Firestarter

Firestarter begins with a man and his young daughter on the run from relentless pursuers. We soon learn that Andy McGee and his daughter Charlene, "Charlie," have mental powers that a government agency known as The Shop wants to study. Andy has the ability to "push" others and dominate their minds but can only use it periodically. Charlie has various abilities but the most powerful is to generate intense heat with her mind, heat intense enough to set virtually anything on fire. The Shop agents consistently show themselves to be as reprehensible as they are persistent and have already killed Charlie's mother.

Stephen King often creates interesting characters and Firestarter is no exception. Charlie is quite a remarkable little girl and I liked her quite a bit by the end of the story. Her part is small in the beginning but she starts coming into her own about half way through and just gets better and better from there. Andy is a genuinely good guy, he obviously loves Charlie and desperately wants to protect her. As his history is revealed, it also becomes obvious that he has consistently used his powers to the benefit of others, while most of us would probably be very tempted to use them more selfishly. The villains are no less interesting, and John Rainbird is especially chilling. I don't want to give away any major plot developments but the relationship between he and Charlie is riveting.

Firestarter is a pleasure to read. At just over 400 pages, it's taut and the story moves along at a good pace. It's almost impossible not to root for Charlie and Andy even as it gets harder and harder to see how they can end up with a happy ending. I found it more and more of a page-turner as the story progressed. As with most of King's early work, Firestarter takes a simple, but strong, idea and spins it into a great novel. I recommend it to anyone looking for a suspenseful story with good characters, whether they are established Stephen King fans or first time readers.

I try to savor reading works by Stephen King because I know he is the only writer capable scratching my literary itch. If fiction is a drug, King manufactures it in the purest and most inimitable form. Firestarter is no exception. Andy and Charlie are some of his most realistic characters, and their harrowing journey is as captivating as it is heartbreaking. John Rainbird is an epic villain, who stands out as one of the most evil characters I’ve ever encountered in a King story. I highly recommend this book.

Firestarter (1980) is a fairly early King novel -- the eighth counting ones he wrote under the Bachman pseudonym. I'm not a fanatical Stephen King fan, but after finishing Firestarter I wondered just how many of his books I've read. I found an online checklist, and it turns out I've now read 29 of them, which probably more books than I've read by any other single author. Still, he's written 80 and is at work on more, so I've got a long way to go if I want to catch up.

I've never seen either of the two movie adaptations of this novel, so I went into it not knowing anything other than the fact that it's about a little girl who can start fires with her mind. In the book, this power is call "pyrokinesis." The critic S.T. Joshi claims the correct coinage should be "telepyrosis," but I believe that Joshi's version would mean heartburn from a distance. Pyrokinesis sounds just fine to me anyway since it sounds like you're throwing fire.

Stephen King starts this one with the tried-and-true technique of dropping the reader into the middle of the action. Seven-year-old Charlene (better known as Charlie) McGee and her father, Andy, are on the run from government agents who have killed her mother, Vicky. A pair of agents had already taken Charlie captive by the time the narrative starts, but Andy managed to catch up with them and use his own mental powers to neutralize them. The secretive agency known only as "The Shop" has plenty more agents, though, and they will keep coming until they have Charlie in their clutches.

In flashbacks we learn that Andy and Vicky met in college. The psychology department was running an experiment where a dozen student volunteers would be paid $200 each to take a mild hallucinogenic drug called Lot Six while being monitored. They both could use the money and ended up doing it together to provide each other a little moral support. As it turned out, the experiment was a sketchy operation being run by The Shop, and some of the students who took part died or were mentally impaired afterward. Vicky and Andy experienced what seemed to be telepathy with each other. As a result of the experience, they grew closer, eventually marrying and having a child. Vicky and Andy also each retained weak psychic abilities. Vicky could use telekinesis to move objects, while Andy's ability allowed him to "push" other people into doing what he asked them to do, like a very strong case of post-hypnotic suggestion.

This is where I have to say that I had expected that this would be a story about an adolescent girl slowly discovering her awakening psychic powers and having to learn to control them. While the latter does come into play, the surprise for me was that Charlie had her pyrokinetic ability from infancy. This brought to mind the Superman comics of the 1960s that I read when I was growing up, where Ma and Pa Kent were always amusingly having to deal with and/or hide the fact that their baby could lift the farmhouse off its foundation if he was looking for a lost toy. Raising a baby who could cause random spontaneous combustion events didn't come across nearly as funny as Superbaby's antics, though.

