Keeping Your Cool in the Cruel Summer Blues (Cujo, 1981)

Cujo (1981)

Good dog gone bad.

Scary cover alluding to a monster you
cannot see. It matches the disquieting fog
from which Cujo emerges, growling at his
beloved boy, Brett Camber. Before Cujo
attacks, he remembers who he is one last
time, and retreats into the mist. It is the
last time Cujo is his true self, and it is the
last time Brett sees him.

If anyone asked me what we studied in 9th grade Honors Physical Science, I'd plead mercy for my decrepit old brain cells since it was more than thirty years ago and who could remember with such a broadly-named subject, anyway . . . but the truth of the matter is that I'd be hard pressed to recall much even a year after its conclusion, let alone five years, ten years, or old-ass thirty years. There were likely assignments of some sort, and I do remember tests because we all cheated on at least one en masse (more on that in a sec), but what I remember most of all was our Very Notorious Teacher. She was small, vociferous, and nutty as a Peanut Buster Parfait. To protect her reputation (which she took no measures to protect on her own), we'll call her Professor Zee.

Professor Zee probably taught us things, but I'd be willing to bet that most of us remember her tangents more than any scrap of "physical" science, because they were generally off-topic, long-winded, highly personal, largely inappropriate, and relentlessly zany. Relating any details would be a dead giveaway, but I will say there were plenty of "husband" stories and almost none of them were chaste, Dagwood-variety antics with the two separate beds and innocent kisses on the cheek goodnight. Professor Zee was wildly entertaining, certainly unhinged, and very popular with all of her students. It should not shock you in the least that it was Professor Zee herself who urged us to cheat on that test.

The absolute bedlam of the early King praise
pages cannot be undersold. First, these
screaming, writhing, orgasmic blurbs
could be about any King title, so just cut and
paste with each new publication, who would
notice?? The most delightful part by far is
the publisher's helpful guide to turning
pages. I just want to kiss it on the mouth,
it's so stupid.

I had the half-baked maturity to know we were getting away with physical science (honors!) murder, and knew enough to be vaguely ashamed of it, but I still took my varnished A's home with a big, faux-proud grin and presented them to my mother as genuine and earned. Professor Zee was a chaotic, messy, reckless force that no one bothered to reckon with (or snitch out) and I was still recovering from the educational joke that was my middle school experience. My grasp of basic ethics was shaky at best. Yet, I knew it was wrong. Not gonna lie now, especially when it was thirty years ago.

Sometime around Halloween, we were revving up another cacophonous class of semi-learning, but Professor Zee was either out of gas or feeling magnanimous and offered the stage to someone else for a rare change. The question was posed, "Does anyone know any scary stories?" By ninth grade, who didn't? But one of my friends (which I could not tell you, my merciful memory spares both of us the chagrin) decides to pipe up, "Ooo Erin knows! Erin knows lots of scary stories." This was no doubt because I was known as a rabid (natch) Stephen King fan. While I cajoled some friends into reading most of my own short stories, I kept the darker stuff pretty close to the vest since those stories were, without question, thinly veiled murder fantasies about my real-life bullies. I don't think I even changed the names, for God's sake. So, I'm pretty sure I got "elected" to tell a scary story to the honors physical science class that afternoon for no other reason than my well-known obsession with all things Stephen King.

A little more specificity here, but what I truly love this time around is how
they're actually right, if not, in some cases, just a little coked up on the hype.
Minneapolis Tribune is about to pop a vein.

Mildly panicked and surely sweating, I scrambled to remember the most recent read, Cujo, to retell to the class. Professor Zee even turned off the overhead fluorescents to properly gloom the mood. In the silence, I took a breath, all eyes on me, and unfurled a scene of ball-constricting fear and gut-punching horror. I watched their expressions darken, my classmates, all middle-school survivors, as their faces drained, their eyes went dead with shock, their skin no doubt crawling . . . because I was so fucking BAD at storytelling it was criminal, y'all. The word "um" was uttered no less than one hundred million times on this planet that afternoon, and ninety-nine million were mine all mine. UMM, like, it was a disaster, a discombobulated, stuttering mess. Ugh. The humiliation. It was a wet and slithering thing and it was all over me. When you see that many faces looking at you with unmistakable pity . . . hoo boy, let me tell you. I cratered. I think I apologized at the end. I think I stopped my own heart. I remember feeling floaty and full of brimming vomit. Did Professor Zee sigh and make me take a bow or did I hallucinate that? We'll never know.

What I do know is that virtually no horror story is truly scary unless it's told by the right storyteller. Stephen King is a phenomenal storyteller. Ninth grade me was decidedly not.

New American Library is not messing around with the revenue. They jam
these paperbacks with as many ad/order pages as they can get away with,
and probably wished they could have done more. Note the title typeface
does not match the cover type, so this is likely just a reprint directly from
the hardcover edition with the prelim and end pages updated accordingly.

Whether it was the old memory or the recent Firestarter debacle, I was dreading rereading Cujo. I remembered enjoying every previous reading, but it had been maybe decades since I'd last dug in, so who knew what cringing horrors awaited me. On a whim I listened to the first few sentences of the audiobook only to slam that stop button before the voice stuck and ruined the book forever. I couldn't tell you if Lorna Raver did a good job, any better or worse than Dennis Boutsikaris did on the audiobook for Firestarter, but I do know now that I'm extremely unlikely to try audiobook fiction ever again. There are likely benefits to experiencing nonfiction in audio form, but the single voice is far too limiting in fiction where worlds are created and populated by so many different beings. I need a blank space, my own headvoice, entirely neutral and open to interpret and create those voices in my mind.

I am delighted to say that I still love Cujo. Sure, the horror tropes are a bit thin by now (1981!), but I still felt the anxiety, the terror, and the decompressing emotion that packs such and visceral, hateful, anguishing punch at the climax of the life-or-death showdown between a terrified, injured mom and a sick, mad dog. I finished it in a few big gulps of time, racing through the story as any good horror/thriller writer can only hope for, and left it by with my eyes still shining with tears and satisfaction. Good book, great storytelling. King's ability to herd the reader from one harrowing plot point to another, the threat ever building, the fear percolating until it explodes in a scorching shot of confrontation, is a finely tuned, 200-pound-machine of charging death from start to finish.

The numbering is a bit weird, but this is probably a scan of the fifth reprint
of the 1982 movie-tie-in paperback. See NAL hustling at the top? 

My first knowledge of Cujo was via the movie trailer shown on television, a teaser trailer that does not show the dog at all, but a series of tense moments and the title running spookily together in blood. I literally did not know what Cujo was, thinking it might be some sort of monster or alien, until someone at school told me it was a Saint Bernard, an idea so ludicrous it was impossible to take seriously. I mean, that ominous movie poster (the same as the original paperback, see above), the trailer never showing the dog, no explanations and just flashes of terror . . . what a fantastic marketing ploy, right? But once you find out it's a Saint Bernard it all falls apart. When I was a kid, Saint Bernards were the adorable lumps with the first aid casks around their necks (a fiction, by the way), saving people in the snow. Saint Bernards were slobbery, dopey, and fluffy. Who would make a horror movie about a dumb Saint Bernard?

The movie came out a couple of years before I ever read King, but I saw Cujo on cable eventually (well before I read it) and man oh man was that ever Gross. They were just like, okay, let's train these dogs to snarl and lunge, drown em in fake blood and puss, and have em attack the ever-lovin shit out of this little car, smearing the muddy, bloody, sick slime all over everything in the height of summer while pretty Dee Wallace and adorable Danny Pintauro sweat in terror and the greenhouse effect until everyone cries because it's seriously so awful to watch. It is gruesome, frightening, and just . . . rough. They did manage to make a Saint Bernard scary. And they created an effective public service announcement for vaccinating animals against rabies.

