Not to nitpick your review or ideas (thanks for posting them!) but this is not that unbelievable at all. Female stuff was not all that talked about back in the 70s. My mother and her friends all believed a host of things about how to not get pregnant after sex and even my own mother didn't realize she was even pregnant at 15 when her period stopped until somebody explained it to her. Things like a period were looked at way differently than now, it wasn't so much a right of passage but a "dirty" thing that a woman needed to take care of and hide. It wasn't unusual then for a girl to not even really understand why she was bleeding until it happened. Eventually a girl's mother or friends who had already started theirs or older sister would explain what was happening and what to do about it. Just a lot different world then.

Surprisingly, of all the King books I did read over the years Carrie was not one of them. For some reason I never got around to it, maybe it was because I knew of the movie and what happened. So, I can't speak much to it, but I think it was a different kind of writing and much of his works were/are terrifying in a sense because he is a master at playing with "what-ifs" that we all think of from time to time. I mean, Lovercraft is enjoyable but nobody really ever wonders if something like Cthulhu exists and could be living in his or her childhood town next door. But story after story of King's has an element of believability to it that can play on the darker side of our psyches. Everybody knows that one girl in school is "different" and gets picked on and sneered at, she is usually very Carrie-esque in that she is naive, maybe poorer and thus wears used clothes and hand me downs, maybe has a parent that disallows make-up and other forms of dressing up. What if she gets her day and could take out all the years of everybody's smirks, eye rolling and insults on those people in one moment with the only tool somebody like her could ever hope to have - psychic powers? All of his early works have an element like that. That is what I think makes him work so well, at least early on. His writing changed a lot after he 1) got off the drugs after Misery and 2) got hit by the drunk driver and almost died. I don't care for his writing after it changed and I haven't read anything he has put out in years. But, his stuff before the change is awesome,Salem's of scared the daylights out of me. What's funny is that I don't even remember why, I was only 16 at the time I read it but I remember not sleeping that night. Same goes with The Shining, another sleepless night. Misery was awesome, The Dead Zone was excellent, Thinner, The Bachman Books (again, a story about a school shooting years before they would actually begin occurring) and the list goes on - all very enjoyable books that play around with believable themes. Enjoy the reading!