Free A Brief Guide to Stephen King by Paul Simpson Page A

the suspense novel. That particular house encloses such classics as Hemingway’s
The Old Man and the Sea
and Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter,’
he told the
Minnesota Star
in the summer of 1980.
    Firestarter
was brought to the screen by Mark L. Lesterin 1984, in what most critics agree was ironically too close an adaptation of King’s book. Screenwriter Stanley Mann included all the key events and characters, but even with Drew Barrymore capturing Charlie’s mix of innocence and terrifying abilities, it doesn’t come alive – not helped by what has to be George C. Scott’s worst performance on celluloid as Rainbird. A belated sequel,
Firestarter 2: Rekindled
, appeared as a miniseries on the Sci-Fi Channel with Marguerite Moreau as a grown-up Charlie. This followed continuity with neither book nor film – Rainbird (now played by Malcolm McDowell) didn’t die but is still chasing after Charlie, and is creating his own band of mutant children.
    A remake of
Firestarter
was announced as being on the drawing board in late 2010 but nothing further has resulted in the intervening years.

6
A COMMUNITY OF HORROR:
ROADWORK
TO
IT
    Roadwork: A Novel of the First Energy Crisis

(Signet Books, March 1981)
    November 1973, and Barton George Dawes is starting to go insane. The death of his son, Charlie Frederick Dawes, from cancer the previous year has triggered irrational feelings of guilt, and Dawes is determined to prevent a new road from being built which will mean the obliteration both of his home and of his workplace. In his head, conversations take place between ‘George’ and ‘Frederick’, the latter the voice of reason as the former starts to go completely off the rails. Dawes buys weapons and eventually manages to get hold of some explosives from Sal Magliore, a local used-car dealer who has links to the Mob. By this point, Dawes has tried to sabotage the deal for his company to move elsewhere, has lost his job, his wife has left him, and he has created homemade explosives to damagethe construction equipment. The money he gets from the enforced sale of his house is used to pay for the explosives, and to help a young hitchhiker he has befriended. At the start of January 1974, Dawes barricades himself in the house to prevent its destruction, after wiring it with explosives. Following a stand-off with police, and explaining his story to a reporter, Dawes blows himself up – never knowing that the only reason for the new road was to use up some spare council money.
    There are a number of contenders for the bleakest book that Stephen King has written – with
Pet Sematary
high on most readers’ list – but this tale, published as by Richard Bachman, is certainly the one that does not allow a glimmer of hope to permeate it. King wrote it a year or so following the death of his mother from cancer in November 1973, in an effort to ‘write a “straight” novel’, as he admitted in the introduction to
The Bachman Books
in 1985. He was trying to make sense of what had happened to his mother, and through the book he was trying to ‘find some answers to the conundrum of human pain’. At that stage, perhaps, he was still too close to the story to gain perspective on it: he described it as his least favourite of the Bachman stories, but when the collection was reprinted a decade later, it had completely reversed position.
    King described the voice in this work as ‘simultaneously funnier and more cold-hearted’ than the tone he usually adopted in his stories, written in a state of ‘low rage and simmering despair’. It was unique among King’s early work in not having any supernatural element to it whatsoever –
Roadwork
is a very credible detailing of one man’s complete breakdown. Much as his detractors may wish to believe otherwise, King has always had the capacity to drop the trappings of the fantastic and focus purely on the characters he creates. As Doubleday editor Bill Thompson noted when King originally