Dedication page (vii)

Perhaps the filmmakers knew they could only pile so much punishment on an American audience since (spoiler alert) the movie ends differently from the book. It stays fairly faithful to King's story until then, with the infidelity and career derailment subplots largely intact, but it seems the filmmakers simply could not stomach the idea of killing the kid. When I first read the book at age thirteen or fourteen, I recall bounding around the room in a frenzy because it really is a thriller, the woman and boy trapped and in peril, the cops and husband knowing something is terribly wrong but chasing all the wrong leads. But I was particularly struck by the ending, shocked that 4-year-old Tad Trenton not only dies, but dies of something so preventable and mundane: dehydration and heat exhaustion. The monster from his bedroom closet, something he's feared incessantly while snugged in his bed every night and something Cujo becomes in Tad's mind the first time he charges their car, never sets a nail or tooth to Tad. Instead, he dies from fear and shock; the fear of the monster, the fear of being hurt, the fear of being killed, his mother's fear of taking a risk to try for the house (and a phone) only to possibly fail and lose everything. It's absolutely devastating.

Only King, who reportedly does not recall writing Cujo due to a cocaine binge, could explain why there is such a marked difference between Firestarter's two-dimensional Charlie and Cujo's fully realized human child, Tad Trenton. Both books were written around the same time, so the disconnect is perplexing. There is such a tender care to Tad's creation, with beautiful, strange, funny, beguiling details about his thinking, his habits, his world and the ways he moves within it, that make Tad as real as anyone who's walked this earth. His death, and Donna's completely feral reaction to it, packs a significant, lingering punch.

I love Stephen King's compulsion to
always add epigraphs, sometimes a whole
bouquet of pertinent quotes, almost as
much as I love his twisted sense of humor.
I don't delve into the Sharp Cereal fiasco
that complicates the Trentons' lives, but
it starts with a very Stand By Me (The
Body) pie eating contest kind of gruesome
scene of hilarity which leads to an
engaging side story of its own.

I think Cujo was the first King book that worked on me in ways beyond the often clever but sometimes cheap thrills of horror. The genre is compelling for the most simple of reasons: Being chased by someone or thing to be maimed and/or eaten is the cornerstone to our entire existence from the beginning of complex life on earth. Fight or flight, all the way down into our slugfish DNA. If humans have nothing else in common with one another, this fundamental evolutionary survival instinct is it. But with Cujo, King delved deeper, into the sly horrors of domesticity, stagnancy, forgetting who we are and what we are meant to be or do.

The world-building part of the story is just as engaging as the jump scares and swooning terror of Donna and Tad trapped in that Pinto by a rabid-mad, massive dog. Donna's infidelity, and the plain but piercing reasoning behind it, were especially eye-opening. None of the reasons were good enough, yet they were all valid in their own way. Reading Cujo at that particular age, the dead-end housewife life Donna Trenton was leading certainly seemed like a version of a horror story. Even at thirteen, I knew intellectually that things were rarely black and white, but there was something about the way Donna comes to understand her inner conflict, how lucidly she brings together the fragments of reasoning that led her down this path, even as she condemns herself for allowing it to happen, and how much harder it is to convey those feelings in any truly effective way during that first confrontation, with her husband deeply hurt and betrayed, and Donna supplicant but still suffering under the weight of her worries, not one of which benefited from the betrayal, even if they were the cause.

"It's knowing you can't wait any longer to be a grownup, or wait any longer to make your peace with what you have. It's knowing that your choices are being narrowed almost daily. For a woman--no, for me--that's a brutal thing to have to face. . . . Men . . . they know what they are. They have an image of what they are . . . They don't hear that wind, or if they do, they find a lance and tilt at it, thinking it must be a windmill or some fucking thing that needs knocking down. And what a woman does--what I did--was to run from becoming. I got scared of the way the house sounded when Tad was gone." (King, 91)

I felt that last part in my chest, always remembered it, and it bookmarks the place in my own history where I first read Cujo, even more than the embarrassing retelling of the tale in Professor Zee's Honors Physical Science Fiasco. My little family had gone through a particularly rough patch of years--a job loss, moving from a relatively happy home to a series of elsewheres, two years of wretched middle school, the humiliation of food stamps, begging off bill collectors, selling off irreplaceable heirlooms--to come out the other side shaky but still together, mom and me against the world, her in a new job, me in the mercifully anonymous halls of high school, both of us living in a better place with fewer worries and less stress. As much as the previous two years hurt, they taught me a great deal of perspective. I was still a brat, mind you, but a more empathetic brat. I knew what Donna meant when she said she got scared of the way the house sounded, for her when Tad was gone, for me the echoing clang or the grinding creak of another strange smelling old rental, temporary, dimly lit, each one farther from comfort, pushing us back into the proverbial washout, deep in the weeds with a broken compass, lost and keening for Home. Even though the concept of "home" was already overexposed and sun bleached from too much obsessing and not enough cohesion. Having moved around all my life, what was home, anyway? A rumor. A fiction. Home is where the boxes sit half unpacked.

King in full KING mode, one whole page
to set up a fairy tale introduction...

I remember the novelty of a new kind of perception, how I expected to feel nothing but judgement for Donna Trenton's infidelity at the first mention of it, but instead found myself relating to her, understanding her, empathizing with her. For once King had created a female character with agency, a woman motivated by complex emotions and experiences. Donna is a wife and mother, and she focuses on her husband and her child, but they are not the sum total of her. King's wisdom in setting the scene with Donna in conflict with her husband, heartsick with worry over the future and the consequences of her betrayal, all while mothering sweet Tad and still going about the grueling tedium of life--the simple act of getting her car fixed by a local mechanic--prime the reader to inhabit the world beside her, trundling down that dusty road in the failing Pinto. Donna is a real person, finally and praise Jaysus hallelujah, a three dimensional human woman. It makes every harrowing experience in the Cambers' dooryard all the more gripping and brutal. She is real, Tad is real, and the stakes are excruciatingly high.

...only to start the book off reminding
everyone of The Dead Zone's side-
creep and Castle Rock's very own
deputy dawg and serial killer,
Frank Dodd.

Still, what was more striking this read around was the narrative that follows Donna's lover after the ugly break between them (he considers raping her) and his subsequent retaliation over her rejection. Steve Kemp is a traveling jack of all trades, with a side business refinishing antiques and a side hustle as a sore loser tennis pro, whose part-time ambitions of laying married women and beating their husbands on the court pale next to his delusions of distinction as a writer. He even has a van with a mural painting on the side. While Steve the Choad is a bit of a stale toad as a character, there is a spark of genuine relevance to him, aside from being a terrible life lesson for Donna and a clear plot device for King.

After his scrap with Donna and subsequent mailing of a very authentic, hard to refute revelatory letter to Donna's husband, Steve Kemp decides to blow town for the next gig, somewhere west and away, to keep on truckin, as it were, and live his rolling-stone life just as any real writer should aspire to do. His temper, and his appalling lack of character, get the better of him, so he decides to turn around and head back to Castle Rock to serve out some more punishment for Donna's impudence. He drops in on the Trentons' home, let's himself in, and finds the house empty (Donna and Tad are already in the midst of their fated encounter with Cujo). In a frenzy best described as childishly terrifying, Kemp trashes the house, smashing, breaking, crashing, destroying . . . then concludes his tantrum by jacking off on the Trentons' bed and leaving a snide note on the refrigerator "Left something upstairs for you, baby."

