A STEPHEN KING CLASSIC AVAILABLE ON AUDIO FOR THE FIRST TIMEIn one way or another, everybody abused Carrie. Her fanatical mother forbade this sixteen-year-old misfit everything that was young and fun. She was teased and taunted by her classmates, misunderstood by her teachers, and given up as hopeless by almost everyone.
But Carrie had a secret: she possessed terrifying telekinetic powers that could make inanimate objects move, a lighted candle fall, or a door lock. Carrie could make all kinds of startling bizarre, and malevolent things happen. And so she did one night, when feeling scorned and humiliated.
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..and growing angrier and angrier...she became the vengeful demon who let the whole town feel her power.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 as if 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 it does on the screen. Carrie White, bullied by cruel teenagers 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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