Book vs. Adaptation | Carrie by Stephen King

Today I'm back with another Book vs. Adaptation post! So far I've done Sarah Waters' Fingersmith (here!), Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (here!), Neil Gaiman's Coraline (here!) and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (here and here!), and today I'm going to be talking about the 2013 adaptation of Stephen King's debut novel, Carrie.

I read Carrie for the first time last month - it was one of the books on my Halloween TBR - and you can check out my book review here. I'd never seen any adaptations of Carrie before, I wanted to read the book first, and once I'd read the book I decided to seek out the most recent adaptation.

Carrie was published in 1974, and is the novel that started Stephen King's impressive career. The most famous adaptation is the one that followed two years later, in 1976, starring Sissy Spacek, but when I sought out an adaptation I immediately gravitated towards Kimberly Peirce's 2013 adaptation, starring Chloë Grace Moretz as Carrie White and Julianne Moore as her mother, Margaret. Why? Purely because I really like Julianne Moore and Chloë Grace Moretz, neither of whom are strangers to book adaptations.

Chloë Grace Moretz is something of an adaptation veteran; she's been in Let Me In (2010), Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2011), Hugo (2011), and If I Stay, and she'll soon be hitting our cinemas in the starring role of J Blakeson's adaptation of The 5th Wave. She was even considered for the part of Katniss - speaking of The Hunger Games, Julianne Moore is well-known for playing the part of President Coin in the franchise, and she also played Clarice Starling in Ridley Scott's adaptation of Hannibal. Both of them are pretty great actresses, so I was eager to see their portrayals of Carrie and Margaret White.

My dad and I sat down and watched this on Halloween - what's Halloween without a fitting film after all? - and the two of us enjoyed it!

Honestly? I actually enjoyed this more than the book, though if you've seen my review you'll know I found the latter half of the book to be a bit of a shambles. This film is a lot more concise, and I loved the extra scenes that were added; in the book the story is interspersed with pieces of 'non-fiction' all about telekinesis, and I was wondering how that was going to be included in this film. Unlike the book, which is set in the '70s, this adaptation is set in our present day, meaning there's more technology; characters have iPhones and Carrie uses YouTube to research telekinesis, which I thought was a really nice touch. In the book she does practice her own gifts, but she doesn't seem to wonder if anyone else is like her which I thought was a little odd.

I think this adaptation is acted very well, too. Moretz is a heart-breaking and believable Carrie and, after her portrayal of Mia in If I Stay, has cemented herself in my list of brilliant young actors. Naturally Julianne Moore is a fantastic Margaret White, and I thought the other cast members were great; Ansel Elgort was a charming Tommy, which I wasn't expecting if I'm perfectly honest, and I loved Judy Greer as Miss Desjardin and Portia Doubleday as Chris Hargensen.

I know quite a lot of Carrie fans were disappointed with this adaptation because they felt that too much was cut, but I don't think this film lost anything; I love a good disaster sequence as much as anyone else, but there's only so much I can watch before a film starts to get boring and repetitive, and for me this adaptation is a perfect balance of the horrifically sublime and the tensely subdued.

Whether you've read the book or not I recommend this adaptation! It's a particularly good film for people out there who don't like horror films - I guarantee this won't scare you.

Review | Carrie by Stephen King

Carrie

by Stephen King

My Rating: 

Carrie White is no ordinary girl.

Carrie White has the gift of telekinesis.

To be invited to Prom Night by Tommy Ross is a dream come true for Carrie - the first step towards social acceptance by her high school colleagues.

But events will take a decidedly macabre turn on that horrifying and endless night as she is forced to exercise her terrible gift on the town that mocks and loathes her...

This is a very frustrating book.

Throughout October I'm trying to read as many spooky books as I can, so I figured now was as good a time as any to cross Carrie off my TBR. It's only a little book, after all, and it was King's debut novel, so I was interested in reading the book that began his impressive career.

It's no secret that I'm not a big Stephen King fan. I think the guy's pretty amazing - he's one of those authors who's really managed to make a career out of writing - but I don't get on with his writing style. The only book of his I'd previously read and enjoyed, and actually managed to finish, is Misery, but other than that he and I just don't gel. That being said, I'd been wanting to read Carrie for a while; Carrie is the prom night gone wrong kind of horror story. Not only that, but I was eager to read a story by King where the main character isn't a male writer. He has a lot of those.

I didn't go into it with high hopes, so you can imagine my surprise when I found myself enjoying it. The story is pretty straightforward - it's probably the most linear of King's novels not that I'm an expert - but I liked it. I loved the themes of religion with Carrie's insanely devout mother, and the connection between puberty and the realisation of Carrie's previously latent telekinetic powers. It's twisted, but I wanted to see Carrie's fellow students punished because, let's face it, they all treat her diabolically. By the time they've learned to fear her - respect her - it's far too late to make amends.

I really enjoyed the way the book was set out, too. It alternates between the actual story - we see Carrie, her mother, her teachers, the other pupils - and then several non-fiction books within the book that are talking about Prom Night. There's one book all about telekinesis which talks about Carrie's past and the genetic aspects to the ability, and another which is an autobiography of one of Carrie's classmates who survived. There were times when I found the 'non-fiction' more interesting than the story because I liked the way King tried to find a scientific explanation for telekinesis.

Then the second half of the novel happened, and everything I'd liked about the first half just unravelled. It's only about halfway through the book that Prom Night happens - it literally says: 'Part Two: Prom Night' - so I assumed that the majority of the latter half of the novel was going to be Carrie wreaking her revenge on the entire town, and in a way it was, but it didn't feel quite as tight as the first half. King wrote about a lot of the events in hindsight, writing about police reports and witness testimonies, and I thought the scene in which Carrie killed the people who'd pulled the final prank - coating her in pig's blood - was very weak, and not written all that clearly. I was hoping the rest of the book would be formatted like the first, with the odd bit of 'non-fiction' but mostly Carrie destroying the town and everybody in it. Instead, it was rather underwhelming.

I didn't dislike the book, but I didn't love it either which is a real shame because I think I could have if bits of it were a little neater or a little tighter or a little better. It's a story with a lot of potential, but, for me, that potential wasn't realised.

I did enjoy it, though, and I think it's a good read for this time of year. I'd like to check out the 2013 adaptation with Chloë Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore soon!