As Steve Kemp puts distance between himself and what he's done, something remarkable and grotesque happens. It's so common, so familiar, and yet it never struck me so hard as it did this time around:

Had the retribution been too heavy for the offense? So what if she didn't want to make it with him any more, so what? He had trashed most of the goddam house. Did that, maybe, say something unpleasant about where his head was at? 

He began to work on these questions a little at a time, the way most people do, running an objective set of facts through a bath of various chemicals which, when taken together, make up the complex human perceptual mechanism known as subjectivity. . . . [H]e tore down what had happened and then carefully rebuilt it . . . until the facts and his perception of the facts jibed in a way he could live with. (King, 201)

As Kemp settles into the revised perception of what he's done, literally leaving it in the rear-view mirror as he drives toward Idaho, he revels in the familiar grift of his lifecycle, his belief that rolling on will keep him honest, enrich his writing, make him the man we wants to be perceived as.

He would have been unable to understand the significance if someone had pointed out the fact that, whether in Maine or in Idaho, he would still be apt to throw his racket down in angry frustration if he lost a game of tennis; that he would refuse to shake the hand of his opponent over the net, as he always had when he lost. He only shook over the net when he won. (King, 202)

By the end of the first day's drive, Kemp has not only absolved himself from his monstrous acts, he has canonized himself a modern day Che Guevara.

His sleep was easy. He had convinced himself that trashing the Trentons' house had not been an act of half-mad jealous pique but a piece of revolutionary anarchy--offing a couple of fat middle-class pigs, the sort who made it easy for the fascist overlords to remain in power by blindly paying their taxes and their telephone bills. It had been an act of courage and of clean, justified fury. It had been his way of saying "power to the people," an idea he tried to incorporate in all his poems. (King, 202)

The reason why this particular human failing struck me so hard at this time around should be abundantly clear when framed in the events of the world as I write this (June 2020). After months of Covid-19 quarantine, the world watched a nine minute murder via Twitter and an enormous number of society took a deep, shaking breath and said, "Stop." There have been protests, marches, looting, lynchings, and widespread police brutality, recorded, documented, and put on blast for anyone with an internet connection to see. It seems the answer to an unforgivable act of police brutality has been . . . more police brutality. In so many of these cases, mirroring countless police-involved shootings and deaths that came before, there is a flashfire, emotional reaction to a situation where minimal professionalism requires there should be none. The person with the badge and gun gets called something he doesn't like, or isn't obeyed immediately even as a suspect is asking why he's been pulled over while the officer refuses to answer, or perhaps someone just runs . . . and that is all it takes for that officer to lose all composure and attack, far too often with deadly force. Sometimes it is a baton, sometimes it is a shove, sometimes it is a rubber bullet. And sometimes it is a real bullet. It has been a sickening though not surprising display.

A fundamental fact of the human condition is hating to admit when we're wrong . . . or weak, or flawed. Some people go their entire lives in a constant state of self-absolution. "I would never do that," "I'm a good person," "how dare you question me." And on. It's an incredible feat of denial and one hundred percent excrement.

Gloss stock, black and white, movie
still inserts. Dee Wallace and Danny
Pintauro were perfectly cast in the roles
of Donna and Tad Trenton. 

I am very flawed. Lots of flaws. Beautiful flaws. Most flawed. I've got lots of shiny feathers, too, glorious, iridescent coloring, and empathy to the moon and back. But with a mean streak, and a permanent wall between me and pretty much anyone. There are doors, but they are hidden, require keys, sometimes passwords. And they move around. A lot. My temper is a living, sharp-toothed thing, springloaded in the dark corner. My love is true. I've had successes and failures. I've been a good listener and a bad friend. In all things, I'm Working On It.

The first time I heard the contrarian phrase "All Lives Matter" my first thought was, "okay, understandable." It was easy to be flippant since, as a white woman, I literally had no skin in the game. Upon further reading, I was made to understand the full meaning of the phrase "Black Lives Matter" . . . and the thoughtless insensitivity of the All Lives Matter response. When shouted in public, meme, or blog post today, at best, it is just ignorant. Worse, it is deliberately ignorant. The very worst, it is toxic narcissism. I'm starting to believe that most people still countering with the All Lives mantra are the latter. The phrase "Black Lives Matter" and every conceivable, patient explanation of the meaning, the history, and the importance of the movement have all been around long enough for everyone to understand what it means if they really wanted to.

Let's face facts, some people don't give a shit and never will. Others are steaming in that subjectivity bath and are positively sodden in wrinkly denial.

King, epigraphing even at the close. 

The juxtaposition of Donna Trenton's striving toward emotional maturity--coming to terms with her weaknesses and attempting to understand her motivations--and Steve Kemp's stubborn, stunted self absorption that leaves him in an endless cycle of reactionary immaturity and vain self delusion is a microcosmic diorama of America today. It's hard as hell to see your own failings, harder yet to own up to them. But if you can do it, you can come out the other side better educated and stronger than you were before.

The first time I saw someone write "I hate white people" on social media, I reacted as though they were attacking me personally. How could I not take it personally? I'm a good person! I am a white people! I shall clutch my pearls and squawk indignantly! First of all, not everything is about me. Second of all, even though whoever said it (and liked it, and shared it . . . ) probably meant "White People (TM)" there have undoubtedly been times in my life where I was acting like white people (TM). Third of all, I am generally a good person, but I do take things personally even when they are not directed at me and also are you mad at me you seem mad at me if you are mad at me that is not fair so I am now mad at you also fuk u and your entire ancestry and we are at WAR.

Denial is so much easier, and defensive anger stands point to beat those ugly truths into the ground. It poisons you, though, pickles your heart, turns your brain into a rancorous tumor of reactive rage. There is no peace in that. One of the longest, most harrowing breaches to traverse is coming to terms with white privilege and the simple truth that you have benefited from it even if you never asked for it. You can't hot potato privilege to someone else and scream "not mine." It just is. And there is no WAR in acceptance.

See? NAL is selling all its wares -- blanks are not allowed!

I had to go to a lot of therapy to work on My Shit (TM) and I'm still a work in progress. After the stress of quarantine and the collective trauma of seeing a man murdered by an officer of the law, we are all due for some therapy. The toxic narcissists who believe others should die to maintain their aggressively uninspired, frosted tip, latte laden, supershopper, Applebee's happyhour status quo while screechily cricketing All Lives Matter with no sense of irony at all should get in the front of the Extreme Therapy line. Every American should get a primary care physician and mandatory psychological analysis as part of standard, baseline healthcare. Therapists should be as commonplace and necessary as dentists. One EMDR session with every cleaning!

All the introspection and emotional maturity in the world isn't going to save Donna Trenton from the shattering Hell that she must face, first by stepping out of her car for the last time, desperate to save her failing child, committed to battle the beast that has already laid her open and infected her with the rabies virus. She faces off with him, beats him with a bat, her rage and terror pushing her on even as he refuses to die, keeps at her, gnashing, biting her. Even when he is finally dead, she's crossed into some haze of delirium, beating his dead body to a pulp as her husband finally pulls into the Cambers' dooryard to find her there, a wretched, wasted figure in an ecstasy of annihilation. Despite everything, it is too late for Tad Trenton. Donna tries desperately to revive him, hissing and biting at her husband, later the paramedics, but he is gone.

Not! One! Blank! Page! Dammit!

