Has Maine ever excelled at developing great sports teams on the high school and college levels?
Why have I never heard of Maine in association with sports?
Maine, known only for Stephen King, Bangor resident, so popular with readers they'll buy millions of copies of his worst novels, millions of his best. His books cover millions of square yards of space on bookshelves worldwide. The Bangor Public Library has an entire room, maybe, dedicated to his work. One of his childhood bikes, behind glass, signed by the rider, can be viewed there. Life-sized photographs of King from infancy to the near present line the round chamber used originally by Free and Accepted Masons and Revolutionary War plotters.
Everything he writes takes place in his backyard, Maine or New Hampshire. Dolores Claiborne even has a map of a 1963 total eclipse across parts of Maine.
Maine.
Is King under a spell? Must he keep to Maine and environs in his work? One can counter that Misery and The Shining take place in Colorado. It's not an absolute rule, people. He can go outside his fictionalized Maine, yet he, or some daemon, chooses to ground him in his beloved state of trembling and fears realized by his more unfortunate characters.
Awkward tormented Carrie, in the 1974 novel, is a sixteen year old big-boned girl with bad acne (unlike 26 year old slender corn stalk Sissy Spacek in the 1976 movie). Carrietta White, cursed to be brought up by a woman with crazily prudish hyper-Christian ideas, has her menarche in the girls' shower. Classmates guffaw, as the cruel bitch component of any given high school population will do. Carrie doesn't understand what's happening, her mother never clued her in. Blood flows from Carrie's sin hole penalty for Man's Fall.
Naked girls surround her, jeering and cackling, girls in the know about periods. Carrie absorbs absolute adolescent humiliation, converts it naturally, or supernaturally, to telekinetic rage.
What a Prom to remember!
Go Carrie!
Her mind has no OFF button. Standing on stage, covered in the blood of their practical joke, led to believe she really had finally aced the popularity contest that is high school--well, no more!
Boys hurled, sprains and breaks, girls smashed into each other, some twisting ankles in high heels.
Julie McClintock and Terri Ho, bang heads!
Bobbie Duncan and Gina Van Styles, rip each other's faces off with your nails!
Richie I'm So Handsome Hayes, jab your face with a fork!
Holly Simms, gluttonize yourself on finger sandwiches and chips! Gorge! Gorge, you darn bicuspid!
One boy, not just any boy, has electric cable wrapped around his constricting throat; Carrie jerks her
head, mouth tight, eyes showing where the metaphorical arrow will go. At the rafters, he chokes, breath cut, legs wagging about, kicking, then Carrietta White drops Mr. Popular, Todd Murker, to the gleaming wooden floor.
Unraveling the cord, she shouts, "Now do you know who I am, Todd!?"
She launches the cord after one of her shower tormentors, Chris Hargensen.
Chris goes down hard, screaming, cord tightening at her ankles, pulled towards Carrie whose hand rises in a squeezing gesture. Chris's ribs break, now her ankles.
Carrie doesn't like this girl!
Carrie levitates the punchbowl across the room. Pink multiple fruit juices plus lemonade plus vodka and gin from students' flasks dump onto Chris's pink dress. In severest pain, Chris croaks a pleading wail at her tormentor.
"You want to be my friend?" Carrie asks.
"Yes! Carrie please?"
"Get real, bicuspid!"
Carrie stomps her combat boot on Chris's face. Nose broken, looks marred, whimpers. Carrie enjoys her power. Carrie snaps her fingers, breaks Chris Hargensen's neck.
Versatile Carrietta. The Defense Department could've used you against Southeast Asia.
Who or what can contain this powerful weapon? This Maine teenager who's had it up to here, plus she can't control her desire to use telekinesis. How would you handle it? Consider, though, if Samantha Stevens from Bewitched, with either Darren, had spent her childhood annihilating civilizations? Why? Because it was fun, what's the harm? Similarly, Carrie is having the best time of her life. Somebody with no power has power.
Bravo Stephen King. You attempted to depict menstruation and shame and a biblical upbringing that fails, tried with some success to embody the reality of women's lives, the cycle they have but we men do not.
Carrie crashes a spotlight onto feathered hair, a glancing blow, but hard enough for a bad headache for "The First Down Maker, Number 44," fullback Andy Pesch.
He asked Carrie out the second week of the school year, changing her life's focus. She peered at her face in a small compact mirror she found in the girls' locker room. She managed to convince herself after a few days, close to her date, that Andy must've found something appealing in her appearance.
Andy knows best.
Andy knows beauty when he sees it.
Andy dated Wanda Peters--she's beautiful so...
The night of, she applied zit cream and a little powder shaken out from her mother's toiletries table.
Pleaded to her mother the necessity of a study session at the public library, French test on Monday, home by ten, promise.
