Firestarter

Rating:
Summary: "If I do . . . something . . . will you still love me?"
Review: All things considered "The Dead Zone" probably remains my favorite Stephen King novel, although the epic sweep of "The Stand" is impressive, but "Fire-Starter" has my favorite ending of any of his works. I can still pick up my copy, turn to the last two sections, and get a lump in my throat. I am not sure why this is the case, although I acknowledge that as a rule King novels do not have what would qualify as "happy endings." At the other end of the spectrum from this one would be the ending of "Pet Sematary," where the whole nightmare is about to begin again. In "Danse Macabre," his dissertation on horror, King writes of the tension between Dionysian darkness and Apollonian sunlight and I have no problems with seeing the end of "Fire-Starter" as representing the sunny side of the equation.

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).