But that is not the end of Cujo, as the much sunnier movie version leaves off with Donna holding a living Tad, instead we see the aftermath for the Cambers, the Trentons, Cujo, and even the hole he jammed his head in at the beginning of the story only to find it full of buzzing squealing flapping batwings with razor teeth. Cujo's remains go to the dump, no one ever finds the hole, the Cambers get a new dog (with all his shots), and the Trentons begin the excruciating work of creating a new life without the light that was once at the center of it, Tad. The healing for the Trentons is slow and painful, but it progresses. The future is not certain, but there is an undeniable hope cast over the epilogue, despite going through something so singularly horrible and losing someone so deeply loved, they manage to stick together, deliberately and thoughtfully. It doesn't break them.

What of Steve Kemp? The book never says. He is of no true consequence other than the fleeting destruction and bad karma he leaves in his wake. This is where stunted fools who refuse to learn and grow belong, dead-end footnotes in the ten cent bin.

To my recollection, this was a metallic
silver back cover, similar to Crayola silver,
pretty but not critical. Metallic inks are
generally more expensive than flat colors,
though it can depend on the type of
printing. Since this is old school, I can
assure you it was offset, and definitely
more costly. However! When you're
running thousands of copies in each
printing, the costs drop dramatically.
Whenever I see this particular shade of
metallic silver, I remember how one
almost exactly like it was our imprint's
"signature color," which means it appeared
on all promo material, logos and logotypes,
etc. Unfortunately, most of our books
could not use it since the print runs were
tiny (academic!) and the ink was too costly.

Imagine the strength true emotional maturity requires. The resolve to stand back and assess instead of lashing out defensively at the slightest hint of antagonism. The perspective needed to stay calm, listen, and at least try to empathize. The character it takes to stay cool under pressure, not allow the emotional outbursts of others get the best of you, and manage tense situations with sensible authority. Imagine aspiring to that, something to emulate and admire, instead of allowing oneself to go low, weasel-like, reactionary, thin-skinned, terrified, permanently aggrieved, badly behaved like chest beating teenagers with weapons of war and a licence to harm and hospitalize instead of serve and protect. It seems reasonable to expect the very best of the people armed to do the most harm, some semblance of emotional maturity being the least of it. "Not All Cops" is still one bad cop too many.

This, of course, is but one aspect of an enormous problem. But each individual can start by being personally accountable and reverent to the awesome responsibility of policing.

Anyway, aspire to be a mighty Donna Trenton. Don't be a mini-balled Steve Kemp. Black lives matter.

Grade: B+
Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 8. Lots of building dread leading up to calamitous jump scares and shots of sheer terror. A solid work of unapologetic horror.
Warnings: Yes, n-word. Spoken by the turdy, mean country folk, of course. I want to say the usage is not as flippant as previous novels, but I'm probably reaching. Just a warning that it's there, an ugly, festering little sore of a word. Otherwise, the biggest warning is Tad. Even with the spoilers, it's hard to read. The kid gets under your skin and the blast circumference of the pain is miles wide.

Artifact: The Internet Archive wins the day yet again! I did notice that things come and go from these collections, so that's something to keep in mind. I've been able to find everything I've needed so far (in chronological order), but upon searching for Firestarter to look something up, I found all the print scans were suddenly gone. Not sure why that was, but it seemed important to mention. For Cujo, I downloaded the same paperback edition I had as a kid: same cover, same interior, same browning around the edges. I'd never read a novel via the laptop before, but once I got into a rhythm with the scrolling, it was mostly fine. Books still rule, though. I'm probably never going to sway from that belief no matter what technology they come up with . . . unless they make a hologram Stephen King that sits on my couch and reads to me, I guess.

Nah. Books rule, the rest drools.

The Impossible Predicament of American Girlhood (Firestarter, 1980)

Firestarter (1980)

She'll burn you to the ground.

The month of September 2018 was a dark time for many, and while every person struggling during that period had their own reasons, their own stories to tell, I was grappling to put an easy label on my own, to get down to the marrow of it and figure out once and for all: Why did the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination and subsequent hearings bother me so much? I didn't personally know the guy. I didn't know Christine Blasey Ford. But the whole sordid affair was still somehow familiar, anyway, slimy and reeking with a musty stench from the past, so much so that I spent many of my waking moments of free time thinking about it, reading about it, and trying to get to the core of it, to the dark part of me that reacted so strongly to this particular moment in US history.

Once the assault allegation was made public, the testimony given, the details laid bare, it was impossible not to contextualize the events that transpired in the summer of 1982 with my own memories of that time. E.T. was the big summer movie that year, but that summer also saw the release of such teen-scene classics as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Last American Virgin, and (shudder) Zapped!; a slippery slope of angst-hijinks-sexcapades of varying levels of Cringe and Shame. Brett and Christine met in a adolescent world steeped in the lowball culture of under-aged partying, peer-endorsed grab ass, and Porky's.

In 1982, women were considered liberated enough to become professionals beyond secretaries or teachers, chain smoke Virginia Slims, take the pill, and have premarital sex if they so dared, but they were also under the threat of being branded with obligatory neon letter-A. Instead of banishment from town, such progressive women could hope to at least be labeled flirty, fun, a good time girl, but she could just as likely expect to be called a hussy or whore behind her back, if not directly, and unapologetically, to her face. These liberated choices belonged to women of age, of course, while girls teetered on the precipice between modernity and tradition, inundated with ads for Barbie, Strawberry Shortcake, Jem if you were "edgy." Unicorns, rainbows, and Lisa Frank aesthetics were all the rage. In 1982 (and some would argue even now) a girl's potential might include non-domestic ambitions, like being a teacher or even a doctor, but the conditioning always included the roles of Wife and Mother. It was never either/or, it was always either/and.

Part of that conditioning required deference to men, obedience to men, gleaning some sliver of validation from men. If you were lucky, Prince Charming would recognize what a shiny little diamond you were, treat you accordingly, run the ramparts with you against the world happily ever after. Perhaps he would buy you a two-story home with a chef's kitchen and a master bedroom. Unfortunately, receiving reverence barely earned can create little monsters who take that doting deference for granted.

When Kavanaugh cried during his testimony, recounting his daughter's words that they "should pray for the woman," in my heart I knew this man. The multifaceted hypocrisy of the man who could easily have been the boy Christine Blasey Ford was pinned under almost forty years ago, terrified and suffocating. There are, after all, so many like him. The nasty boy who hid behind his "faith" all while behaving like a depraved lunatic on Friday and Saturday nights. The president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes cracking jokes about the fat girls in gym, which girls he'd "do" only with a bag over her head, which girls gave the best head. The boy who was "owed" that deference, whose moral center slid effortlessly in whichever direction allowed him to behave in whatever way he saw fit. The boy, if ever called out for his bad behavior, who cried immediate foul, the boy who was always "just kidding around," even if the people he left in his wake were crying, avoiding school, developing eating disorders, practicing lethal knots.

Sure, I'd met him before, plenty of boys just like him, during my own harrowing journey through adolescence just a few years after those fateful events in the summer of 1982. We all had. There's at least one pack of them, if not several, sniggering their way through the bitterly long days of school, the hazy, daze-y nights of shooting pool, cruising, partying.

Do I not believe that an act of pure Christian kindness could move Brett Kavanaugh to tears? I do believe it. But I also believe the testimony that brought him to tears was a calculated maneuver to bolster his character. I believe Brett Kavanaugh was overwhelmed with a lot of other emotions that day, and all the days leading up to his testimony, most of which would have easily led to tears, fury, and childish outbursts. He was frustrated, incensed. He believed a great injustice was afoot. And I believe he cried because he got called to task for something that was once the status quo. The slap and tickle, the chase, Russian hands and Roman fingers, just bros being bros. Hardy har har. They were just kidding around. 

