Tag: firestarter

Firestarter: Burn It Down (Part II)

On By profrol1 Comment

The state’s independent network of utilities was devised with the goal of avoiding federal regulation; by not crossing state lines, Texas’s power grid could sidestep national utility guidelines—and energy companies could profit under the guise of individualism and “self-reliance.”

Bryan Washington, “Texans in the Midst of Another Avoidable Catastrophe,” February 18, 2021.

Power Dynamics

As I write I am fortunate enough to be doing so on a computer that is still connected to working electricity, while at least a million in the Houston area are without power, as are millions more across the state, as we continue to experience record low temperatures. Millions, also, are like myself probably hearing for the first time of the existence of ERCOT (the Electric Reliability Council of Texas) and processing the implication that the insane scale of these power outages are related to the fact that a single entity controls all of the state’s…power. The same “unprecedented” winter storm that created a record demand from the statewide interconnected power grid simultaneously crippled the turbines and other integral machinery’s ability to supply that grid, generating…the perfect storm.

Recent tweets from Houston mayor Sylvester Turner.

Is this event a “deus ex machina” like the plot development of the storm and subsequent power outage in Firestarter, or did we call this down upon ourselves? One’s answer may depend to some degree on their political orientation, since “facts” don’t so much exist anymore, but King would probably agree at this point that we’ve played an active role in the climate change that is in turn likely playing an active role in Texas experiencing an “arctic” weather event. In addition to climate-change culpability, there’s the questionable design of a statewide interconnected system that was apparently designed to avoid federal regulation for the sake of greater profits and necessarily spreads incapacitation…like wildfire.

If the storm that causes the shit to hit the fan in Firestarter is a deus ex machina, the origin of the fire itself is less so–the title itself seems to refer to Charlie, who has the power to start fires, but the text is also interested in the question of how this power…started. Firestarter is in many ways reminiscent of Carrie, with the female protagonist’s name adjusted by a couple of letters, the hateful mother replaced by a loving father, and the mother’s evil relocated to that shady covert-ops branch of the American government in the entity of “the Shop,” an explicitly CIA-like organization interested in both protecting and furthering the power of the State. This results in what might be the most significant divergence from Carrie, locating the source of the female protagonist’s x-kinetic “powers” rather than its source remaining mysterious–scientific papers in Carrie identify her telekinesis as genetic, and Charlie’s powers are as well, passed down from her parents. But Charlie’s parents reveal the more precise manner in which these powers entered the genetic code via the government-administered Lot Six experiment. In locating the powers’ source, King locates a monster with historical precedent in the Shop, but both the physical setting and descriptions of the Shop’s headquarters and the bureaucratic-and-beyond battle of individual monsters therein–specifically Cap and Rainbird–reveals, if unconsciously, longer standing monstrous aspects of America’s history.

Who’s The Biggest Monster of Them All?

More mileage might have been gotten out of some character development for Cap, a pure villain, by hinting at a more explicit source of his particular mental “ricochet” once Andy starts pushing him. The other figure to experience such a debilitating “ricochet” is Pynchot, who is explicitly identified to be a “mental deviant” in the form of a transvestite, a problematic figuration to be sure in putting the impetus of guilt on the individual rather than the society that so rigorously establishes and enforces its behavioral norms. What Cap’s equivalent mental “deviance” would be is not clear; the memory he has of a scary encounter with a snake as a kid doesn’t really seem to qualify. The golf and snakes thing he comes to fixate on is so random as to feel stupid (and would seem to reveal that King himself is the one weirdly preoccupied with these elements based on their prominent linkage in another story of his, “Autopsy Room 4”).

The most interesting things about Cap are:

1) The invocation of his real-life referents (some of whom went more or less insane due to the nature of their work): “Nixon, Lance, Helms … all victims of cancer of the credibility.” It’s part of Cap’s monstrous characterization that he designates these insidious figures “victims” (especially since the first is perhaps the biggest Kingian monster of them all?).

2) Martin Sheen plays Cap in the 1984 Firestarter film adaptation just a year after Sheen played King villain Greg Stillson in The Dead Zone film adaptation. Sheen also famously played the protagonist of (loose) Heart of Darkness (1899) adaptation Apocalypse Now (1979), recalling Firestarter‘s themes of America’s hypocritical destructiveness in the Vietnam War, as well as one of Matthew Salesses’s points about the difference (or lack thereof) between a character’s and a text’s racism raised via Chinua Achebe’s critique of Heart of Darkness “for the racist use of Africans as objects and setting rather than as characters.”

For more on Firestarter‘s racism as a text we go to Rainbird, Firestarter‘s resident POC. Reading in professor J.J. Cohen’s monster-theory fashion, Rainbird is a “monster” via “Thesis IV: The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference” by being a “dialectical Other” via his status as Native American, a status/difference rendered monstrous through his scarred appearance, which is, not incidentally, usually figured as the most monstrous through the gaze of the novel’s other monster, Cap:

And Cap was glad Rainbird was on their side, because he was the only human he had ever met who completely terrified him.
Rainbird was a troll, an ore, a balrog of a man. He stood two inches shy of seven feet tall, and he wore his glossy hair drawn back and tied in a curt ponytail. Ten years before, a Claymore had blown up in his face during his second tour of Vietnam, and now his countenance was a horrorshow of scar tissue with runneled flesh. His left eye was gone. There was nothing where it had been but a ravine. He would not have plastic surgery or an artificial eye because, he said, when he got to the happy hunting ground beyond, he would be asked to show his battlescars. When he said such things, you did not know whether to believe him or not; you did not know if he was serious or leading you on for reasons of his own.

and

The top of his huge head seemed almost to brush the ceiling. The gored ruin of his empty eyesocket made Cap shudder inwardly.

