Carrie

Author: Stephen King
Genre: Horror
Publication date: April 1974
Book description: The story of misunderstood high school girl Carrie White, her extraordinary telekinetic powers, and her violent rampage of revenge.

Thoughts:
So to start off my dive into Stephen King's books, this is the first published book by him. Before this, he had only written short stories and he was only using his writing to get extra cash for his family.
This is the first time I read Carrie, interesting tip bit of information most readers encountered this story in their teenage life mainly due to the storyline Carrie is a highschooler. I will say that it is very difficult at this time to know nothing about Carrie even if you are not a reader. I have not seen the movie in an extremely long time. Maybe I saw portions of the original or first version of the movie. But I have an idea of the overall plot and some of the more iconic scenes in the story. With that said this is the first impression, I have reading this book for the first time. 

She is an ostracized girl, people in her school always pick on her and treat her horribly mainly because she was a good enough target and it had been going on for so long that it was part of her life.
Carrie does not have an easy life, she has a hard life school life. At home her mother who is a very extremist religious woman who is hard to get close to. The mother is not right in the head she had a fervent religious belief that clearly is not based on a specific religion but on her own interpretation based on past trauma when she was younger at hands of her husband. 

There are a few characters, Carrie, the mother, a few other highschoolers, mainly Sue a girl who used to participate in the bullying of Carrie but at the start of the book we see Sue start to understand what they are doing is wrong and try to make up for it and try to give Carrie a chance to be seen differently and get acceptance. 
We see people behave selfishly, people make mistakes, people get hurt. It is a very interesting book. It was way more detailed than the movies, it is mainly a sad story more than a horror we see Carrie be miserable for her whole life with a few minuscule moments of being ok, it really is impactful. There is no paranormal activity other than Carrie's powers. And the revenge, well is hard to make up your mind about it, after you see the way she was treated you kind of understand the rage and the reason that drove her to react the way she did and make the choices she does.
The ending was very appropriate for the story I feel, and the fact that in the end, it is like an investigation is taking place to try to uncover what really happened in the town that fateful night, where the authorities find it hard to believe what happened and try to get those few survivors to accept or give a different logical account of the events. The government cannot accept the true story based on what the survivors say: "A girl with telekinetic or some sort of ability caused the whole mess." It is found hard to believe and they do not accept that as fact. That gives it a very realistic feel.