How could Brett Kavanaugh be held to account for something he did in the panty-raid days of the early 80s? It was, to him, an outrage. I believe this in my bones.

And this is where I settled in to the memories, let the incidents rack up, one by one, the petty little indignities, the outright assaults. I was alive in that same timeline. I went to parties, gatherings, witnessed the immaturity, the infantile games, and saw how fast "fun" could turn ugly and sour. And I'm alive now, alive and furious, but also basking in the glow of the new generations of women who witnessed the lazy sexism, the glowering fat-baby puling of men no longer allowed to treat women like objects, moving predictably from crying spoil sport to NOT ALL MEN, and said, unequivocally, Fuck that. It's glorious. A true balm on the burn, salve for the scars.

But the wounds break open when these 1982 "bad boys" rear their sneering little preppy heads, as the privileged so often do, first when their rich, spray-tanned Cool Dad got elected president of the United States . . . then when their Bro-in-Chief got nominated to the Supreme Court . . . only to be outrageously held accountable for alleged horseplay when he was but a wee, church-going lad. As so many of us watched the Kavanaugh hearings play out from the sidelines, we shook our heads, reliving our own memories, remembered the clamoring trolls of our youth. I set my eyes on that frown line between Kavanaugh's brows and could almost hear the echo chamber of every animal house in America through the decades: not fair, not fair, not fair . . . 

It would almost be funny . . . if it wasn't. Ask a woman if that neon letter-A fades as life evolves, relationships catch fire and fizzle . . . marriages, children, careers. Is it a club stamp from a regrettable night that soon disappears? Or is it embroidered into the skin of your chest, the bloody scabs breaking open as you howl? And even as women's rights in this modern world seem better now than they've ever been, the branding remains. Don't forget the PTSD, baby, the things you thought you dealt with but didn't really, the memories you thought you scrubbed still slinking around the shadows to jump out and give you a real scare when you least expect it, the moments in American history where people who have no connection to you are testifying to events that happened almost forty years ago still you find yourself sitting in your car listening to CNN with a crawling stomachache and just the slightest tremble in your hands, scarlet letter-A burning a hole through your chest.

Because it isn't just women who are held to a specific standard--be lady like, cross your ankles, smile--it's teenagers, too. It's preteens, too. It's little girls, too. It's babies with a pink bow tied to the only lock of hair they have on their bald little heads. The coding starts immediately, to be of service to others, to please and be pleasant, to smile without prompting, to submit to innocent hugs, kisses, pinches, the lighthearted "flirting" from grown men at picnics, church, the grocery store, be nice to the stranger who's a "friend of the family." In the new age of body autonomy, parents are thankfully beginning to better understand how a lack of boundaries can be scarring and may pave the way to a child being abused, a teen being raped, a woman being locked in an abusive marriage for years, decades, a lifetime. Nevertheless, the traditions persist, forcing kids to hug Uncle Bob and kiss Aunt May, shaming and punishing children for resisting--trying to set boundaries--and grooming them for potential violation later on.

As a kid, I was pinched, hugged, tickled, and relentlessly evaluated over every physical attribute and change. My apple cheeks, chubby cheeks, pretty hair, unruly hair, beautiful eyes, "bedroom" eyes, lovely smile, buck teeth, long legs, chicken legs, pretty face, pimple face, lean arms, hairy arms, big ass, stupid walk, lose some weight, wear some make up, too much make up, be quiet, slim down, stop taking up space. I was poked, prodded, kissed, grabbed, tickled, shaken, yanked, and hugged. I got labelled "the Dragon Lady" by my family for being impudent, so by the time I was a teen and put a stop to all that touching nonsense, I figured they could just stay mad about it forever since my own kin thought I was a raging dragon bitch, anyway. But it was too late. The damage was done.

I didn't learn that it was okay to set boundaries until I was well into my thirties. My thirties. This is also when I finally understood that it was wrong to be made to feel guilty for withholding hugs and kisses. Unfortunately, I did not escape childhood without those boundaries being violated far beyond "innocent" displays of affection. I did nothing wrong and did not deserve it, but I blamed myself for decades. This is how the mind works when your boundaries are soft to non-existent and all the anger and helplessness you feel gets directed back on yourself. And this is why I felt so furious and sick listening to the Kavanaugh testimony, the conservative politicians, the witless pundits. Very much like Firestarter's Charlie McGee, I wanted to incinerate the lot of them with my absolute, concentrated rage.

We were blue collar, at the best time (literally 1982-84) lower middle class and just barely, but for the most part poor to poor plus. If growing out of clothes was an Olympic sport, I would have at least medalled, especially in middle school. You say "slutty," I say "no fucking money, honey," because that's literally what was happening. I would live and die for those brief periods of galvanic joy when there was cash for clothes: new, fresh, nice-fitting clothes. I wasn't zipping up my old Jordache's with pliers because I was fat; I was eeling into them because we had no fucking moneyyyy, honeyyyy. In the middle of puberty, no less.

When I turned eleven, the catcalling from strangers began. At the mall, the gas station, just walking down the street. There were scary incidents with rowdy men in trucks, sleazy men in hotels, grown-ass men baring down on me for existing in their world with my faded Duran Duran t-shirt pulling tight against my chest and my second-skin jeans which I roll-pegged to hide the fact that they were also high-waters. I didn't shake my ass, give them leering, come-on looks, tie a cherry stem in my mouth while leaning provocatively against an ice machine. Still they hissed and tsk-ed, made wet kissing noises and hey babied me up one Quick Trip and down to Dillons. I kept my head low, walked like a shuffling robot, and flushed red with humiliation. It was gross, embarrassing, and more often than not, made me physically sick to my stomach.

But I was told that this is what every woman endures so I should just suck it up. Family, friends, even the shitty counselor at my school all parroted the same thing. Stop whining, let it go, this too shall pass. Yet another lesson in weak boundaries. I was a thing to be treated in whatever way any random man decided I deserved. I was told to be grateful that men found me attractive at all, that not all girls got that kind of attention. People I trusted actually said that to my face. On multiple occasions. What a lucky thing to be complaining about. How lucky I was. So ungrateful for my luck.

Oh millennial girls, gen z girls, thank God for you. You are burning this entire patriarchy to the ground and I am LOVING IT.

Underneath that blanket status of womanhood, the one that grants half the population the right to act upon you in whatever fashion they see fit while you are expected to smile demurely or, I don't know, bend over(??) . . . there is that other layer, the deeper, black-slimy layer, the one where someone, somewhere has to finally admit that poor girls are less than, even if they are innocent and "pure." Poor girls, by virtue of their scrubby, fast-food existence, truly do "deserve" whatever they get. Poor girls are never really pure. I won't even get into racial Othering--first, because I can speak only from my own experience, but more so second, because it should be fucking KNOWN by now. And if you don't know, you need to know.

People feel entitled to cross your boundaries, to cut you down to your marketable parts, to stamp you generic and sell you wholesale. Just look at working-class victims of serial killers and marvel at the lengths people would go to create distance between themselves and the women murdered. They were too trusting, too exposed, they were drunk, stoned, provocatively dressed. They were at the wrong place at the wrong time. They were peripheral people living dead end lives. In some way, they must have had it coming.

It is demeaning, infuriating, and entirely societally contrived. We see what happens even to good, upstanding, well-off girls when they dare stand up against the "harmless fun" of meanmouthed boys. We saw it unfold, in all its insidious, black stinking ichor, from the mouths of politicians, pundits, and the Honorable Horndog himself over the summer and fall of 2018 . . . with my own entirely shameless translations and comments in parentheses, bold is mine.

