Free A Brief Guide to Stephen King by Paul Simpson

apple of her parents’ eyes. But she’s the focus of a major manhunt by a covert branch of US intelligence, the Department of Scientific Intelligence (better known as The Shop), which is aware that both she and her father Andy have major psychokinetic powers – he can ‘push’ people todo what he wants; she can create fires simply by thinking about them – and is determined to bring them under its control. Charlie and Andy go on the run, but the agents of The Shop pursue them across the country before capturing them and bringing them to The Shop’s own headquarters, The Farm in Virginia. There Charlie is befriended by John Rainbird, a Cherokee Native American who is really a hit man for The Shop, who wants to learn about Charlie’s powers, and then kill her. Andy is kept drugged but when he manages to break free, he pushes The Shop’s boss, ‘Cap’ Hollister, into helping father and daughter to escape. Things go wrong, and Rainbird shoots Andy; in revenge, Charlie sets both Rainbird and Cap on fire, and proceeds to destroy the Farm. After recovering, Charlie heads for
Rolling Stone
’s New York office to lay bare the details of The Shop’s plans.
    Firestarter
has been seen as a milestone in King’s early work, drawing together many of the themes and tropes that characterized the books published in the 1970s. Douglas Winter, writer and critic, looking back in 1984, saw it as a ‘transitional work: King’s revisiting of concepts and themes explored in
Carrie, The Stand
, and
The Dead Zone
suggests a tieing [sic] up of loose ends’. However, King initially was more concerned that what it really meant was that he was running out of ideas. ‘I had this depressing feeling that I was a thirty-year-old man who had already lapsed into self-imitation,’ he told Winter, ‘and once that begins, self-parody cannot be far away.’ He started work on the manuscript in 1976 but stopped when he felt that thematically it was too close to
Carrie
; however when he returned to it a year later, he decided that not only was the book ‘less like
Carrie
than I thought – it was also better’. He was happy if critics felt that he was trying to ‘amplify themes that are intrinsic to my work’ rather than that ‘Steve King had started to eat himself’.
    The morality of power is a theme to which King returns repeatedly throughout his work. He admitted in his afterword to the paperback edition of
Firestarter
that he was horrified at the thought of the CIA and the KGB left in charge of experiments into the power of the mind; at the time he was drafting the novel, the CIA’s involvement in such mind-altering programs as MKULTRA was being revealed to the Senate Church Committee. In
Danse Macabre
, his overview of the genre, King pointed out that America had also just experienced the first presidential resignation, a resounding defeat in Southeast Asia, and major domestic discord on several issues – ‘the America I had grown up in seemed to be crumbling beneath my feet’. Accordingly, although Cap and Rainbird are definitely villains in the book, the main enemy that Andy and Charlie grapple with is the faceless power of the government. The Shop itself reappeared in
The Tommyknockers
, and the original TV series
Stephen King’s Golden Years
.
    Firestarter
also contains a sexual element that is almost paedophilic – although Rainbow repeatedly notes that his interest in Charlie is not sexual, it’s clear that there is an unsettling perversity to the relationship. King noted that ‘I only wanted to touch on it lightly, but it makes the whole conflict more monstrous’. He may well have shied away from the book being seen in this light, since one of the inspirations for the character of Charlie was his own daughter Naomi, then aged ten.
    King believed
Firestarter
should be seen as a suspense novel, rather than lumped in with a generic ‘horror’ label: ‘I see the horror novel as only one room in a very large house, which is