Firestarter Reviews

We don´t need no water, let the pyrokinesis burn, burn one hotter with obsessive compulsive forced washing mysophobia, burn.

The, at the time of publishing still hot, cold war spy conspiracy secret agency setting with the human free drugs experimentation background, makes it a suspenseful read, especially as it escalates towards more complexity than in other of King´s works, especially including a kind of meta level, not focusing on the local dread and terror or cosmic horror, but on the consequences superpowers could lead to in real life.

This makes it kind of untypical, one doesn´t fear the protagonists or a mysterious, paranormal activity, but the consequences of the decisions of the puppetmasters in the background, making it a psychological thriller that uses the character´s abilities to create suspenseful scenarios and fuses plot and character. Something the mainstream superhero genre should possibly once restart considering when including psi abilities because it has enormous potential for completely fresh ideas from romance to horror.

Sharp, direct, and switching between different plotlines, also not usual for King, this is one of his underappreciated, early masterpieces. Maybe, instead of including the cold war setting, it could have been changed to a general military government conglomerate world domination conspiracy setting, because the idea of having kind of superheroes in such a scenario was, in a book, fresh in these days.

King´s novel The Institue is a darker, horrible continuation of this idea, leading to the uncomfortable, final, often asked, and never answered question how big the real secret human experimentation complex, next to the secret prisons, secret killings, secret special black operation forces, etc. might be. Thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands? Millions may be a bit exaggerated over the top, but it might be a few superheroes and many average people getting special, potentially fatal final treatments by their governments to breed übersoldiers.

Fun fact: King told in an interview how his wife owned him by saying something like this: "You wrote Misery about a man in a bed together with a crazy woman. Then you wrote Gerald´s game about a woman tied to a bed. Next, you´ll write a novel about a couch without anything happening." When I first saw the plot description I couldn´t resist thinking of her ingenuity in pointing the finger at the fact that her husband truly has a tendency to rererecyle ceratin ideas and topics, as in this case, Carrie with fire. But hey, he is the King, he has the right to do whatever he wishes.

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