"This has been a drive-by shooting when it comes to Kavanaugh . . . I’ll listen to the lady, but we’re going to bring this to a close." - Lindsey Graham (Little lady can say what she wants, but he's getting confirmed.) 

"I am not questioning that Dr. Ford may have been sexually assaulted by some person in some place at some time, but I’ve never done that to her or to anyone. Dr. Ford’s allegations stems from a party that she alleges occurred during the summer of 1982. 36 years ago." - Brett Kavanagh (So long ago, how could anyone remember, so long ago, why should it matter now, so long ago . . . ) 

"She and I did not travel in the same social circles. It is possible that we met at some point at some events, although I do not recall that." - Brett Kavanaugh (She wasn't one of us.) 

"Some have noticed that I didn’t have church on Sundays on my calendars. I also didn’t list brushing my teeth and for me going to church on Sundays was like brushing my teeth. Automatic. Still is." - Brett Kavanaugh (I go to church and am therefore unimpeachable.) 

"One feature of my life that has remained true to the present day is that I’ve always had a lot of close female friends. I’m not talking about girlfriends. I’m talking about friends who are women. That started in high school. Maybe it was because I’m an only child and had no sisters. But anyway, we had no social media or text or email and we talked on the phone. I remember talking almost every night, it seemed, to my friends Amy or Julie or Kristen or Karen or Suzanne or Maura or Megan or Nicky." - Brett Kavanaugh (I cannot be a racist because I have many black friends.) 

"There is a bright line between drinking beer, which I gladly do and which I fully embrace, and sexually assaulting someone, which is a violent crime. If every American who drinks beer or every American who drank beer in high school is suddenly presumed guilty of sexual assault, it will be an ugly new place in this country. I never committed sexual assault. As high-school students, we sometimes did goofy or stupid things." - Brett Kavanaugh (Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, but nice try. By the way, the "stupid things" comment is as close as you will ever get to the truth of what Kavanaugh may have done to Christine Blasey Ford . . .  or any other incidents, like say shoving his penis in someone's face. Boys will be boys.) 

"I never had sexual intercourse or anything close to it during high school or for many years after that. In some crowds I was probably a little outwardly shy about my inexperience. I tried to hide that. At the same time, I was also inwardly proud of it. For me and the girls who I was friends with, that lack of major or rampant sexual activity in high school was a matter of faith and respect and caution." - Brett Kavanaugh (I was an inexperienced teen boy who went to church so therefore could never had done anything wrong, i.e. more fallacies in logic.) 

"The committee has a letter from 65 women who knew me in high school. They said that I always treated them with dignity and respect. That letter came together in one night 35 years after graduation while a sexual-assault allegation was pending against me in a very fraught and public situation where they knew—they knew they’d be vilified if they defended me. Think about that. They put themselves on the line for me. Those are some awesome women, and I love all of them. You also have a letter from women who knew me in college. Most were varsity athletes. They described that I treated them as friends and equals and supported them in their sports at a time when women’s sports was emerging in the wake of Title IX. I thank all of them for all of their texts and their emails and their support. One of those women friends from college, a self-described liberal and feminist, sent me a text last night that said, quote, 'Deep breaths, you’re a good man, a good man, a good man.' A text yesterday from another one of those good women friends from college that said, quote, 'Brett, be strong. Pulling for you from my core.' A third text yesterday from yet another of those women I’m friends with from college said, 'I’m holding you in the light of God.'" - Brett Kavanaugh (Some of my best friends are black.) 

"How did you get home? I don't remember. How'd you get there? I don't remember. Where is the place? I don't remember. How many years ago was it? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. What neighborhood was it in? I don't know. Where's the house? I don't know. Upstairs, downstairs -- where was it? I don't know -- but I had one beer. That's the only thing I remember." - Donald Trump ("Locker Room Talk" Aficionado) 

"When you see Sotomayor and Kagan, tell them that Lindsey said hello to them, because I voted for them. I would never do to them what you’ve done to this guy! This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics, and if you really wanted to know the truth, you sure as hell wouldn’t have done what you have done to this guy." - Lindsey Graham (I voted for you womyns and look what they're doing to our boy.) 

"I don't think she's uncredible . . . I think she's an attractive, good witness. . . . In other words, she's pleasing." - Orrin Hatch ( . . . ) 

"I know I am a single white male from South Carolina and I am told I should shut up, but I will not shut up if that's okay. Because I got here the same way everybody else did. The people in South Carolina voted for me and senator Scott to be their voice, men and women, and I'm going to try to be their voice today." - Lindsey Graham (Letting women and POC speak is exactly equal to telling me to shut up.) 

"Now all of us know from human experience that if someone is a sexual predator, if someone is committing the kind of actions that have been alleged, that it is very rare that they're a one time offender. That if someone is carrying out this kind of conduct, they typically have a pattern of doing so over and over and over again." - Ted Cruz (fuck u zodiac killer)

The pundits were worse. But that last quote from Ted "Not Bundy" Cruz is perfect example of something that we all struggle to recognize. You've no doubt heard it stated somewhere: people can be more than one thing.* It is a logical fallacy to pretend as though "bad guys" lurk through the deviant years of their lives doing ever more dastardly deeds as time progresses. On shows like Criminal Minds, profilers often say serial killers won't stop until they're imprisoned or dead . . . but they absolutely do. Hometown freak of nature BTK is a prime example. President of his church council, even. Simultaneously a serial killer, even though he went to church. Religiously. Imagine.

People are not either / or. They are heterogeneous. They are multifaceted. Sometimes they are Legion. At one point in the shitshow hearing to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, Lindsey Graham said, "Are you a gang rapist?" which Kavanaugh easily denied. As if that was the beginning and end of it, as if that had anything to do with the allegations in question. Kavanaugh would have passed that question on a polygraph, too. But with that one act of diversion, the perspective shifts, doesn't it? Because people feel safer in a binary world . . . at least until their own indiscretions are brought into the light. Then we're all complex little snowflakes, aren't we?

It is easier on our societal projections if we believe that Brett Kavanaugh could never have pinned Christine Blasey Ford to a bed, snorting beastly laughter with his bud in a drunken melee of Will They or Won't They because he is a churchgoing, married, father of two. Because he graduated from Yale and Yale Law. Because he served as a US Circuit Judge. And now because he's a Supreme Court justice. The mind resists the correlation, insists it can't possibly be true. Especially when you don't want it to be true.

It's funny, then, that Blasey Ford's testimony failed to compel a meaningful shift in the Senate's partisan vote to confirm Kavanaugh.  She was a girl who benefited from a well-off upbringing. She earned advanced degrees in psychology and epidemiology from Pepperdine, USC, and Stanford. She was a professor at Stanford and Palo Alto University (1). It still didn't matter. Once Christine Blasey Ford dared to cross that line, making accusations against the upstanding judge at the pinnacle of his career, she became "the woman." Against this lauded justice's unshakable recall and scrawled notations from his diaries ("36 years ago"), the woman's memory was simply "mixed up." And we should feel sorry for this woman, pray for this woman, have pity for her confused recollection of a night that never happened.

Even Christine Blasey Ford is reduced to a misguided, broken nothing, who is either tragically wrong or a complicit Democrat grenade (they never decided on which, so she was somehow both). If someone like Christine Blasey Ford can't get justice, if she is not a valid witness, then what hope do the rest of us have? When you dare to stand up to the patriarchy, especially the politically powerful patriarchy, they will tear you down to the ground. Welcome to the scarlet letter club, babe, we're wearing red every-fuckin-day.

