Review: Carrie by Stephen King
What a joy--and a revelation--it was to re-read Carrie twenty years after I first picked it up as a slightly angry teenager. There's a reason why Stephen King is so well respected as a writer and his talent is obvious, despite this being his a novel and relatively short. Told from two perspectives--from books and articles written after the big event, and also in short blocks that form the story of what led up to the big event, we know that Carrie White, an unpopular high school student with supernatural powers destroyed not just the school, but an entire town on prom night. From there, King delves deeper and deeper, not only tells us what happened, but the crucial factor, the why. And it's entertaining stuff. It's difficult not to feel sympathy for Carrie, the misfit who has endured years of ostracism from her peers and suffered all kinds of abuse at home from her mother a supposed Christian fundamentalist. We also discover the bit players who made this tragedy oc...