Carrie’s Crazy Mother
Carrie White’s mother is crazy. Everybody knows that. But because it is crazy dressed in the respectability of religious zealotry, it somehow doesn’t seem as crazy as it should. And it should because:
“She had been able to feel, actually feel, the Devil's Power working in Carrie. It crawled all over you, lifting and pulling like evil, tickling little fingers.”
The Devil's Power
So what was this so-called Devil’s Power which Carrie’s crazy momma could actually feel? Well, for one thing, it is something that isn’t so much felt as seen:
“It made her eyes glow with a kind of witch's light. And sometimes, at the supper table the sugar bowl would whirl madly like a dervish…Sometimes she panted like a dog on a hot day.”
This Is Carrie?
The Devil’s Power manifests itself in bizarre behavior which may or may not actually be a manifestation of her crazy momma’s crazy. Tommy, Carrie’s unlikely date for her unlikely appearance at the prom frankly isn’t buying it:
“This is the girl they keep calling a monster…The girl who could be satisfied with a hamburger and a dime root beer after her only school dance so her momma wouldn't be worried.”
Chris and Billy
Chris Hargensen and Billy Nolan are one those high school couples that people always look at and wonder…why? How? And then come the tenth year reunion they’re married. Come the twentieth, they’re divorced, but still hook up. Just one of those chemical things. But even Billy—no Rhodes Scholar—already knows the score:
“Somehow it had all led to this, even the early part, and when it was done the glue that had held them together would be thin and might dissolve, leaving them to wonder how it could have been in the first place.”
Silence...Laughter...Hell
The “this” that “it” all led to is literally one single moment in time; a slow-motion five seconds feeling like a lifetime. A gag, a prank, sick revenge…nothing serious. Just another set of popular kids at school getting their kicks from beating up one last time on the losers. Before the laughter, before the silence, there is just a yank on a cord tied to a bucket of blood. And before the laughter has a chance to die, retributive justice—otherwise known as hell—is unleashed.
“They stared at each other in the dark, frozen by the actual act as thought never could have done. Her very breath turned to glass in her throat.
Then, inside, the laughter began.”