One of the things Christine learned as a young girl who just suffered a world-tilting shock was to immediately suppress her humiliation, negate the gravity of the situation, and never, ever confess her sin to anyone. After all, she was drinking, underage, with boys . . . she managed to get herself cornered by two of them . . . her body, her weakness, something about her invited those boys to set upon her like two clambering, immature trolls, so clearly she was at least equally to blame. I can tell you from experience that those self-defeating thoughts do not spring up from nowhere in a victim's mind. It's cultivated, tenderly cared for, and shoots up through the soft earth of her soul, thick stemmed and vining, pegged with curved thorns, and tended by every invalidation of her boundaries, devaluation of her worth. It's misted in petty, throwaway comments, enriched to the root by every involuntary touch.

The Kavanaugh hearings took me by the neck, those vines of bad touch and self hatred, and I was yanked rudely back to the bad ol' days, much the same way as post-election night. And as much as people who refuse to empathize might try, I wasn't looking for it, I wasn't asking for it, and it just fucking happened. When you see a man and a woman with similar backgrounds and impeccable credentials play out "He Said, She Said" in front of the whole world and everyone knows that the man will come out ahead even if people admit they believe her (that it happened, maybe, but not with him, oh no), it's hard not to take it like a crack to the jaw and just cave inward. First, a president. Now, a Supreme Court justice. It's vile.

 Which leads me, finally [MASSIVE SIGH], to Stephen King's Firestarter. You wondered if I forgot what the hell I was supposed to be writing about, didn't you? Alas.

This was the exact same edition I owned since
high school. It was so cool to find a scanned
copy on the Internet Archive!

This is maybe the third time I've been through Firestarter. According to my research, the first time was no earlier than 1981, since I found the same edition I had back in high school scanned in on the Internet Archive (more on that later). I think I read it at least once more in my twenties, then never felt compelled to read it again.

I never found the story particularly interesting, sort of a different riff on the whole Carrie idea, but I usually like to re-experience all of my King books. Some more than others, but those I've abandoned are usually well remembered as to the reasons why, like hating Salem's Lot for the hokeyness and the boring, over-tread vampire thing. I remembered the basic plot of Firestarter but not much else. What was it? Had I just avoided Firestarter because of the retreaded premise?

It turns out: No. Nnnnooo. It just sucks. So hard. There are little blips and bits that resonate, but I mostly found the writing laborious and the characters offensively flat. Not a lot of heterogeneity going on in Firestarter. And while I've always understood why many critics of King's early work take him to task on his female characters, it's almost a relief to finally realize that THIS is the one they were probably thinking of most. It has to be. The women are just . . . terrible.

I can smell this book through the screen. Mmm decaying paper.

There's one "authoritative" female figure in the postscript, but she's little more than a carbon copy of Everyman McPowerhungry, just another fascist antagonist but with boobs. There are various secretaries following orders with backstories you could read in an obituary in the newspaper. There's an apron wringing farm wife who is told to "hush, woman" at one point. And there's Vicky McGee, the firestarter's mom, a flat, cardboard-cutout suggestion of a person who's sad fate evokes exactly zero sympathy from the reader. She is an idea of a dream girl/hot wife who is merely acted upon for the sake of the plot.

I would blame this breathless adulation on publicist necromancy
or the drooling fanaticism of simpler times, but I am in the minority
when it comes to Firestarter. Lots of people love it. It's probably
best not to chase that rabbit. Might get bit.

Then there's Charlie McGee. King does better with her, but she's still an outline of a person, all predictable, family-fare TV tropes of what it means to be a Girl, let alone what it means to be a Pyrokinetic Girl. She cries, she doesn't want to do bad things, and she feels guilty about the destructive, unwieldy nature of her powers. At the start of the book Charlie is about 8-years-old. It is critical to remember that she is no older than ten by the end of it because what ruins Firestarter above all else--and what brought that whole Kavanaugh business to the fore of my thoughts--was the despicable, nauseating objectification of Charlie throughout the novel.

The most grotesque assessment of Charlie filters through the character John Rainbird, an operative of The Shop, a secret governmental agency devoted to psychological and pharmaceutical experiments to perfect modern warfare. Rainbird is duplicitous from the start, first secretly tranquilizing Charlie at her grandfather's cabin in order for The Shop to safely kidnap her and her father, later pretending to be her orderly when she is imprisoned at The Shop's headquarters. Upon first learning of Charlie, Rainbird is immediately intrigued by the possibility of her alleged power and muses over "what it would be like to kill a child" (King, 134). Rainbird, a veteran assassin, has made it a practice to look into the eyes of the person he's killing, apparently to find some truth about death that continues to elude him. In the conclusion of his thoughts about this girl and her pyrokinetic powers, "[h]e felt very tender about her, very protective. . . . the girl would be his" (King, 135).

The copyright page says the first Signet (paperback) edition printed
in August of 1981 and, if the crite page follows the same logic our
publisher did, this would have been the twenty-first reprint. I'd
imagine SK reprints were far bigger than any I've ever done (thousands!)
so the math tracks with the paperback of The Tommyknockers
included on the order form page (1987 hardcover pub, so maybe 88
for the paperback?) - gotta love those prices, though.

A reader could stretch her head around that last statement: Sure, she's a child, he feels for her as only a cold blooded murdering psychopath might feel for a child. Sure, he's completely insane, stares into his murder victim's eyes to try to understand death but has thus far come up empty, so why not crack open a magical fire child and see if her dying eyes illuminate anything. SURE. In that obsessive, controlling way that serial killers love, perhaps that is what he means when he says she will be "his," like a trophy or a chapter or a good luck charm . . . but no. The innuendo only gets worse from there.

When Rainbird lays down his ultimatum to the man in charge, Captain Hollister (Cap), he insists he be given Charlie "'for disposal'" once The Shop is done with her and further elucidates, "'I want to know her intimately'" (King, 194-5). When Cap reacts the way any normal (albeit morally and ethically deficient) person might--with horror--Rainbird dismisses his reaction and clarifies "'[n]ot in the biblical sense'" (King, 196). When pressed to explain why, Rainbird, in peak killer-creepy pedo fashion fondles a picture of Charlie, looking at it "almost tenderly," and says, "'She is very beautiful. . . . And very young. Yet inside her is your Z factor. The power of the gods. She and I will be close. . . . Yes, we will be very close'" (King, 197-8).

As the plan is afoot, with Charlie imprisoned and Rainbird playing her orderly, he realizes that her affect on him has had unexpected benefits, that he feels "better, more alive, than he has in years" (King, 214). He rhapsodizes over this dreamily as he's on break, how he's grateful for the girl, the challenge of knowing her, the feelings he hasn't felt in so long, and how "once the dance was done he would kill her and look into her eyes, hoping to catch that spark of understanding, that message, as she crossed over into whatever there was" (King, 214). Charlie, a child, is a thing to be used, siphoned, expended, and disposed of at the whim and collaboration of an amoral agency and a psychopathic murderer.

Simple copyright page and dedication page.

Rainbird finally gets his chance to play Charlie for the lonely little kid that she is during a freak rainstorm that knocks the power out across the entire facility, locking them alone together in the dark. He feigns fear--shares war horror stories conjured from half truths and easy soft spots--and Charlie breaks, believing his ruse and listening to him relive his post-traumatic lies, offering comforting words and hugging him in the darkness. Between tall tales, Rainbird imagines "how it would be to slip his hands around her neck." He muses that he actually does like her, that "[h]e might even being falling in love with her," but that "[t]he time would come when he would send her over, looking carefully into her eyes all the time. . . . if her eyes gave him the signal he had looked for for so long, perhaps he would follow her. . . . Perhaps they would go into the real darkness together" (King, 240).

