Rereading Stephen King: week nine - Firestarter

This had to happen eventually. The problem with something as subjective as literature is that your average reader is, sooner or later, going to disagree with majority opinion; and I knew that when it happened during this reread, I would have to write about it honestly. A few weeks ago, in the thread for The Long Walk reread, commenters began listing their top 10 favourite King books. Many, many people included Firestarter. And why wouldn't they? It's early King, when (collective wisdom has it) he was still writing exciting, original novels, playing in the ballparks of horror-SF that his diehard early readers love. It's one of the books that stepped into public consciousness – it had a film made with Drew Barrymore in, for goodness' sake – and people rattle it off as a classic. I really liked it too. Or, at least, I did the first time that I read it.

Charlie McGee is a little girl in the grand, early-King tradition of "kids with special powers". Hers is pyrokinesis, and was triggered by some shady drug experiments committed on her parents by an even-more-shady governmental organisation known as The Shop. Oh, and also, because the plot needs it, her dad, Andy, is a bit psychic (another side-effect of the experiments). His power isn't firestarting but something called "The Push", which is a bit like Jedi mind-control only not quite as cool and effortless. They're on the run from The Shop, because The Shop wants them back. When The Shop tries to capture them, they kill Charlie's mother, and now Charlie and Andy run and run and run and run. Things happen: there's a hitman hired to pursue them (the amazingly named John Rainbird), Andy and Charlie are separated, Andy becomes addicted to drugs, and then they're captured by The Shop and then they are reunited and then they escape and then the ending happens, where people die and Rolling Stone magazine is, somehow, wound into the tale. It's a series of small events that have repercussions, but none actually really drives the narrative: they feel like bumps in the road instead.

For me, that's a problem. The book is ostensibly a road-trip narrative where we're following Andy and Charlie across America. But what I've told you in that paragraph above? It's the whole story. It's a very thin narrative, stretched over a pretty big book, and I'm not sure that one can sustain the other. Then there's the problem of thematic repetition. It's possible that this is an effect of the manner in which I'm reading these books: I'm aware that this isn't a normal way to consume (or re-consume) a body of work. But the issues with Firestarter – easily, in my opinion, the least effective of King's early works – come mainly from a terrific sense of my having seen this all before. Carrie, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone: they all feature characters with mental abilities not a million miles away from those in Firestarter (and we're not even at the Breakers yet). In these books, explanations of those abilities are generally vague, and that works to their benefit. Here, The Shop and their experiments are the lynchpin of the entire story: driving it forward, with The Shop as a pursuer that's never really effective or scary. For me, the explanation should have been strapped to the back of a more prominent narrative. Firestarter often feels like it's biding its time, waiting for something earth-shattering to happen.

It's not a bad book. I'm doing it a disservice, probably. It's well written, Charlie is exceedingly likable, The Shop has the potential to be a really fun concept ... But Firestarter mostly does nothing. In such a lengthy book, I really missed a three-act structure (or, rather, a more defined three -act structure, given how much of the back-story is told through flashback and reminiscence); I missed the ebb and flow of something more rigid to hold it together. The Dead Zone didn't have a conventional structure either, but where risks made that book sing, using them in an effective way, everything in Firestarter feels a little more like treading water. And the length also makes this feel like a bit of a slog. In his early years, King was, for the most part, very good at knowing what books needed to feel epic, and giving them an appropriate page-count. The smaller-in-scope books, he kept short: Rage, The Long Walk, Carrie. This is the first time in my reread I've found something amiss: a King novel that doesn't have the story to back itself up. Would it be better if it were half as long? I'd bet the farm on it.

And, yes: this is contentious. I've seen innumerable people on these here internets saying they love Firestarter, and I think that I did, once. It was never top tier for me, but I loved it. Maybe it's the density of how I'm reading these books that highlights the flaws; maybe it's just that there's been a lot of stuff like this in the world since it came out, much of it by King himself. But I also think it's quite a hollow book, something I suspect King himself knows. In the afterword to a recent Dark Tower comic, King stated that he felt Firestarter should "obviously" be turned into a comic. He's totally right: it could make an excellent comic mini-series. Cut into six issues, the peaks and troughs of the story would play better, with the smaller fragments of plot dedicated to an issue each. I'd really like that: the opportunity to read this book in a format that actually suits the narrative. Because, honestly? I'm not sure that the long-form novel is it.

Connections

The Shop pops up occasionally in other books, mentioned in The Stand, The Mist and The Tommyknockers, either as a cause of the mess or as the government department tasked to clean said mess up. Perhaps they were something that King once intended to make more of as part of his extended universe? Or, as @mattcraig posits, maybe they were just an easy way to use the CIA in a story without directly calling them that?

Next time

We're defending our land and throwing Molotov cocktails at bulldozers in the Bachman-attributed Roadwork.