It’s Rainbird who utters this novel’s two uses of the N-word (a shockingly low number for a King text) both in contexts I’d never heard. One is modified by “red,” Rainbird uttering a racialized and racist projection of himself as figured by the Shop in an argument with Cap; in his full phrasing, he also invokes his disfiguration, referring to himself as “‘this one-eyed red [N-word].'” (The other use of the slur is part of a term for a random lock Rainbird was taught to pick.) In doing so, Rainbird calls out the normative white gaze in a way that might seem a larger symbol of literature’s normative white gaze and, per Matthew Salesses, its default position of white supremacy. But at the end of the day, all signs say we’re supposed to read Rainbird as “bad,” which means his calling out the white man for enforcing his standards as all standards then becomes “bad,” and the text returns to white supremacist…

Rainbird is plenty capable as an individual–but scarily capable, his capabilities deployed for pure evil, and even if we might get some satisfaction out of him putting one over on Cap since Cap is also a monster in his own right (one that hides in disguise), Rainbird’s overriding motivation of looking nine-year-old Charlie in the eyes as she dies would seem to leave it pretty unequivocal about where his nature falls on the good/evil spectrum. Yet there appears to be a deal of authorial effort to complicate this particular matter, which might in large part be a side effect of Rainbird’s predominant use as a plot device to establish Cap and the Shop (and thereby America) as monstrous. Rainbird explicitly terrifies Cap, which means that however monstrous/scary Cap is, Rainbird must be even scarier….

Rainbird’s scarred appearance renders him monstrous physically, but also through how he got it. The injury is not the fault of the “‘Cong,'” as he claims in his critical lie to Charlie, but men on the American side:

“We were on patrol and we walked into an ambush,” [Rainbird] said. That much was the truth, but this was where John Rainbird and the truth parted company. There was no need to confuse her by pointing out that they had all been stoned, most of the grunts smoked up well on Cambodian red, and their West Point lieutenant, who was only one step away from the checkpoint between the lands of sanity and madness, on the peyote buttons that he chewed whenever they were out on patrol. Rainbird had once seen this looey shoot a pregnant woman with a semiautomatic rifle, had seen the woman’s six-month fetus ripped from her body in disintegrating pieces; that, the looey told them later, was known as a West Point Abortion. So there they were, on their way back to base, and they had indeed walked into an ambush, only it had been laid by their own guys, even more stoned than they were, and four guys had been blown away. Rainbird saw no need to tell Charlie all of this, or that the Claymore that had pulverized half his face had been made in a Maryland munitions plant.

This description of war is brutal in a way that walks the line between gratuitous glorification of violence and a critique of it in a way that reminds me (again) of Apocalypse Now:

Commentators have debated whether Apocalypse Now is an anti-war or pro-war film. Some evidence of the film’s anti-war message includes the purposeless brutality of the war, the absence of military leadership, and the imagery of machinery destroying nature.[93] Advocates of a pro-war stance view these same elements as a glorification of war and the assertion of American supremacy. 

From here.

The source of Rainbird’s monstrous injury seems an effort on King’s part to continue to emphasize the American government (or at least the war hawk military-industrial branch of it) as the monster behind all monsters (the Oz monster?), twisting and disfiguring the rationale of “weaponizing” anything–a little girl, creative-writing pedagogy–for the sake of “national security” (that rhetorical smokescreen for American supremacy) and letting their paranoia twist and disfigure perceived threats until they themselves become twisted and disfigured. Drugs are again invoked here as part of the culprit, the men deploying the Claymore directly responsible for “pulverizing” Rainbird’s face because they were “stoned” and therefore confused. These things seem to position Rainbird as a “victim,” but that Rainbird is the one who then twists the tale to switch out the guilty party undermines any element of this victimization that might budge him from the evil end of the spectrum. He becomes complicit in duplicity. And his terrifying the Oz monster of Cap and thus being scarier/more monstrous than the Oz monster means the Oz monster can’t really be the Oz monster…

Then there’s Rainbird’s relationship with Charlie…perhaps best characterized as duplicitous seduction? The duplicitous covert element of it takes Rainbird’s evil/monstrousness beyond Cap’s and the Shop’s, figuring Rainbird’s use of what the White man taught him not as righteous/redemptive revenge, but as even more evil than that of the people who taught it to him. The seduction part of it, per Cohen’s monster theory, provides another significant element of Rainbird’s monstrousness:

Feminine and cultural others are monstrous enough by themselves in patriarchal society, but when they threaten to mingle, the entire economy of desire comes under attack.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” 1996.

With a lover’s eye, Rainbird noted that she had not braided her hair today; it lay loose and fine and lovely over her neck and shoulders. She wasn’t doing anything but sitting on the sofa. No book. No TV. She looked like a woman waiting for a bus.

Charlie, he thought admiringly, I love you. I really do.

Rainbird is a “cultural other” who is “threaten[ing] to mingle” with a “feminine other,” a mingling whose monstrousness is then underscored by the age of this feminine other lending another dimension of taboo/monstrousness to the threatened mingling. His overtly sexual gaze and “womanizing” of a girl-child is a threat to the patriarchal order, and if that threat is monstrous, as it would be hard for such a threat to a nine-year-old’s innocence not to be, Rainbird’s monstrousness thus reinforces the patriarchal order it exists in opposition to as “good.” So if his threat to that particular order is not good, then his threat to the order of the Shop would seem to be implicated as not good either, which complicates reading the Shop and its aims as monstrous…even though King clearly intends them to be.

