"Firestarter" by Stephen King

A short, tight, and truly horrific tale told by a master

Andy McGee and little 8 year old Charlie are on the run from evil government agency, The Shop. While still in college, he and his wife were the subject of a secret government test in which he could have sworn several people died but they just disappeared, as if they'd never existed. Now, years later, the two of them have developed strange abilities but that's nothing compared to their little girl who starts fires when she gets upset. For all this time they've managed to hide their new abilities from the agents who are still watching them but when Charlie goes to a friends house to spend the night, the agents panic and, after torturing her, kill Charlie's mother, setting off a chain of events that leads to Andy and Charlie desperate and on the run. The net is closing in, but the government may not be the worst of their dangers, because Charlie's talent is growing exponentially, and it's hungry...

One of the things I love about King is, being a child of the 60's, he has the right attitude toward various things from race issues to the government. The only place he falls down is in his attitude towards fat people but the understanding that people aren't fat because they're lazy slobs who eat too much isn't exactly common even now, after all the new studies and the burgeoning size acceptance movement, so I can forgive him that especially since his attitude is so good in so many other areas. Various governments, the US being prominent among them, have perpetrated some truly notorious acts on the unsuspecting populace, like the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment or the CIA testing of LSD on clients of prostitutes. Of course, pyrokinesis is science fiction, like the aliens of X-Files, but the fact that the government is pretty effing shady is science fact.

Firestarter reads more like a short story than one of King's typical epics. This isn't a bad thing - King is great at the short, sweet (or bitter) nugget and this is a pitch perfect example. Like all his stories, his plotting is riveting; characters have depth, many of them you truly care for and wish you could meet; his writing is sharp, with the occasional stunningly poetic imagagery. The reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 is, despite the story's perfection, I felt a distance from it. Maybe it was the unrelieved horror of Andy and Charlie's experience - from the very beginning all the way up until the ambiguous ending their story is one of unrelenting terror, pain, betrayal (both of self and by others) and sheer exhaustion. Because of the story, and because you truly like Andy and Charlie, you feel compelled to find out what happened but it felt like the exercise in endurance it was for them.

Conclusion: Highly recommended, but only for those not faint of heart.