H. P. Lovecraft once called Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables "New England's greatest contribution to weird literature." Pace Hawthorne scholars, there's a new contender, out of Maine, for the title. At least booksellers today would be unanimous in citing Stephen King, author of Carrie, The Shining, Salem's Lot, The Stand, The Dead Zone, and now Firestarter, best sellers all, as the northeast's preeminent scribe of the spooky.

King has not been taken very seriously, if at all, by the critical establishment. Unfortunately for him, it's all too easy to take cheap shots at his material by lifting bits of it out of context; what is ghastly when the mood has been set can be risible when the lights are up, so to speak. (p. 38)

But King's real stigma—the reason he is not perceived as being in competition with real writers—is that he has chosen to write about ghoulies and ghosties, about things that go bump in the night. Rats and vampires, necromancers and mind-readers, deadly plagues and telekinetic children: it may sound silly but, as King is well aware …, there's a long, as the saying goes, and honorable tradition.

It's a familiar list, these distinguished folk who've been intrigued with what Lovecraft termed "the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things": Dickens, Henry James, Kipling, Walter de la Mare, de Maupassant. And there are many best known for their work in the horror genre alone: J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James. References to these greats … are dotted throughout the King oeuvre. It is apparent that he has read widely and appreciatively in SF, fantasy, and supernatural literature.

King began by borrowing freely. In his collection of short stories, Night Shift …, two tales in particular call to mind earlier classics: "Jerusalem's Lot" (which sets the scene for the novel Salem's Lot) resembles Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and "Gray Matter" seems to owe a bit too much to Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the White Powder." But overall, King has been moving in the direction of admirable originality; it is no mean trick to make the here-and-now creepy, without recourse to gothic ruins or the Carpathian Mountains.

Firestarter is dedicated to Shirley Jackson and takes its epigraph from Ray Bradbury, another writer whom King often calls to mind, specifically when he elegizes small-town America…. Firestarter is [as Henry James would say] "an excursion into chaos," much as was Carrie, another novel in which a young female mind could upend the fixed laws of nature.

This time, however, the child is a grade-schooler, not a sexually strait-jacketed adolescent: Charlene Roberta McGee, a precocious seven-year-old when the story begins, is on the lam with her father, Andy, running from minions of "the Shop." (pp. 38-9)

Flashbacks reveal that Andy and Vicky, the woman who became his wife, had volunteered as guinea pigs in a drug-testing experiment back when they were seniors in college. Their encounter with "di-lysergic triune acid"—administered by a faculty member, yet secretly controlled by the Shop—is an episode of unsettling gruesomeness that doesn't really end when the effects ostensibly have worn off. Not only do Andy and Vicky find themselves afflicted with low-grade psychic powers, but their genes are somehow affected as well. They realize the extent of the problem when the infant Charlene shows herself to be capable, if annoyed, of sizzling up the hairs on her teddy bear….

The bulk of [Firestarter's scenario] is King's characteristic long-windedness; the rest is pursuit-and-flight … and the anticipation of those moments when Charlie shows herself to be "capable of manufacturing hell, or a reasonable facsimile." Yet the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and once again King has given the supernatural epic a good name, for those not afraid to meet it on its own terms. Though an inelegant writer … King impresses, finally, by virtue of his enthusiasm and self-confidence, his faith in his own imaginative powers. Some may object that King's writing is too enthusiastic, or, at least, too energetic. A true son of the 1960s, King in all his books makes the music coming out of the era one of his touch stones for decency and sensitivity…. Even his love of parentheses, to indicate thought or menace or to heighten a mood, could be considered writing stereophonically. Sometimes a King novel or story is a veritable lightshow of italics, ellipses, and parentheses; one imagines him drumming it out on an electric typewriter with rock music blaring behind and the occasional blown fuse.

King also has a well-known predilection for brand-name products: Hush-Puppies, Adolph's Meat Tenderizer, Pledge, Woolco, Sara Lee, Cheez Doodles, Cremora, Hefty Bags, Shakey's Pizza, etc. Certainly these items were missing from Castle Dracula, as were such favorite King expressions as "pissant," "doodly-squat," and "shitcan." King also does very well with making modern appliances and machinery, like lawnmowers and trucks, ominous, even predatory: perhaps he will one day give us a killer Cuisinart.

Stephen King, in short, is not the kind of occult writer who would have gone out and joined a satanic society; brushed by the counterculture, he's still much more likely to be a pillar of the local Kiwanis. But his Sears catalogue horror can be appealing, as it taps everyone from Edgar Allan Poe to Chuck Berry. Moreover, King's fiction fulfills, in its own way, Henry James's dictum that "a good ghost-story … be connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life." James might have fastidiously recoiled from King's lumbering prose but he would have understood what he was about. (p. 39)