A year ago, he was an upstanding instructor of English at Harrison State College. Now Andy is on the run with his daughter. A pigtailed girl named Charlie. A girl with an unimaginably terrifying gift.

A gift which could be useful to corrupt authorities. Soon Charlie will be caught up in the menace of a fateful drug experiment and a sinister government ploy . . .

Firestarter’ (1980), is the second of the twelve Stephen King novels that I’m planning to read for my Stephen King 2026 Reading Challenge. I enjoyed it much more than ‘’Salem’s Lot‘, the first book in the Challenge. 

I’ve always thought Stephen King would have been a force in any genre he chose to write in. Some of my favourite Stephen King stories are the ones that have only the smallest measure of woo-woo factor. With ‘Firestarter’, Stephen King showed that he can write a first-rate Speculative Fiction Thriller. 

The writing is taut, focused and vivid. The story is both unrushed and tense. Stephen King moves us fluidly between the present and the past, using the events in each to amplify the emotional impact of the other.

The story stands on three pillars: the possibllity that a drug could unlock mental powers in a subject, which could then be inherited by their children; the willingness to accept the existence of a powerful, ruthless, covert government agency that will lie, coerce and even kill to get its way; the sadness and innocence of Charlie Magee, a young girl born with enormoous destructive potential who is desperately afraid that one day she will use it and who has had everything and everyone taken from.

For the first two pillars, Stephen King extrapolates from CIA and Defence Department programs investigating and trying to weaponise ESP and Psychokinesis, by creating The Shop, a well-funded, covert Federal agency that operates outside the law, with negligible government oversight. The Shop and its operatives are scarily plausible, perhaps even more so today, in these times of ICE, than when ‘Firestarter’ was published in 1980, but Stephen King increases the sense of threat and malice by creating John Rainbird, The Shop’s top assassin and intergoator. I think Rianbird is one of King’s scariest characters. His combination of high insight, low empathy and mystical obsession with the moment of death is a powerful cocktail. Seeing him work with precision and dispassionate skill to manipulate a little girl that he admires and intends to kill is much more horrifying than the vampire rising from its coffin in ‘Salem’s Lot’.

For me, what made this book exceptional was the third pillar: the character of Charlie Magee. Stephen King took the time to make the reader care about Charlie and her father rather than rushing on to the spectacular scenes of destruction. The pacing is impressive, it starts relatively low-key with Charlie and her father on the run, builds to a spectacular confrontation and escape and then is followed by an almost unbearably tense period when Charlie and her father are prisoners of The Shop, and John Rainbird is abusing Charlie’s trust. When the moment of destruction finally arrived, it was biblical, graphic and emotionally satisfying. 

The story could have ended there, but I’m glad that it didn’t. Stephen King took the time to consider consequences and to factor in Charlie’s personality and personal ethics. The ending he came up with made me smile.

I recommend the audiobook of ‘Firestarter’,narrated by Dennis Boutsikaris. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample.