Firestarter (1980)

With the publication of Firestarter, it was probably getting hard to ignore that Stephen King was settling in to a pattern, writing about special people, often of a youthful age, that are not understood by the population around them. In fact, especially in the case of the younger ones, these special people do not fully understand themselves. Quickly reviewing his first six books (Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, and the featured book of this post), this applies to all of the books except 'Salem's Lot. Additionally this gives some more justification to "the importance of being Bachman", as those books don't follow this pattern, giving King a chance to flex a different literary voice. Also, I'm leaving out Night Shift because it's not a novel and covers a wide spread of King's early literary career.

Now writing about the same subject repeatedly isn't a bad thing, keeping in mind auteur theory and all that, but in the case of Firestarter there wasn't quite the thrill that King delivered with his earlier novels. The idea of a shadowy government outfit trying to reverse engineer and exploit supernatural powers seemed a little to much like the plot of an X-Men movie. The government as the antagonist is no new thing for Stephen King (The Stand, The Dead Zone) but never so directly cast in the role as they are here. Also, another annoying crutch reappears here in the form of young children speaking with adult voices under the pretense that they are exceptionally smart. I'm deliberately trying to stay away from talking movies, but it forces adaptations to either use much older actors (see 'Salem's Lot), or, as the movie version of this book did, make the original dialogue more "child-like". One thing new to a Stephen King novel, but a bit of an obnoxious trope in other works of fiction is the "evil Indian", a Native American character who has decided to use his special native powers to manipulate and kill in ways the white man would never understand. While this is disappointing, let's just say I had never imagined George C. Scott in the role of John Rainbird. (We'll save this for the next post.)

If one thinks too hard about the plot here, this is probably one of King's most preposterous novels. In the case of the aforementioned X-Men, the insurmountable problem is that they were born that way. While Charlie was born into her frightening power of pyrokenesis, Andy and Vicky were just normal people who, thanks to one drug test gone wild, not only acquired (or became able to express) special powers, but also could genetically pass along their new skills! Then again, perhaps that's the fun of it. I found this to be one of his funniest books. Seriously? No, bear with me here. First off, the Shop is run by a bunch of morons. They played up the evil role to nearly hyperbolic proportions, which played right into Andy's power of suggestion, bringing out darkly hilarious skeletons from closets involving intersections of women's clothes with garbage disposals and golf with snakes. Even earlier in the book, Andy's suggestive powers caused people to calmly converse while standing right next to a Shop agent screaming that he was blind.

I will say one great thing about the book is the pacing. For most of the second half of the book I thought it was going to be any minute that Charlie blew the Shop to fiery bits and the anticipation of the moment kept me turning the pages. Darn you, Stephen King, I had to get past page 500 before the fireworks started! But the unraveling of the Shop was handled very well. By the time things started exploded, the whole operation was pretty much on its last legs and probably wouldn't have survived even if Charlie left the place standing. It's important to remember this isn't a mystery novel, so the possibility of the Shop actually succeeding at anything never got on my radar, and it was really more the act of witnessing their undoing that made reading this book enjoyable.