Firestarter (Signet) (Mass Market Paperback)

The "Fire-Starter" of the title is young Charlie McGee. In 1969 her parents, Andy McGee and Vicky Tomlinson, participated in a drug experiment run by a secret government agency known as The Shop. A year later they marry and two years later they had a little girl who could set her teddy bear on fire just by looking at it. As the novel opens Charlie is eight and her parents have taught her to control her pyrokineses, but The Shop knows about her and wants to study her as an "ultimate weapon." So Shop agents are set out to hunt down Charlie and her father, chasing them from the streets of New York to a farm in Vermont.

On the one hand King plays into one of the commonplaces of contemporary fiction, the secret government organization that will do anything to anybody to get what it wants, that I happen to detest. I have to admit that if you give me a choice between seeing the government as corrupt or as incompetent, I choose the later and I am sick of the idea that the way to defend America is to forget what being an American is all about. But counterbalancing this is the relationship between Andy and his daughter. Her parents have instilled in Charlie the idea of controlling her power and not hurting anybody, but circumstances are forcing the young girl to go against her conditioning. There is a scene early on in the book, when the McGee have made it to the Manders farm and The Shop agents catch up with them. Andy tells her daughter that she can stop them and she asks the question that serves as the title of this review, the other point in this book that always brings tears to my eyes. At the heart of this novel there is a real little girl.

This is by means a perfect Stephen King novel. The entire set up works well enough without the whole John Rainbird subplot, which I find to be just too much of a wildcard and just because we know in the end the little girl is going to turn the tables on The Shop does not take away the pleasure of reading how she gets to do it. Besides, Irv Manders is one of my favorite minor characters in a King novel and the whole idea of a young girl coming into her own under extraordinary circumstances is quite captivating. Add to that the ending and "Fire-Starter" remains a favorite and one of the Stephen King novels I continue to pull down from the high shelf of the big bookcase so I can read my favorite parts again. I also thing the film version is one of the better adaptations of one of his novels (qualified to those that have the author’s name before the title and not the really good ones like "The Shawshank Redemption" which do not).

Charlie McGee is just a cute little girl, yet she is denied anything resembling a normal life. Her parents participated in a psychological study back in college that earned them two hundred dollars and strange new powers. They had unwittingly served as guinea pigs for an experimental-drug called Lot Six - courtesy of The Shop, a covert part of the federal government. Andy has the ability to "push" people into thinking and doing what he wants, while his wife Vicki is able to move things with her mind. Their abilities are comparatively weak, but such is not the case with their daughter: Charlie can start fires with her mind. Charlie's unprecedented powers make her a subject of great interest for The Shop - and eventually they come for her. Andy is forced to flee with his daughter after his wife is killed and Charlie herself temporarily abducted by government agents, but his limited power can only take them so far because the "push" exerts a painful physical toll on him. Charlie has to grow up in a hurry, as she seeks to understand who and what she is and to distinguish right from wrong in a crazy world that blurs the lines of good and evil. Her parents taught her that she should never use her power, yet she is put into positions in which that frightening ability borne from something inside her is the only thing that can keep her and her father safe and free. She is scared of the power, partly because she has trouble controlling it, but even more because a part of her enjoys using it. King's development of Charlie's feelings in this regard is masterfully done.

The novel makes little secret that the eventual ending will be a tragic one. The climactic events, however, don't take place on an elaborate scope; in fact, the majority of the action goes down in only two distinct locations. The fulcrum exists in the form of a grotesque human being named Rainbird. He's really the only interesting antagonist in the entire story, but I just don't know that his actions are justified by the things we learn about him - principally, his fascination with death. In my mind, he's one of King's weakest villains.

This is starting to sound like a negative review, but in actuality I regard Firestarter as a fascinating novel that shows how King is equally proficient at evoking love as he is terror. There's a strong sociological component to the novel. After all, the villain here is not a werewolf, ghost, or monster of any kind; it is nothing less than the government of the United States itself. In the 1970s, we began to learn about some of the heinous experiments our own government had perpetrated upon us (among the least of which was the injection of psychotic drugs to unknown participants) and the equally awful manner in which they covered such things up. If anything makes Firestarter scary, it is the fact that the novel was inspired by actual government-sponsored crimes of the most despicable kind. I'm sure the impact of Firestarter resonated much more deeply in 1980 than it does now, but this is only because we now know how untrustworthy the government can be. Still, Charlie's story is a most compelling one, and it shows us another side of Stephen King during the most productive phase of his unparalleled career.