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Firestarter

Stephen King

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Feb 25, 2023 Werner rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

Since the 1970s, Stephen King's name has been a household word, at least in the U.S. As a pop culture icon, he's practically synonymous with the field of “horror;” his books are guaranteed best sellers, and his fame has been spread even far beyond the ranks of the reading public by heavily-publicized film adaptations of many of his novels (including this one). At times, he derives his horror from supernatural premises, but he's just as apt to ground it in science fiction, as he does here.

Despite Since the 1970s, Stephen King's name has been a household word, at least in the U.S. As a pop culture icon, he's practically synonymous with the field of “horror;” his books are guaranteed best sellers, and his fame has been spread even far beyond the ranks of the reading public by heavily-publicized film adaptations of many of his novels (including this one). At times, he derives his horror from supernatural premises, but he's just as apt to ground it in science fiction, as he does here.

Despite my liking for the speculative genres, I've never been a particular King fan. “Horror” for its own sake doesn't appeal to me (and I don't think of it as a genre –I define genres by their subject matter, not by their intended emotional effect); and I've always, even as a teen, been skeptical of “best sellers,” which have struck me as often owing their fame to advertising/promotion and band-wagon psychology. However, when a mid-life career change took me to library school, resulting in a few years (1987-1991) as a public librarian, I concluded that, because of his popularity with library patrons, I needed to sample his work, just for purposes of readers' advisory services. A lady I worked with suggested this novel as a first read. To date, I've only read three others (and gave one of those just two stars.)

King's SF here is of the “soft” school, focusing on psi powers (as he'd already done in his 1974 debut novel, Carrie), a motif anathema to “hard” genre purists. The premise here is that back in the 60s, “the Shop,” a U.S. government covert intelligence agency (clearly modeled on the CIA, which in real life is nicknamed “the Company”) engaged in unethical research with a psi-enhancing drug, administering it to unwitting college students. One of these, Andy McGee, developed a powerful ability to telepathically influence other people's minds with phobias or suicidal compulsions. But when he married another of the psychically enhanced students, their child Charlene (“Charlie”) proved to be gifted with pyro-kinetic powers of lethally dangerous proportions. By the time she's seven years old, she's able to control these, and she and her parents lead a normal life, with their psi abilities unused and under wraps. Unknown to them, though, they've been under surveillance all this time by the Shop, which wants to use Charlie as a weapon. When Shop agents move in without warning and kidnap Charlie, murdering her mom in the process, a David vs. Goliath conflict is on in earnest.

The source of horror here isn't what Andy and Charlie can do with their minds, if they want to. They genuinely have no desire to use their abilities to hurt innocents –and don't use them even on the guilty, except in self-defense, or defense of a family member. Rather, the source of the horror is the vision of an unaccountable government agency, devoid of any regard for morality and law, carrying out its own self-serving agenda independent of democratic governance, with vast tax-supported resources and an unchecked ability to do anything it wants, including murder, intimidation, blackmail, bribery, and systematic cover-up of truth. What lends this depiction its particular power is the fact that, unlike malevolent vampires or ravening werewolves, whose depredations we're pretty sure can't be reflected in reality, we're by no means sure that the bona fide monsters here don't have some real-life counterparts. By 1980, many Americans, across the political spectrum, had become concerned about precisely these kinds of tendencies in the real-life national security/intelligence agencies. In the decades since, those concerns have only spread and deepened, with what many of us believe to be very good reason. A potential effect of reading this novel might be to foster an awareness among all Americans who actually understand and value democracy, whether they think of themselves as liberals or conservatives, that a significantly dangerous threat to democratic principles and practices might be coming from inside our own government, and that we have a common interest in countering it.

Unfortunately, King does his best to self-sabotage any such bipartisan message, by making sure his characters' partisan ideological labels are firmly in place. He makes sure that we're privy to Shop head honcho Captain Hollister's thoughts, fantasizing about using psi techniques to murder Sen. Ted Kennedy (because he's a “liberal”), just so that any potentially uninstructed readers out there will be sure to understand which party's members are the “good guys” in white hats, and which party our villains here exemplify. (In fact, office-holders and administrations of both establishment parties have encouraged, financed and covered up any number of unethical and illegal abuses of the government's security apparatus; and indeed, a bipartisan consensus among their power brokers in support of these kinds of shenanigans is probably as widespread as the consensus against them would be among the rest of us. And the real-life Captain Hollisters of the world tend to care much more about whether a given party has the power to reward their service than they do about what flavor of political rhetoric it uses. But there's no hint of that here.) For those who might have an agenda like the Shop's, casting it in partisan political terms ensures that, first, many of those on the side of the political spectrum that's accused will then automatically dismiss the whole concern as a slander by the Enemy; and second, many of those on the side of the spectrum that's supposedly “innocent” will feel safe in turning a blind eye to whatever the noble heroes leading their side might do, since such abuses can only come from the (flipped) Enemy.

For all that, the depiction of the kind of evil the Shop represents is clearly drawn enough that I think a certain number of readers would look beyond the author's ideological labeling, and perceive that we're looking at behavior that's radically bad in itself, irrespective of party labels. As a story, the tale works well. It's vivid, fast-paced, and with a strong sense of suspense and danger, with a high-stakes good vs. evil conflict that draws you in. (Though this is a thick book –albeit not as thick as some King tomes—it doesn't feel at all bloated.) King's characterizations are super-vivid and lifelike; we come to care intensely for Charlie and Andy and root for them. The denizens of the Shop also aren't cartoon villains (although they're certainly villains), and they aren't faceless clones of each other, but rather clearly differentiated and nuanced. (John Rainbird, the disfigured psychopath who serves as Hollister's pet assassin, is a more chilling figure than such King villains as Randy Flagg or the vampire king Barlow in 'Salem's Lot, perhaps partly because, paradoxically, he's more “human” and relatable.) As a work of “horror,” the novel provides its share of grisly mayhem. However, there's no sexual content, and bad language isn't particularly pervasive –though King drags in the f-word twice. (In 428 pages, that's not a high incidence; but both uses are completely gratuitous.) He also goes out of his way to take a jab at evangelical Christians. But these negative features of the book show up only in a few places. It's far from deep literature; but overall, I liked it well enough for the type of entertainment that it is. ...more

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Apr 29, 2009 Crystal rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction

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