Firestarter (novel)
1980 novel by Stephen King
Firestarter is a science fiction-horror thriller novel by Stephen King, first published in September 1980. It tells the story of a young girl, Charlie McGee, with the ability of pyrokinesis, whose destructive force a ruthless government agency tries to harness for their own purposes. In July and August 1980, two excerpts from the novel were published in Omni. The novel entered the New York Times' Best-Sellers List on August 24, 1980. In 1981, Firestarter was nominated as Best Novel for the British Fantasy Award, Locus Poll Award, and Balrog Award. In 1984, it was adapted into a film. A miniseries follow-up to the film, Firestarter: Rekindled, was released in 2002 on the Sci-Fi Channel and a remake from Blumhouse Productions was released on 13 May 2022. The book is dedicated to author Shirley Jackson: "In Memory of Shirley Jackson, who never needed to raise her voice."
Plot summary
Andrew "Andy" and Charlene "Charlie" McGee are a father/daughter pair on the run from a government agency known as The Shop. During his college years, Andy had participated in a Shop experiment dealing with "Lot 6", a drug with hallucinogenic effects similar to LSD. The drug gave his future wife, Victoria “Vicky” Tomlinson, minor telekinetic abilities and him a telepathic form of mind control he refers to as "the push". They both also developed telepathic abilities.
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This entry incorporates text from “Firestarter (novel)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.