What complicates the (disturbingly) overtly sexual nature of Rainbird’s gaze are other passages reinforcing that it’s not a sexual desire for Charlie herself we’re seeing Rainbird exhibit, but for something that she represents that will somehow manifest when he sees her die, an experience he’s generally fond of and in her specific case seems to think will be even better because of Charlie’s a) youth/innocence and b) powers? It’s not entirely clear. It is entirely creepy, even if it seems like we’re supposed to read Rainbird’s love of death as more sexual than his love of Charlie herself is. That the horse that becomes a bonding/bargaining chip between them is named “Necromancer” seems to make it symbolic of Rainbird, but also of the Shop itself, the entity with the true tragic flaw leading to self-destruction in this narrative.

Rainbird’s romancing of death through a nine-year-old girl seems to offer a distinct type of monstrousness when contrasted with Cap’s, more overt as opposed to covert, though Rainbird maintains secrecy about his true aims and utilizes covert means obtained from his Shop training. He’s a figure who is ultimately trying to bring down the Shop’s covert order, using its own covert means to do so, which means this destruction can be classified as self-inflicted–the government planted the seeds of its own self-destruction, trained its own assassin. There seems potential for Rainbird to be read as a redemptive Native American figure, taking just vengeance against the government created by the colonizers that used a variety of covert means to eradicate his people, using their covert tactics against them, through which he becomes in part the vehicle/catalyst of their self-destruction.

But as Audre Lord has it, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Even if Rainbird is using covert means, his fight against the larger covert order again reinforces a sense that he’s associated with more “overt” evil of the “savage” variety as opposed to the “covert”/”civilized” kind. King, who loves “counterpoints,” seems to be using Rainbird as a counterpoint to Cap to make the (counter)point that there’s more than one way to be evil, once again indicting the more evil evil as the one that pretends not to be. It might be true that “civilized” has been the veneer of empire and its attendant ruthless bloodlust, but the use of Rainbird’s savagery to emphasize it ends up representing him in a way that’s essentially parallel to the original designation of indigenous people as “savage” as a means to prop up civilization–just in this case to prop it up as equally evil instead of the opposite.

The “Master’s House” brings us to the Shop’s precise location and its connection to America’s long and brutal history of oppression:

Two handsome Southern plantation homes faced each other across a long and rolling grass lawn that was crisscrossed by a few gracefully looping bike paths and a two-lane crushed-gravel drive that came over the hill from the main road. Off to one side of one of these houses was a large barn, painted a bright red and trimmed a spotless white. Near the other was a long stable, done in the same handsome red with white trim. Some of the best horseflesh in the South was quartered here. Between the barn and the stable was a wide, shallow duckpond, calmly reflecting the sky.

In the 1860s, the original owners of these two homes had gone off and got themselves killed in the war, and all survivors of both familes were dead now. The two estates had been consolidated into one piece of government property in 1954. It was Shop headquarters.

The designations of “plantation,” “antebellum,” “handsome,” and “graceful” are invoked a few times throughout the book to refer to these twin houses (including the passage in which Charlie burns them down); the “plantation” and “antebellum” labels more directly invoke a connection to slavery that the opening description explicitly–or almost explicitly–references by mentioning the Civil War. The setting here reinforces a thematic starting point of the Shop’s evil, implying that the Shop is carrying out an agenda parallel to/descended from the Confederate South’s systematic subjugation, which Rainbird’s whole deal (including his “red N-word” invocation) would imply goes all the way back to the conception of our country on land stolen from indigenous people in the first place.

But again, this plot does not figure Rainbird as a monster solely through the narrative logic that his country–or the country that took his country–made him one. His ultimate aim to degrade Charlie due to his preoccupation with death seems more rooted in a vague mysticism associated with his native heritage than anything else:

Perhaps with a child the result would be different. There might be another expression in the eyes at the end, something besides the puzzlement that made him feel so empty and so—yes, it was true—so sad.

He might discover part of what he needed to know in the death of a child.

A child like this Charlene McGee.

“My life is like the straight roads in the desert,” John Rainbird said softly. He looked absorbedly into the dull blue marbles that had been the eyes of Dr. Wanless. “But your life is no road at all, my friend . . . my good friend.”

Rainbird considers the killing he’s done for the sake of his job “impersonal,” thus the larger meaning he apparently seeks to derive from death seems disconnected from the White Man’s agenda that’s ultimately driving his impersonal killing career-wise. It’s the search for this larger meaning that motivates him to break with the Shop, again implying it exists in opposition to the Shop (i.e., is not something he has because of the Shop or its training). That and the terrible “‘roads in the desert'” mystic aphorism he utters in the wake of murder read to me as the construction of a Native American stereotype. The text problematically roots his desire to kill Charlie in the stereotype of that Native Americanness, in a desire to seek death for the sake of death and some kind of mystical/spiritual unity with it, rather than out of any desire for vengeance engendered by American/colonialist exploitation.

The single detail the text provides and leans on to try to “humanize” Rainbird, i.e., provide some type of character development, also invokes this vague stereotypical conception of Native Americans, a detail with both possibly mystical and savage connotations–that they go barefoot:

John Rainbird was a man at peace. … If he was not yet at complete peace with himself, that was only because his pilgrimage was not yet over. He had many coups, many honorable scars. It did not matter that people turned away from him in fear and loathing. It did not matter that he had lost one eye in Vietnam. What they paid him did not matter. He took it and most of it went to buy shoes. He had a great love of shoes. He owned a home in Flagstaff, and although he rarely went there himself, he had all his shoes sent there. When he did get a chance to go to his house, he admired the shoes—Gucci, Bally, Bass, Adidas, Van Donen. Shoes. His house was a strange forest; shoe trees grew in every room, and he would go from room to room admiring the shoefruit that grew on them. But when he was alone, he went barefoot. His father, a full-blooded Cherokee, had been buried barefoot. Someone had stolen his burial moccasins.

