My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Stephen King Challenge #10
Well... this is awkward. The only reason this is getting a third star is because I found the idea well ahead of his time. Mind you now, this book is 36 years old, I've read my fair share of Stephen King books in succession and I could really use a break at this moment. So one could blame the times, the timing or the timelessness (or lack thereof) but I found the Firestarter's very hard to keep up with.
It dragged like hell. Oh yes, like hell it did. King takes his sweet time to set scenes and prepare climaxes and describe plot points from different views and I can only salute the master's will to adapt his storytelling style to a more ready-to-become-a-film trope... but unfortunately, my state of mind could not forgive slow pacing, long descriptions, loose ends and unbelievable villains. Rainbird is an assassin, a brute, a thug, a muscle, but also an expert tactician/strategist/hacker/cook/actor/improviser/psychologist, in the convenient massive package of an one-eyed, creepy mother loving Indian, with a metaphysical motive to kill people so he can see the glimpse of death as a reflection of the other side in their eyes when they die in his hands.
Add to this mix the so-ambitiously-futuristic-that-it-must-be-the-80s scene where Rainbird calculates probabilities through interviewing a terminal, and it amounts to an embarrassing pile of eye-rolling and sighing moments of impatience, during which I was convinced that I was sticking to this book out of sheer compulsion to get on with the challenge.
Watch the movie. It's fun. Read this in the toilet or on guarding duty while in the army.
And I'm taking a much needed from the Stephen King Challenge, before moving to Bachman's Roadwork.
View all my reviews