I was probably fourteen or fifteen years old the fist time I read Carrie. It was the third book I'd ever read by Stephen King. The first was The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, followed by Different Season (I was obsessed with the movie starring River Phoenix and watched it regularly on the VHS my grandma had, at least once every weekend I spent at her house). If I remember correctly, someone gifted me this book (hindsight 20/20, and it was probably not the best book to gift a girl who was going through puberty and had her first menstrual period that summer — honestly, the joke writes itself). I thought it was a good book and that was the extent of my feeling towards it. I roughly remembered the plot, but I don't think I quite grasped how deep Carrie's revenge went until I reread it today. In certain aspects it reminds me of It. Not because of the plot, but because a whole town gets destroyed. In It, this is justified by the fact that the entity had corrupted the whole town, but why did Carrie decide to burn Chamberlain down? I think she was simply a hurt kid that snapped and decided to hurt people. She just poured all that pain and humiliation onto the whole town. It couldn't have stop with the destruction of the school. As I'm forming my thoughts while writing this review, another thing that reminds me of It is that, from the moment the fire started at the high school until the moment she died, Carrie's mind was connected to the whole town. She was the entity, and her thoughts were trickling down into the citizens' minds. I think that, amidst all the violence it was forced upon us readers, this aspect could have been easily overlooked, but it's something that really hit me. It was as if she had made the whole town her accomplice.