The shoe thing feels like a weird appendage of a detail to me. It’s presented as an antidote to a humiliation that his father suffered, but that humiliation was not getting to participate in a cultural rite that Rainbird’s highly Western capitalist materialist antidote of hoarding designer footwear seems to make a mockery of in and of itself. It feels more absurd than authentic. King seems to be abiding by Western narrative conventions in more ways than one here, and the shoe tidbit would be a violation of “show don’t tell”–I’m told this character “had a great love of shoes”; I’m not shown that in any way approaching convincing. Listing the brand names isn’t enough.

More effective is the way we’re shown Rainbird isn’t really at peace through the close-third-person narration in his point of view telling us that he is. John Rainbird’s conflict seems figured in the passage above as his being split between two worlds, his perspective likening the inside of his house (i.e., the unnatural world) to the natural world (“forest” “[]fruit”). This particular description does a decent job of splitting the difference of depicting Rainbird’s conflicting influences–Native v non-Native. But on the whole, when it comes to depicting one of these influences as more in the vein of tainting or contaminating–as more, in a word, monstrous, or raising the possibility that it’s the very combination itself that’s monstrous in a way that doesn’t necessarily figure one as “worse” than the other–the evidence above weighs heavily in the column of characterizing Native Americanness itself as problematically monstrous alongside a characterization of American monstrousness that is ultimately less problematic for being more historically justified…

Lest anyone thinks these points about Rainbird utterly irrelevant, a Firestarter film reboot is approaching production, with Zac Efron (our resident Neighbor) set to play Andy and a more recent announcement that Rainbird, the “Main Villain,” will be played by Michael Greyeyes, who “earned praise for his performance in the 2021 Sundance Film Festival entry Wild Indian” (in which he seems to also have played a murderous Native American). I suppose having a Canadian actor who is Native American play this “Main Villain” role when George C. Scott, an American actor who was not Native American, played it in the original, is in theory a marker of progress, but this description would indicate they’re sticking pretty close to the problematic aspects of the text:

John Rainbird is an agent who operates for The Shop – and is also a sadistic psychotic. When he learns of what Charlie can do, he becomes obsessed with her, and though his handlers don’t know it, he has plans to take the girl for himself when she is found. It’s a terrifying character….

From here.

But I do hope Drew Barrymore, whose childhood portrayal of Charlie might be the only thing that renders the original worth watching, plays reboot Vicky. King’s thematic use of drugs as another way to highlight both the government’s callousness and hypocrisy in their being willing to prey on an innocent child becomes ironic in light of his repeated thematic use (exploitation?) of children’s innocence to highlight the evil of adults by contrast (a la Holden Caulfield) has led to child actors such as Ms. Barrymore having their innocence thereby corrupted and often falling victim to substance abuse… But unlike the two Coreys, Ms. Barrymore has made an admirable recovery (seemingly facilitated by, like Charlie, telling her story), and as a woman who’s gained some power in male-dominated Hollywood, perhaps she might be able to bring some more dimension to the role, since Vicky probably presents us with our least developed character who feels like she should be entitled to a bit more nuance considering she factors pretty heavily in the path to Charlie’s powers. The novel’s in media res starting point necessitates burying Vicky in a past timeline, simultaneously draining the suspense and significance from her death. The absence of any human attributes other than the purely physical becomes most glaring in the flashback scene where Andy discovers her murdered corpse:

He opened the door between the washer and the dryer and the ironing board whistled down with a ratchet and a crash and there beneath it, her legs tied up so that her knees were just below her chin, her eyes open and glazed and dead, was Vicky Tomlinson McGee with a cleaning rag stuffed in her mouth. There was a thick and sickening smell of Pledge furniture polish in the air.

He made a low gagging noise and stumbled backward. His hands flailed, as if to drive this terrible vision away, and one of them struck the control panel of the dryer and it whirred into life. Clothes began to tumble and click inside. Andy screamed. And then he ran.

The details of the domestic setting here get more description than anything Vicky herself gets in the rest of the entire book. They seem an attempt to render the central horrific element of the scene–a corpse discovery–more horrifying by juxtaposing it with that which we find mundane: the dryer has “life”; Vicky does not. This trick would work if Vicky had a life as a character in the first place. Since she doesn’t, (at least) two things happen here: 1) Vicky the character becomes nothing more than the sum of her domestic duties, and 2) it’s the domestic itself that becomes horrific, figured as a murderer-by-proxy: if this is a horrific place to die, then it must have been a horrific place to live. But we have no idea how horrific Vicky might have found any of it, which leaves King himself as the one who finds these domestic trappings the essence of horror…

One random-seeming character ends up getting to feel more human than Vicky:

The name of the third man was Orville Jamieson, but he preferred to be called OJ, or even better, The Juice. He signed all his office memos OJ. He had signed one The Juice and that bastard Cap had given him a reprimand. Not just an oral one; a written one that had gone in his record.

This would appear to be a pretty explicit reference, one ultimately as random as the character himself. OJ is the eyes of the Shop agent on the ground who gets to experience Charlie’s destruction and danger more directly than Cap, but there’s no answer to the question of why this character is the agent who gets to be those eyes (he does not turn out to play any significant role in the action other than bearing witness), or why that character gets the initials that lead him to give himself the nickname of this particular cultural figure that at the time of Firestarter‘s publication would not have had quite the notoriety he has now. Perhaps King was inspired by Simpson’s role as a security guard in 1974’s The Towering Inferno…

In other perhaps more explicable likenesses, the “McGee” last name appears to be an homage to Travis McGee, a recurring detective character of mystery writer John D. MacDonald. I also happened to recently come across a “Chuck McGee” (i.e., Charlie McGee) in some non-King reading. This McGee is a real-life coach of “overbreathing” that James Nestor, the author of Breath, hired to practice the technique:

“You are not the passenger,” McGee keeps yelling at me. “You are the pilot!”

James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of A Lost Art. 2020.

