Carrie is an odd book. Fitting, since Carrie is an odd girl.

It’s not her fault. She’s raised by a fringe evangelical mother who actually resembles a growing portion of the evangelical Christian crowd in modern day, which is horrifying given that this book came out 46 years ago.

In a way, it’s fitting that a girl who was denied her own agency repeatedly throughout the book, a girl who was abused at home by her family and at school by classmates, is also also mostly denied her own narrative. King has always been one to head hop. He’s a master of using towns as almost characters themselves — ‘Salem’s Lot gets whole chapters dedicated to the minutia of small towns and what happens to that minutia as insidious interlopers invade. But it’s fascinating how much of the story is actually told from outside perspectives — not just the excerpts from documents and court testimonies, but even the narrative passages are usually not from Carrie’s perspective.

We get Ms. Desjardin’s perspective of Carrie’s terrified reaction to getting her period in the shower.

We get the principal’s perspective of standing up for her by pushing back against a bully father that uses his power and influence to enable his bully daughter.

We get the warped and hateful perspective of said daughter, Chris Hargensen, whose fear of Carrie’s lack of conformity rolls off of her like she burrowed through pig shit.

We get the perspective of Mama White, crazed, self-righteous, selfish, and ego-maniacal. Her faith — like most if not all of the right-wing evangelical Christian movement — is not true faith. It’s a corrupted faith focusing on herself and her own desires, loaded with self-loathing and a desire to pass the buck of any moral failings or hardships to the active interference of the devil and God.

We get the conflicting and nuanced perspective of Sue Snell, who through a combination of guilt, self-loathing, and pity, tried to do something nice for Carrie, a girl who’d never experienced that sort of kindness before.

We also get the sweet, good-hearted perspective of poor Tommy, who did his best to make Carrie happy and might even have begun to fall for her in some way — perhaps not romantically, but if things had gone differently, I think they would have had a lifelong bond.

We also get, in the form of news articles, court testimonies, and excerpts from pop-academic textbooks, the perspective of the wider world — this world that turned its back on Carrie and anyone like her. This world that didn’t actually give a shit what kind of life Carrie lived until it began to impact their own lives.

When we do get Carrie’s perspective, it’s in fleeting glances, but damn near every time that I can think of, it’s when she begins exercising her abilities or asserting herself and taking control of her own life. I don’t know if it’s intentional, or even true, but it felt like the more confident Carrie became, the more the book took on her perspective. And then, once Chris and Billy’s plan to humiliate Carrie is enacted — it started with blood and laughter and ended with blood and laughter — Carrie is once again removed from the narrative…but this time she forces her way back in. If her classmates won’t try to understand her, she’ll make them understand by broadcasting her last dying scream of rage and embarrassment directly into their heads. The last we hear of Carrie is, notably, from Sue’s perspective as Carrie, frightened, hurt, and dying, opens them both up so that they each can truly view each other and themselves.

This is why I paired the movie with Frankenstein in my podcast — the creature that Henry Frankenstein* created didn’t ask to be born. He was born because of his creator’s hubris. Henry dabbled with things he wasn’t prepared to deal with, then tried to wash his hands of the responsibility. When that didn’t work because he’d created life and was now responsible for it, he chose to punish his creation for his own sins. He was not the victim of tragedy, he was simply made to endure the consequences of his own actions — to a point; it’s not Henry that’s left for dead in a burning windmill, after all.

In that same vein, Mama White views her child as a curse from God for her immoral behavior. It’s not clear exactly what kind of person she was before she got pregnant, but the implication, at least, is that perhaps she was a party girl? That’s the vibe I got from the way she kept focusing on the road houses and back seats of cars. But when she met the man who would become her husband, he who was a storm cloud of religious zealotry, fire, and brimstone, she adopted those views herself. Carrie, like Frankenstein’s creation, didn’t ask to be born. And Mama White, like Frankenstein himself, chose to hypocritically punish her daughter for her own sins.

When I originally read this book, I thought it was a fine, serviceable book. It was very short, with very little actual prose. The transcriptions and documents that made up roughly half of the book seemed less like an intentional story mechanism and more a way to pad the book to get it to novel length. Not bad, just not amazing. That was seven years ago, though, and this time, I was far more keenly attuned to Carrie’s struggles. This time, not only did I see the struggles of being a woman and a teenager, but I realized that Carrie’s portrayal felt very queer.

Carrie is shamed for perfectly natural, normal, human things. She’s shamed for any sexual feelings she might be developing. She’s shamed for the way her body is changing — a thing both natural and wholly out of her control. She’s shamed for wanting to fit in. She’s shamed for not acting appropriately deferential to her mother’s chaotic blame-shifting and self-justification.

Folks that grew up in extremely religious houses, especially queer folks, can identify with those struggles. It’s not a uniquely queer experience, but it is a common queer experience to endure that same sort of shame both within and without. There’s the feeling of isolation and exclusion as you realize you’re different from your peers. There’s the feeling of internal shame as you’re told by others through word and deed to deny a part of yourself, bury it down, and pretend to fit in. There’s the feeling of self hatred when you can’t just blend in with your peers. Often these messages come from your own family.

It’s a complicated push and pull to love an abusive parent. You love them. You hate what they do. You desperately want to please them. You know you never will because its not actually about you, but about them. But you still go on blaming yourself anyway because it is you, after all, who has to endure the pain and humiliation they inflict.

The first time I read the book, the documents felt like an unwelcome interruption of an ongoing story. Now when I read it, I see the hurt and heartache that these strangers caused Carrie, from her classmates’ childish cruelty, to her mother’s deflection of her own self-hatred, to the media’s politicization of her life. Carrie is not allowed to rest, even in death.

It’s a hell of a first novel, and ironically short given that King would go on to be known for extremely long epics. But one thing that King is good at is drilling straight to the heart of a situation and making the people feel real and alive, and that’s just as present here as it is throughout his career. It maybe doesn’t reach the heights of some of his later works, but there’s something remarkable about his first published novel being such an empathetic portrayal and such a comparatively small story, albeit with an explosive ending.

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*Note: in the 1932 film Frankenstein directed by James Whale, which is what I’m referring to, Frankenstein’s name is Henry Frankenstein, not Victor Frankenstein as it is in the novel. There is a character named Victor, but he’s a friend of Henry’s (and obviously has a crush on Henry’s fiancée, but you should listen to our podcast episode for more on that).