Carrie is intriguing from the start, it doesn't take long to get pulled into the plot. We have this teenage girl who's relentlessly bullied, seemingly for no reason, and you want to know: what's her deal, and why does everyone hate her? You know kind of early on, how the story ends. So rather than a mystery, it's more of a "how did we get from point A to point Z" type of read.

The way the plot is structured is pretty cool, it's kind of like an epistolary novel, but instead of just letters, it has fictional news clippings and excerpts from books within the Carrie universe.

You get to experience things through the characters' perspectives, as well as retrospectively, through the fictional news clippings, book excerpts, and interviews of some of the characters. There's also Carrie's inner monologue, which was creatively woven throughout the story, that was my favorite element to the whole book! 

The build up to the final act is great. But then you get to the final act, and all that tension just fizzles out. It drags on and on. That is where the book fails me, I actually prefer the ending in the movie (1976 version), while I prefer everything else in the book, leading up to the end. There's more character development and background context, though it's still a quite short and fast paced book which I appreciate.

This sort of reads more like a crime thriller, with a sci-fi twist. I did know going into it that this was King's first novel and one of his less scary ones, so I'm not bothered by that.

Male-gaze-ickiness aside, this is mostly an enjoyable read, I would recommend it to those of you who like fictional crime stories and elements of sci-fi, or anyone who wants to pick up a King book but doesn't want to go for one of the scarier or lengthier ones. This is more sad than scary.

I will probably continue to read books by SK but I'm not in a rush to move on to the next.