This metaphor for control reminded me (once again) of Matthew Salesses’s reconsideration of the craft of fiction and how often Western literature depends on the idea of individual agency, which King’s plot once again reinforces by having nine-year-old Charlie escape the clutches of the Agency of the Shop, and by telling her story through the media, reinforcing the same Western democratic values that engender the existence of counterintuitive secretive government entities to “protect” it. At the end of the day, King might have thought he was sticking it to the Man with Firestarter‘s horrific depiction of callous G-men, but whether capitalizing on deep-state paranoia or critiquing it as founded, King is basically contributing to a larger cultural narrative Trump was able to use as a critical springboard, and might have had more spring for it….

-SCR

Firestarter: Burn It Down (Part I)

On By profrol4 Comments

“Burn it down, Charlie. Burn it all down.”

Stephen King. Firestarter. 1980.

The way we tell stories has real consequences on the way we interpret meaning in our everyday lives. 

Matthew Salesses. Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping. 2021.

Published in 1980, Stephen King’s novel Firestarter extends his themes and fictional universe in ways that often feel, like the storyline itself, more repetitive than cumulative.

The Summary

We open with 34-year-old Andy McGee fleeing on foot down a New York City street, carrying his 7-year-old daughter Charlie and closely pursued by two men in a green car. Andy gets them into a cab, using his ability to “push” the cabdriver to convince him the men are after someone else, and that a one-dollar bill Andy gives him is actually a five-hundred-dollar bill to pay for taking them all the way to the Albany airport. En route, Andy dozes and remembers the psychology department experiment run by Dr. Wanless that he participated in twelve years earlier as a senior in college because he needed money; he was given the drug “Lot Six” and met Charlie’s mother Vicky, another participant in the experiment; Vicky is dead, killed by the men now pursuing Andy and Charlie. When they make it to the airport, Andy, suffering a debilitating headache from using the “push,” tells Charlie she needs to get them some money. Charlie uses her abilities to extricate the change from the phones in the phone booths, but some of her power gets away from her, and ends up setting on fire the boots of a nearby serviceman on the phone with–and clearly being a jerk to–his girlfriend. 

As Charlie and Andy leave the airport on foot, Andy recalls the experience of the Lot 6 experiment in more detail. During it he was seated across from Vicky, and they began to communicate with each other telepathically and share intimate things with each other, falling in love. During the experiment Andy also saw a boy claw his own eyes out, though an assistant claimed afterward Andy was just hallucinating. 

As the green car makes it to the Albany airport and Shop agents search it, a van picks up Andy and Charlie as hitchhikers and drops them at a motel fifteen miles away. Andy recalls the year after Charlie was born, when things would catch on fire but he and Vicky wouldn’t speak of why. Eventually Andy had to yell at Charlie for setting her teddy bear on fire, after which point he called his old college roommate Quincey, who knew about the Lot 6 experiment and who told him that the Shop would be very interested in Charlie if they were to learn about her powers.  

At the Shop’s headquarters in Longmont, Virginia, Dr. Wanless has come in to see Captain Hollister, aka “Cap,” who first looks over the McGee file and Wanless’s notes on the Lot 6 experiment, most of whose subjects are now dead. Wanless comes in and gives his usual rant to Cap about how dangerous Charlie must be and how her parents must have given her a complex (a la toilet-training) about controlling her power and what could happen if she gets past this complex; Wanless thinks her “potential for destruction” is so high she needs to be killed. Then Cap meets with Rainbird, a half Cherokee Shop agent.

Meanwhile, at the hotel in Hastings Glen, Charlie recalls learning about her pyrokinesis powers and her parents telling her it was bad to use them. She and Andy shower and hit the road to hitch a ride while Shop agents (including Orv Jamieson, or OJ) convene nearby to search motels and restaurants; the pair of agents approaching Charlie and Andy’s motel blow a tire on the way and just miss them. Charlie and Andy are picked up by a farmer, Irv Manders, who takes them home for lunch with his wife. Sixteen Shop agents converge on the farm, and Charlie can tell (psychically) that they intend to kill her father. When agents grab Andy, she unleashes her pyrokinetic powers more than she ever has; in the commotion, Irv Manders is shot, and the Manders’ house burns down, but the Shop agents scatter (some are killed). Andy has to slap Charlie to snap her out of using her powers, at which point she almost inadvertently burns him up, too. Irv lets Andy and Charlie have his off-road Jeep and gives them directions to follow a dirt road that will help them evade the road blocks the cops have set up in the surrounding area to catch them. 

Per the orders he was given in his meeting with Cap, John Rainbird kills Dr. Wanless, but makes Wanless tell him everything Wanless knows about Charlie and her powers first. Charlie and Andy successfully make it to Tashmore, Vermont, to an isolated cottage owned by Andy’s now deceased grandfather. Andy recalls the first time the Shop’s agents abducted Charlie fourteen months prior when she went to spend the night with a friend: after a psychic flash, he left work early and came home to find Vicky dead; the friend’s mother Charlie was staying with told him that some “friends” of his in a van had picked her up. Getting another psychic flash the abductors were escaping via the freeway rather than the airport, he tracked the van to a rest stop and got Charlie back by using his “pushing” abilities on the two agents with her to an extent that they were driven insane (he pushes one of them into believing he’s gone blind). When Charlie learned they killed her mother, she was barely able to keep her power from burning up their hotel bathroom.

Andy and Charlie stay several months over the winter on Tashmore Pond; Charlie turns eight. In the spring Andy decides to mail several letters to different newspapers about what’s happened, thinking that publicizing it might be the only way to save them, but when he doesn’t get a response after a couple of weeks, he assumes, correctly, that his letters have been intercepted and the Shop knows where they are. The Cap enlists Rainbird to assist with their capture, at which point Rainbird reveals he’s been hacking Cap’s computer and has a lot of sensitive info in order to blackmail Cap into letting him have access to Charlie once she’s captured. On the day Andy and Charlie try to leave the cottage, Shop agents, including Rainbird, shoot them with tranquilizer darts and easily capture them. 

