Firestarter

Stop me if you've heard this before- a Stephen King story about a little girl with telepathic capabilities who ends up starting fires. Yeah, at first glance Firestarter may appear to be King's first book, Carrie, all over again, but thankfully despite the similarities on the surface the plot is wildly different. Here King trades the pressures of fitting in at high school for the pressures of running away from the government; the titular firestarter Charlie was born to two parents who took a bizarre experimental drug in their college days to make some quick cash- the drug gave them some light psychic abilities, but their child was born with a much more powerful ability to start fires. They've tried to hide her powers for years so as not to arouse suspicion, but as she gets older this is harder and harder to do and soon enough the family is on the run from the FBI, when the book starts up. For the first half of the story we see the family constantly on the move and trying to outwit their potential captors, and then halfway through there was a huge event that I assumed would be a game-changer; unfortunately for me it "changed" in that it got a lot more boring. Seriously, the second half of the book just dragged and dragged for me as a major conspiracy is unraveled and you find out more about the people who are trying to get their hands on Charlie. There are a few great scenes in Firestarter, particularly the bizarre drug trip Charlie's father recalls early on, but there was a reason Firestarter took me forever to get through. And it's not that Stephen King is getting stale to me after plowing through so many of his books lately; I'm nearing the end of another one and it was much better!