rug yanked from under her once again. You want there to be a way out for her -- just like you want the coyote to kill and eat the damned roadrunner at least once -- but you know it's never going to happen.
The plot concerns Carrie White. Her mother is a crazy religious kook who torments Carrie and hates women and sex. Carrie begins to menstruate in a high school girls locker rom where she is taunted by her cruel classmates. Revenge is dealt in spades when Carrie brings down the house during her Senior Prom killing her tormenters and prom attenders. The story does have resonance with the revenge meted out by the blinded and enraged Samson a judge of Israel who is imprisoned by the enemies of Israel.
The King novel is never forgotten once read. A harbinger of all the great King novels which were to come from the prolific pen of an American genius.
“Carrie” focuses on a teenager, Carrie White, who lives alone with her mother, a religious zealot with a penchant for episodic, psychotic rants. She punishes Carrie, for instance, for having her period by locking her in a cupboard. She also grounds her repeatedly for committing offenses, however minor, against God. On top of that, her classmates in gym class taunt her in the shower when she starts menstruating by throwing tampons and napkins at her. Carrie is an outcast both at home and at school.
She finds, however, that she has a unique gift: the power of telekinesis. She can move things, make things happen with her mind alone. It’s an ability that could theoretically serve to her benefit. But it ultimately turns out to be more of a curse.
Carrie’s gym teacher, Miss Desjardin, tries to stop the bullying. After the shower incident, she scolds the girls and then sentences them to detention for a week. The reader can see early on that the incessant attacks on Carrie are destined to lead to catastrophe. Only Carrie’s classmate, Sue Snell, appears to experience any degree of remorse. She tries to make it all up to her by urging her boyfriend, Tommy Ross, to take her to the prom. Sue would stay home and let Carrie enjoy herself for once.
And then it happens. Sue’s attempt to bring a sense of normalcy into Carrie’s life backfires when Chris Hargensen, Carrie’s chief tormenter, engineers a practical joke. She has her boyfriend, Billy Nolan, along with some buddies of his to fill a couple of buckets with pig blood. At the prom, the smiling Carrie is surprised when Chris spills the blood over her, drenching her clothes – and igniting a torrent of fires, explosions and carnage, thanks to her telekinetic powers. Soon, the school and much of this small town is ablaze.
The book is a powerful indictment of school buying. Children can be so cruel – that becomes evident throughout the book. The message resonates even today, as authorities try to put a stop to cyberbullying. This is really a must-read for all age groups.
Top reviews from other countries
I'm a massive fan of Stephen King,pretty much read all his books,am in the process of 're-reading them all in order.
This his first novel is a great read,love the way he incorporates graffiti,manuscripts and interviews into the story,you can't help but feel so sorry for Carrie as that is Kings strength,his character building,I've had people tell me they can't get on with Kings books because there is too much character building,which is insane as you wouldn't get anything out of the books if you didn't have a vested interest in the characters,nobody does it better than King in my book.
So I highly recommend this book,read this and you will want to read everything else he has written.
This is only my second Stephen King’s book ever read and I really enjoyed it!
The plot and the narrative are highly compelling, shifting from newspapers articles and witnesses’ statements to characters POVs, catapulting the reader entirely in Carrie’s world and the events surrounding Prom’s night.
Some of the references used by SK in this book , have been used as well in The Institute (which was the book that introduces me to this genius of an author), but in a completely new and innovative way. I was surprised and pleased to finally discover why the author is referring to Samson in a couple of his novel, and this is when I came to realisation that SK is a brilliant genius!
I can’t wait now to dive into Salem’s lot!
It was shorter than I expected (having read many of King's other books) and whilst good, I can tell it was an early book.
Written from varying points of view during the build up, after and during the events of 'prom night'. King uses eye witnesses and media articles to tell the story of Carrie, a girl from an abusive background who has telekinetic powers and who is cruelly bullied by her peers at high school.
It's unputdownable from the beginning. I find it ironic that Stephen King screwed his first chapter up and binned it (to be rescued by his wife) thinking it no good when in actual fact he had combined some of the most traumatic events that could happen to a teenage girl.
The absolute horror of having to be naked in a communal shower with a group of your peers who you know hate you; the even worse horror of starting your first period in front of said peers...never mind not even knowing what a period is!!
****SPOILER ALERT ****
Mrs White's death is more violent in the original film version and whilst that would also have worked in the book, I feel Carrie still loved her mother however appalling she was (I cringed every time the expression 'dirty pillows' was used) and it seemed more in character that she provided a quieter, more controlled death for her.
I found the shifting mediums and perspectives clever rather than jarring, although others may disagree. What I found most jarring was King's depiction of menstruation; never in my entire life have I heard of a female gushing blood from that area unless it's actually a medical emergency or a miscarriage. I understand that the scene was meant to stand out but I do wonder if King actually spoke with any females before writing it. That said, I found the novel as a whole brought the tension levels up well and addressed topics like bullying and religious indoctrination well. The academic texts throughout bring a layer of realism to the novel and it certainly drew me in.
For a debut novel this is undeniably strong. It attacks taboo issues head on and refuses to flinch at unpleasant realities and utter carnage.
One thing I will say about Carrie is that it really does excel in showing the cruelty of school kids. That is something that he definitely got right.
I plan to read more of King’s novels to see if this was just a one off.
Carrie by Stephen King is available now.