Five months later, a storm hits the Shop headquarters compound where Charlie and Andy are being held. The power goes out while Rainbird is in Charlie’s room posing as a janitor, and he uses it as an opportunity to get closer to Charlie by making up a story about being scared of the dark because of his time as a prisoner of the Vietcong. The blackout disrupts Andy’s med schedule, inducing a panic attack that somehow helps him regain his pushing abilities, and he ends up using the push on himself in his sleep.

As time passes after the storm, Rainbird–“John” to Charlie–convinces her to participate in a test and make fire in order to get some things for herself, like eventually seeing her father. Andy starts throwing his pills away and pretending he’s still drugged while using his push ability on his handler Dr. Pynchot to let him stick around for more testing instead of sending him away to another compound. Pynchot turns out to be a mental “deviant” (a transvestite), and so the push has an adverse effect on him that slowly makes him lose his sanity. Charlie does a successful test for the Shop people, demonstrating the startling potential scope of her powers. Afterwards she’s allowed to walk outside with John, who takes her to a stable where she meets a horse named Necromancer; Charlie tells John she was able to control her ability during the test in a way she hadn’t before. Cap and Rainbird decide Charlie ultimately can’t be controlled and that Rainbird will kill her. 

Cap calls Andy into his office to tell him Dr. Pynchot killed himself and that Andy will be going off to the Hawaii compound; Andy uses his push on Cap to find out how Rainbird has been manipulating Charlie and then to arrange that the Cap will take him along to Pynchot’s funeral. Charlie has a bad dream about Necromancer and other horses burning. 

Charlie does another test, this time destroying a cinderblock wall. She demands to see her father and threatens to make something happen if she doesn’t; one of the doctors, Hockstetter, thinks the testing has helped her practice her power in a dangerous way. On the way back from Pynchot’s funeral, Andy pushes Cap to arrange for both Cap and Charlie to come with him on the flight to the base in Hawaii (though he plans to get them off before that at a refueling stop), as well as to send Rainbird off to San Diego, and to give a note to Charlie. The Captain gives Charlie the note, which tells her to meet her father in the stables at 1pm the upcoming Wednesday, and not to trust Rainbird, who should be gone by then. This makes Charlie keep her distance the next time Rainbird visits her, which combined with the knowledge that Cap recently visited her, makes Rainbird nervous. He watches a recording of Cap in Charlie’s room and sees him pass the note; then Rainbird uses stolen computer codes to look over some files and deduces Andy does have his pushing ability and used it on Pynchot and Cap. When Cap calls to send him to San Diego, Rainbird agrees but then uses the Cap’s codes on the computer to cancel the order. 

That Wednesday, Charlie asks to go out to the stables, and an agent takes her with orders to leave her there. Rainbird hears about her request to go to the stables and is there waiting in the loft after making everyone else clear out when she gets there. Rainbird calls down to her and she yells at him for betraying her; he says he wants to be straight with her and has almost convinced her to come up the ladder to him to finish their business when her father comes in the with Cap (who came to get him for them to get on the plane to Hawaii). Cap now has a full-blown ricochet effect in his head about golf and snakes from Andy’s pushing. Rainbird has his gun trained on Andy and tells Charlie he can either shoot her father or she can come up the ladder to him and her father can go to Hawaii; she’s about to go to the ladder again with Andy thinking he’ll have to push her not to, but then the Cap freaks out thinking a nearby hose is a snake near the time the agent who escorted Charlie to the stable rings a compound-wide alarm telling everyone to converge on the stables. When Rainbird jerks his gun toward the suddenly moving Cap, Andy uses a massive push against Rainbird to make him jump from the loft. Rainbird breaks a leg but manages to hang on to his gun and shoot Andy (who felt himself already dying from the amount of push he just used anyway). Rainbird wants Charlie to look at him so he can look her in the eye as she dies (this is what he’s wanted from her all along) but as he fires his bullet she uses her power to vaporize both the bullet and then Rainbird.   

The back of the stable blows out, hitting a lot of Shop agents with shrapnel. Charlie goes to her dying father, who tells her to “‘[m]ake them know they were in a war” before he dies. When the horses start running from the barn, the Shop agents are on a hair trigger and shoot at them. Charlie comes up behind the agents and starts sending fire. She destroys the entire compound, including the antebellum houses. Her power almost spirals out of control completely, but she manages to get ahold of herself and send it into the duckpond. From the point of view of Shop agent OJ who was at the Manders farm, we get some of the chaos of Shop employees trying to climb the fences to escape and getting attacked by the Dobermen guard dogs there. Charlie sits by the pond recovering, then climbs the fence herself after a woman calls her a witch and Charlie screams back it’s not her fault. 

The media reports that the destruction at the Shop compound was a terrorist attack and that Rainbird was a double agent. Four weeks later, the new (female!) head of the Shop wants Charlie found and killed after the initial period of confusion following the destruction enabled her to get away. Charlie shows up at the Manders farm, and they take her in uncertainly because they were threatened by the government to keep quiet about what happened with Charlie last time. After some months, word gets back to the Shop about where Charlie is, but the morning agents show up to apprehend her, she’s already left. She makes it to the offices of Rolling Stone and says she wants to tell one of the writers her story. The End.  

The Agency

The titular trope of this novel seems a thematically apt one for the sea change my thoughts on the “craft” of fiction are undergoing as I’m teaching my first advanced fiction workshop in over a year and reading the recently released Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Matthew Salesses, who says:

Much of what we learn about craft (about the expectations we are supposed to consider) implies a straight, white, cis, able (etc.) audience.

