Some Notes on Carrie

I've been reading a lot of commentary regarding literary adaptations. Sometimes, its readers who feel like the new medium did not give a favorite book or franchise justice. Others, its critics doing the same or faulting the adaptation for being too much on-book and therefore uninteresting. A couple days ago, we finished the last few episodes of the new CARRIE series in one fell swoop and it was all that we imagined it should be, natural given Mike Flanagan's record of adapting things that somehow vary widely but also provide a beautiful encapsulation of the original. He did it most phenomenally with his HILL HOUSE adaptation, as well as with subsequent projects like FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER and THE MIDNIGHT CLUB, but also with original material like MIDNIGHT MASS, which, as my husband says, has to be the best Stephen King story not written by Stephen King.Flanagan's CARRIE seems to expand King's universe into the modern world, complete with new ways of traumatizing the characters…