In a blue sweater and long black skirt down to her ankles, Carrie waited with her math book and notebook, a number two sharpened pencil jammed through the metal spiral.
Andy Pesch, suave, short, but confident like the top kid in camp.
A dreamboat, just my size, Carrie thought, pacing, trying not to stomp in her combat boots, remembering THE DAY when Andy Pesch
shoulder-leaned against a locker two away from hers.
"How's it goin, doll?"
"Um, okay."
"Want to cruise with me Friday night?"
"Okay."
Terrified and thrilled, Carrie reminded herself often in the next three days to conceal her happiness and expectations of romance with a gorgeous boy with muscles, from her mother. This most momentous of events in her recent life, the first date, would be played out, she believed, without parental, or paternal God of punishments, spying on and interfering with her love life. She felt independence for the first time.
My love life! How nice that sounds! Come on, Andy! I love you, Andy! From afar, but now up close, soon, come on! Andy, come on! Where are you? You said you have a fast car.
She waited, her mind conjured every scenario she could think of.
Why was Andy late?
Did he have a breakdown, the car, I mean? Is he nervous about our date? Maybe he's not experienced, maybe the stories are just stories? Andy, so innocent. I hope he's not dead. Andy, I'll die if you're dead!
Carrie's thoughts became so saturated with Andy she decided to let him touch her breasts, and tonight.
Tonight, oh, it's going to be great! No one's ever felt like this!
Her watch showed 9:34. Two and a half hours on nine or ten squares of pavement except when she walked in the gutter.
Cars passed throughout with breaks in traffic. A Buick station wagon filled with girls, some of them from the shower incident, yelled and shouted.
"Hey Red!"
"Been to the drugstore lately?"
Carrie's pencil zwipped itself from the spiral, rocketing after the station wagon, to clatter on the street fifty feet ahead.
It was the fifth time something weird like this had happened. She went home, cursing herself for not just going to the library to study. More cursing when she saw the B written in red felt tip on her test.
Andy Pesch, woozy from the spotlight's impact, tries to sit up. Carrie's having none of that.
More for you, Andy!
Carrie breaks his left femur. Andy screams, no more haze in the brain. Carrie flutters her fingers, Andy Pesch's gut splits open in a gruesome smile with spilling intestines. Larry Dringle, celebrated halfback, Number 39, stealer of thirty-seven cherries, slips on his friend Andy's guts, landing on his broken leg, right side submerged in a fallen athlete's guts, a pratfall amusing Carrie no end.
What a time to not have a camera!
Carrie spins blubbering Larry Dringle, pulls him towards her on the floor, makes him rise like Nosferatu from his coffin, turns him fast until he falls, dizzy, grunting and groaning, then yelping as Carrie heats his brain and shoots tingling painful jabs at his groin. His screams for the moment rise above all others.
Across the gymnasium, a group of students set things, and each other, on fire with their lighters. Deb Giles, one of the shower bicuspids, runs in high heels, screaming, long lustrous red hair flaming.
Carrie yanks open Larry's mouth, fires a microphone into it, jammed far enough back it's stuck, but the gymnasium's sound system projects a resonant ambiance of rumbling breathy grunts.
Carrie hurls Larry.
Son of a rich bicuspid who never once suffered in this school, until tonight!
She lifts Larry six feet and down into prone, dead Andy. Squirming in Andy's guts, Larry's screams from speakers drench all other sounds in the big bloody room. He rises with difficulty from slippery smelly entrails and trots toward the red EXIT, his last act of free will.
With her eyeballs, Carrie pulls him, walking backwards, to the free throw line. She drops him to lie on his back, then floats from the stage, hovering above him, the microphone projecting from his face a sight gag gone on too long, especially from Larry's point of view.
Carrie lowers herself onto him, grinds it out to discover for herself if Mother's right that's it a bad thing.
Losing her virginity (so she considers it), coming to orgasm, Carrie multi-tasks throughout, maintaining a high level of carnage among the decimated students. Cops outside whoosh into the air and land a mile or two away, people are killed by their silverware, throughout the country people lift into the air, hundreds and even thousands of feet, are dropped, broken to bits; all of this during the last two minutes of Carrie's first dry hump.
In the gym she sees everyone dead.
Except Norma Watson, one of the shower girls.
"Hey Norma! What's red and squatting behind a table hoping I won't see her?"
"What Carrie? Will you please let me--"
"You!"
Norma pops into red mist and liquefied guts, skeleton thudding to a polished wooden floor needing a serious cleaning.
Carrie, the most powerful being in a nation with only 150 people left, the rest telekinetically eliminated in numerous ways bewildering to victims who know nothing of the planet wide reach of an abused girl's anger, casually mind-poofing four billion people on a ruined Prom Night.
Her mother, however, survives.
Vic Neptune
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