Matthew Salesses. Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping. 2021.

Like many American institutions, this country’s fiction–popular and literary alike–is largely white supremacist. Nowhere is this more apparent than in King’s oeuvre. Salesses traces our idea of what’s “normal” in fiction back to Aristotle, who dissented with the god-driven plots common in the tragedies of his time to institute the character-driven model that is still the basis of literary fiction to this day. While King has played with both plot-driven and more character-driven models, within either, his white characters enjoy a significant amount of agency.

Take King’s story “Trucks,” for which we have a first-person white male narrator. If character development is knowing anything about this man outside of what he’s doing in immediate response to the sentient semis surrounding him, then we have zero here. But his white (supremacist) gaze is essentially consistent with any of King’s “implied authors,” as Salesses wold have it:

The girl in the booth screamed. Both hands were clamped into her cheeks, dragging the flesh down, turning it into a witch’s mask.

Glass broke. I turned my head and saw that the trucker had squeezed his glass hard enough to break it. I don’t think he knew it yet. Milk and a few drops of blood fell onto the counter.

The black counterman was frozen by the radio, a dishcloth in hand, looking amazed.

Stephen King, “Trucks,” Night Shift. 1977.

When the narrator ends up moored in a truck stop with a bunch of strangers, he sees a “girl,” a “trucker,” and a “black counterman.” The white male narrator is at the mercy of the trucks and essentially ends up enslaved by them at the end, but it is he who is able to lead the stand against them, hence: agency. But the agency of his gaze goes even further in defining a normative standard:

It is easy to forget whom we are writing for if we do not keep it a conscious consideration, and the default is not universal, but privileged. To name the race only of characters of color, for example, because that is how you’ve seen books do it before, is to write to a white audience. It is to write toward the expectations of how white people read the world.

Matthew Salesses. Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping. 2021.

History shows that white people tend to read the world as a hierarchy they’re at the top of, a worldview that keeps us in constant (bloody) conflict. Salesses traces how Aristotle’s character-driven plot model generally promotes the value of individual agency (agency in the sense of having the power ) in a way that certain government Agencies essentially propagated in a specific post-WWII fight:

In other words, the Workshop never meant craft to be neutral. Craft expressed certain artistic and social values that could be weaponized against the threat of Communism.

Matthew Salesses. Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping. 2021.

and

In his book on creative writing programs during the Cold War, Workshops of Empire, Eric Bennett traces the success of the workshop model to its history at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He quotes letters from Workshop cofounder Paul Engle to friends and funders, in which Engle sometimes describes his investment in craft as an ideological weapon against the spread of Communism. In one letter, Engle writes that he is convinced, “with a fervor approaching smugness,” that the tradition of Western literature “is precisely what these people [in the East], in their cloudy minds, need most.”

Matthew Salesses. Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping. 2021.

and

If you have been taught to write fiction in America, it is a good bet that you have been taught a style popularized by Ernest Hemingway and later by Raymond Carver, sometimes described as “invisible,” that is committed to limiting the use of modifiers and metaphors, to the concrete over the abstract, to individual agency and action, and to avoiding overt politics (other than the politics of white masculinity). Instead of a political argument, a character might angrily eat a potato. This is supposed to leave conclusions up to readers, though what it really means is that the ideology of craft is to hide its ideology. … If the Workshop is supposed to spread American values without looking like it is spreading American values, what better craft for the job than the craft of hiding meaning behind style? [bold emphasis mine]

I’ve been reading and writing about the “dirty” covert ops of the Central Intelligence Agency for some time, and now come to find out that through the weaponization of creative-writing pedagogy I’ve essentially been spreading their propaganda, an agent whose identity is unbeknownst even to myself…. So, that’s great. Salesses never name-checks the CIA, only this broader “ideological” battle between East and West, but this particular Agency’s enlistment and manipulation of literature is well documented.

In Firestarter, King does name-check the CIA:

“What sort of government agency we talking about? FBI?”

“No. The Shop.”

“What? That CIA outfit?” Irv looked frankly disbelieving.

“They don’t have anything at all to do with the CIA,” Andy said. “The Shop is really the DSI—Department of Scientific Intelligence. I read in an article about three years ago that some wiseacre nicknamed it the Shop in the early sixties, after a science-fiction story called ‘The Weapon Shops of Ishtar.’ By a guy named van Vogt, I think, but that doesn’t matter.”

It doesn’t matter, but it’s a sci-fi reference, so in it will go….and if the Shop didn’t “have anything at all to do with the CIA,” it wouldn’t be necessary for a character to state that categorically. The CIA-Shop likeness goes beyond general(ly questionable) covert tactics to the specificity of this plot: using mind-altering substances on unwitting subjects with the ultimate aim of mind control, which it’s been proven the CIA has attempted.

The CIA did Nixon’s dirty deeds dirt cheap, and Nixon is King’s Necromancer–his favorite whipping horse. This novel piles on the evidence that King was forged in the fires of Watergate and Vietnam.

“I’ve heard things,” Quincey said finally, when he saw that Andy wasn’t going to let him off without something. “But sometimes people listen in on phones, old buddy. It’s the era of Watergate.”

and:

Dr. Joseph Wanless had suffered his stroke on the same day Richard Nixon announced his resignation of the presidency—August 8, 1974. It had been a cerebral accident of moderate severity, and he had never come all the way back physically. Nor mentally, in Cap’s opinion. It was only following the stroke that Wanless’s interest in the Lot Six experiment and follow-up had become constant and obsessive.