To sum it up, without going into much more detail, I will note that Firestarter falls into three well-defined acts. In the first, Andy and Charlie are desperate and on the run until they are finally captured by The Shop's implacable Native American superagent, Rainbird. In the second act, the two are prisoners of The Shop, where they are drugged into submission. Psychological techniques are used to gain their trust. The Shop wants to understand the extent of Charlie's powers (which she refuses to show them at first) with the idea of perhaps developing a eugenics program using parents who have been doped with Lot Six to produce superpowered mutants. All of this is being done in name of national security, of course. In the third act, Charlie and Andy finally gain some agency of their own and manage turn the tables on their captors. The climax is unputdownably exciting and cathartic. The denouement that follows provides a satisfying sense of closure.

I never read at the beach. I don't even understand why anyone would. But this is a great book to read on an airplane or anywhere else that you want the hours to fly by unnoticed.

Give someone a twenty second summary of Stephen King’s FIRESTARTER and odds are the person you’re talking to will reply with “Gee, that sounds neat. Hey, I gotta go.” On its face it’s a goofball premise: two students are voluntarily injected with a top secret serum that produces extraordinary abilities in its subjects – telekinesis and psychic control – but the students' situation grows only more extraordinary when they bear a child who inherits an even greater power – the power to incinerate things with her mind.

It sounds silly, but FIRESTARTER becomes a meta-literary experience when the pages turn so swiftly your fingers start to burn. It’s a remarkably a well-told tale.

Our heroes are eight year old Charlie, the firestarter, and her father Andy, both relentlessly hunted by the federally funded shadow group known as The Shop. It’s a bad guy-heavy cast, but one baddy is the worst of the lot: John Rainbird, a disfigured assassin obsessed with death, and especially obsessed with seeing death in the eyes of a child. While most of the characters are forgettable, Rainbird is the standout. He’s terrifying - a truly menacing villain. Think NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN’s Anton Chigurh meets Hannibal Lecter.

The themes are redolent of that post-Watergate/Vietnam phobia about covert government iniquity. The paranoia feels a little dated – as dated as the computer technology used by The Shop - but the novel’s psychological aspect is brilliant. Both Andy and Charlie have psychic abilities nonpareil, yet they’re picked apart and driven astray with universally effective emotional techniques that are almost inescapable. Our characters have feelings that can be preyed upon, and preyed upon they are. We cringingly watch Charlie cajoled into a friendly alliance with the uber-evil John Rainbird, a man who wants to watch her die. To see it slowly play-out on the page is as gripping as any of the high octane showdowns that fill this novel. Charlie may be able to incinerate Cleveland, but she’s a child as susceptible to manipulation as any other.

Stephen King is one of the most efficient writers to ever live. Efficient seems a mediocre compliment, but it’s intended to be a massive compliment. His sentences feel both effortless and meticulous. He shears his thoughts to the bare essentials, delivering plots like ballistic missiles. You’ll know exactly what I mean when you pick up FIRESTARTER, and feel the controlled tension pour into your veins.

Great read.

I've been doing a little experiment lately since I loved The Dark Tower novels so much, along with The Stand, Hearts in Atlantis, and It; I've been reading Stephen King's novels in order from the dates of publication. In other words, I started off with Carrie, then I read 'salem's Lot, The Shining, Night Shift, The Stand, The Long Walk, The Dead Zone . . . then most recently Firestarter. What I found was that Firestarter was the first novel (other than The Long Walk, which was technically Bachman, and hence King delibrately trying to write differently) from Stephen King that has a different feel to it. In fact, it's the first novel from King that I felt he was writing because he needed something for the publisher; it's the first King novel that I felt seemed more "plot" driven, than character driven (and he actually admits this about books like Rose Madder and Insomnia; and whether or not that's true about Firestarter, I can't say, but it feels like it is); and finally it's the first Stephen King novel that you can't "sense" The Dark Tower on the other side of a hidden door somewhere.

He had written this novel for Shirley Jackson (

If I was just rating the book I would give it 5 stars as I really enjoyed it, but whoever was responsible for converting this book to the kindle version did an awful job. There are a ridiculous number of typos (misspelled words, incorrect or missing punctuation, incorrect capitalization, missing spacing) and I am by NO means an expert in such things, so I can only imagine how many of the typos I missed. The frequency (every couple of pages, sometimes multiples on a page) actually got in the way of my enjoyment of the book. When I sent an email to amazon to let them know that they should really have someone go through and fix the typos they asked me to send them the location and nature of all the typos I'd found...I was already half way through the book and had probably come across 50! I wasn't going to go back and find the typos for them! So be warned, if typos are something that tend to really bother you then get the paperback version of this book because the kindle version will annoy you.