Carrie is, like, thee book about how we fail fat weird girls with abusive parents. Shaving all the edges off doesn't just make a worse story, it ignores the fundamentally ugly truth that we STILL FAIL girls who are too ugly or strange to be considered worthy of sympathy, leaving them to the whims of parents who may well hate them. I don't understand why Flanagan has become so pathologically incapable of letting horror stories just BE DARK, but it's really de-fanging a lot of stories for a lot of people! Hill House is not about the power of family it's about how lonely people will literally kill themselves to feel any sense of belonging, no matter how fleeting. Carrie is not about a mother and daughter doing their best, it's about the real and present hatred that ESPECIALLY ISOLATIONIST CHRISTIANS have for any young woman and especially young women who are fat, weird, and/especially or refuse to conform. Much like the society at large. I'm losing my mind