As I sit here watching the closing arguments of Trump’s second impeachment trial, I’d say we still have not “come all the way back” from Watergate… the reveal of the potential for political corruption revealed by Nixon and his deployment of “intelligence” agents for a smear campaign is something Boomers could not un-see. After that it seems we entered an emperor-wears-no-clothes situation: we knew the system didn’t work but kept pretending it did anyway. Then Trump raised the specter of that corruption, beating it into a dead horse whose corpse he rode into the White House…

One of Trump’s favorite rhetorical levers is conspiracy theories, which were so effective due to our checkered political history (Watergate all the now known shady shit the CIA has done) opening up the possibility that these theories could be true; there was precedent. Drenched in deep-state government paranoia, Firestarter was published in September of 1980, shortly before John Lennon (RIP) was murdered by Mark David Chapman in December of 1980. There are conspiracy theories that J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, which Chapman was reading at the site of Lennon’s murder when police apprehended him, was part of some kind of CIA-related mind-control program, which is noteworthy in light of King’s overlapping interest in the specimen of the male adolescent. (Even if The Catcher in the Rye was not written or utilized as an explicit mind-control device, it’s still a mind-control device.)

Connected to the concept that the human mind might be programmed or controlled, the toilet-training metaphor about Charlie’s relationship to her powers, if leaned on too heavily/repetitively, took on resonance for me as a metaphor for how we’ve been conditioned to define a normative literary and otherwise standard as straight, white, male, etc., individualistic. I’m the perfect audience for some CIA-bashing, but I have been conditioned pretty strongly on the character-driven front to want what is in many ways lacking in this novel. I could do King’s premise-driven pocket-horror short stories for the most part, but in a novel, I struggle. Here, the characters are agents of the plot in that they only exist to advance it, instead of the plot existing to advance them. Not to say the characters should always be advanced, but they could at least be more interesting?

In Firestarter‘s premise, Andy McGee an unwitting victim of the government’s sinister experiment, utterly innocent. He seems to have less agency than a lot of white-male King characters, relentlessly pursued and powerless to stop it–except not entirely powerless. But using the “pushing” power he does have is literally killing him while we come to find the nature of Charlie’s is to feed on itself and grow more powerful, which subverts some of the agency that derives from Andy’s powers. His thorazine-dependent interlude at the Shop compound raises interesting themes about physiological v. psychological addiction and connects the “push” label to “drug pusher” (side note: according to an anecdote in King’s On Writing memoir, “pushing” is also the term King and his brother used for pooping when they were kids). Mind-altering drugs take away one’s personal agency, and I suppose the premise of a white man losing his agency is in large part what King is deriving horror from here. (The horror!)

So the Shop “controls” or is the party whose actions generate most of the plot here, but then they lose control in what turns into a narrative about the dangers of playing god. This happens not because of anything Charlie does–which would mean a more ancient-Greek-type plot of the Shop destroying itself–but because of a random storm, a deus ex machina, God in the form of a not-random storm…evidence for which might be the omniscient point of view in which this pivotal plot point of the electrical power going out is described (an omniscience reminiscent of a will-to-know-all in vein of CIA/NSA surveillance/”intelligence”):

The chain of events that ended in such destruction and loss of life began with a summer storm and the failure of two generators.

As someone who recognizes that the systems of our government consistently and constantly prey on people who have done nothing to “deserve” it, I shouldn’t need Andy to be the victim of his own tragic flaw to make this plot satisfying. Yet it’s my (conditioned) impulse to explore what that would look like, which would trace back to the reason Andy was in the study back in college in the first place: here it’s that he’s poor and needs money as he’s about to go to grad school for English. Surely something else I can sympathize with… but there’s something about him that just feels vanilla and hard to get invested in. (I don’t give a shit about his “Granther,” whose former existence is a paper-thin excuse for the cabin they’re able to hole up in, a convenient property that unwittingly belies this victimized white man’s privilege….) The novel’s alternating presentation of past and present timelines doesn’t help. In theory, opening in the middle of the action as it does should generate more tension/interest, but when it’s presented as Andy actually recalling the past in such detail as they’re in the midst of doing things like climbing down a steep highway embankment, it calls attention to itself as clumsy.

Other notable and in my (conditioned) view detrimental lacking aspects of character development would be Charlie, Vicky, Cap and Rainbird (more on the latter three in Part II). Charlie’s conflict over whether to use her powers is good or bad is pretty generic–ie feels like what any child might feel about this situation without anything to inflect it to express her individual character. Which just says more about my conditioning … the nature of Charlie’s power feeding on itself (the way fire itself does!) and the question of her control over it–her agency–resonates with the Shop’s relationship to its figurative power, but the conclusion of her story doesn’t play this out in much of a satisfying way; we get a Salem reference via the lady calling her a witch as she’s trying to leave and then she makes her way back to the Manders, where she only uses her powers in very tiny helpful ways that I guess are supposed to show us she has internalized the lesson that power corrupts and only seeks more power, a cycle she is then going to stop by going to Rolling Stone, of all places. This conclusion reinforces Charlie’s agency, which would feel more valuable to me for being non-male if she had some character development to pay more than lip service to her empowerment… It’s also a conclusion of King once again reinforcing the power of narrative itself.

Western patriarchal imperialist narrative, of course. This novel takes as its sole epigraph the opening line of Ray Bradbury’s famous novel Fahrenheit 451 about a world in which books aren’t just banned but burned. I mentioned in a previous post how King’s Bradbury homage “I am the Doorway” is “a possible (unconscious) allegory for … a passing of the patriarchal torch from Melville to Hemingway to Bradbury to King,” and it’s ironic that Firestarter takes 451 as its literary antecedent, since 451 seems like a conscious allegory about the dangers of burning down the patriarchal Western canon, while Firestarter feels like an unconscious allegory of the need to burn down the patriarchy itself. As the news breaks that Trump has been acquitted, it would be a pleasure to burn the whole of the Western canon and the political system that’s weaponized it.

Torch the torch…

-SCR