Before Rainbird can "have" Charlie, he must convince her to submit to The Shop's tests. They are fairly certain she has pyrokinetic powers, but they don't know how strong they are or whether she can control them. Charlie refuses to speak to The Shop's agents, mother stand-ins, and other functionaries, but as a lowly "orderly," Rainbird has an advantage. Once their friendship in kindled during the night of the thunderstorm, Rainbird starts to work on Charlie, gently, co-conspiratorially, coolly focused. At one point he realizes that if The Shop's intuition that Charlie's psychic talents might expand much further than simple pyrokinesis (mind reading, perhaps), he might find himself in mortal trouble. In Rainbird's mind "[i]t added a certain spice to the proceedings . . . a spice that had been missing for too long" (King, 261).

But Charlie isn't just a disposable salt and pepper packet, or promising key to Rainbird's death puzzle, she is also a sexy baby (TM), akin to those pedo-provocative Love's Baby Soft commercials from the 1970s--the same decade that King put this creepfest to paper--because, don't you know, "innocence is sexier than you think." It gets predictably problematic when they are alone together. In the midst of the mind games, he's waxing the floor while she's standing at the refrigerator "pretending to linger over her selection of a snack"

One clean, pink foot was cocked behind the other so he could see the sole--a pose that he found curiously evocative of mid-childhood. It was somehow preerotic, almost mystic. His heart went out to her again. (King, 262)

This is the best line from that whole book. Sorry, Ray Bradbury.
Everything after it is a big, slobbery snnnnorrrre. I said what I said. 

If only that was where the weirdness ends. Later Charlie is rewarded for allowing the tests to proceed: excursions outside, visits to the stables to see the horses, and finally getting to ride her favorite horse, Necromancer, and all along the way with her trusted "orderly" by her side. She begins to have dreams of escaping The Shop on Necromancer, through woods on fire, riding bareback and naked, all the while yelling faster, faster, oh please, and faster. A figure blocks their path, the horse rears and she falls, but the dream dissolves before she can discover who the figure could be (though we know, don't we?).

This whole scene is borderline at best--the horse is a known symbol, both in terms of freedom, generically, and power, sexual or otherwise, whether bridled (controlled) or unbridled (wild, out of control). She's nude, which in the context of the dream could be seen as both free and vulnerable, though she cannot "tell where her her thighs ended and Necromancer's sides began . . . they were one, fused" (King, 301). While it's certainly clear that the dream is meant to evoke breaking free, the feeling of power, and the looming threat of an (un)known aggressor, there is no way--IN HELL--that a reader isn't going to pick up on the sexy baby subtext and wonder, Like, what the Fuck, Steve?

There is a point in the dream sequence when Charlie and Necromancer come upon a deadfall and things get decidedly un-subtext-y:

Wild with lunatic joy, she kicked at Necromancer lightly with her bare heels and felt his hindquarters bunch. They leapt it, for moment floating in the air. Her head was back; her hands held horsehair and she screamed--not in fear but simply because not to scream, to hold in, might cause her to explode. Free, free, free . . . Necromancer, I love you. (King, 301)

It does not help that the word "faster" is repeated with ever increasing urgency twelve times throughout this two-page scene. It helps even less that I re-experienced Firestarter not in book or e-book format, but via audiobook, my very first. Seriously not a good start, audiobook realm. Not a good start at all.

I love the title page after the full title page, especially since there's sort of
a preliminary title page in the praise pages. This is Firestarter. Did I
mention this was Firestarter. Look, Firestarter.

The actor who read Firestarter for the audiobook edition is Dennis Boutsikaris (Better Call Saul, Billions, Quantico) -- you've seen him because he's been in everything. Once I looked him up, I immediately recognized him from my serial viewings of the Law & Order franchises, but honestly, he's been in freakin ev-er-y-thing. Before I even started, I made a deal with myself not to peek at the audiobook's narrator, so that any knowledge of their previous work would not color how I perceived the reading. Over the course of the audiobook, I came to the conclusion that it might be Harry Shearer of Spinal Tap (and The Simpsons, and A Mighty Wind) fame. Now, imagine a mellower version of the Ned Flanders voice doing a falsetto, breathlessly repeating faster, faster, oh please while narrating a fiery woods/freedom horse/naked dream of a ten-year-old (at most) little girl. Go ahead. Imagine it.

From a childhood spent conditioned to believe my pain was my own fault, either by my own actions or because I was "too sensitive," I've also acquired a solid knack for denial. Surely I'm not seeing this, that can't be what he means, I must be overreacting . . . and so on. I've had years of therapy now. Once the dream sequence was done, so was I. Fuck this book. Let Rage stand and ban this motherfucker, Steve. Firestarter ssssuuuucks.

The last page and inside cover of the paperback reprint of Firestarter, c.
1987, maybe 88, featuring a big ad and order form for the audiobook(!)
editions of The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three. Cassette
tapes! Read by the author! Thirty-five freaking dollars?! And that's the
cheapest of all the options, though limited edition signed audiobooks in
cassette form have to be worth something now, right? More than $125,
I hope. But who could listen to them? Do tape decks even exist anymore?
They're not going to come raging back like vinyl, I guarantee you that.
Oh I miss how you have to rewind and fast forward a hundred times to
find the start of a song. Oh remember that delightful snapping feedback?
Oh and the teeny tiny liners with every lyric written in 1 pt. font??? 
They did smell good, though. Like sweet, sweet electrified music chemicals.

I am willing to concede that it is possible my impression would have been slightly less Offended had the narrator been someone else (or if I'd just read the damn thing), but Firestarter is ruined now and for always. No offense to Dennis Boutsikaris. Loved you on all the Law & Orders.

The rest of the book plays out as you'd expect. Dad and girl conspire to escape, plans get thwarted, Rainbird gets his bitchass incinerated and good riddance. Dad dies, Charlie gets away. Eventually she makes her way to New York City and the main library where a 26-year-old male librarian sees her smile and "[f]or a moment . . . was almost in love" (King, 400) -- naturally. Puke. He sends her on her way to a trusted news organization (Rolling Stone, it turns out), where she's going to tell her story and perhaps burn all surviving minions The Shop down to the ground alongside its smoldering headquarters.

I saw the movie way before reading the book, so
Charlie has always been Drew Barrymore to me.
That likely intensifies my hostility toward the
source material. I doubt I'm the only one from my
generation who feels protective of Barrymore, from
her dear beginnings in E.T., her early successes in
Irreconcilable Differences and Firestarter, to her
shocking early addictions and growing up far too
fast. Her (semi) normal life and wonderful work
since then has been a delight to watch over the
past few decades. GO DREW, a true firestarter.

Do I believe in pure love, the love that parents have for their children, teachers have for their students, reverends have for the tiny little lives in their flock? Of course I do. Am I so jaded, so twisted from my own experiences, that I see perversions and violations where there really are none? No. In this case, the skin-crawling awfulness is woven throughout the book. Charlie isn't the only female objectified, commodified, minimized to the barest nothing. Little plot devices everywhere. Rainbird is easily the sickest psycho in the story, but never forget that a large portion of the book is devoted to the government's pursuit, capture, and subjugation of two free Americans, one of whom is a child, the other who did nothing except participate in an psychological experiment in college. Not to mention the fact that paper doll mama is straight up murdered when two overzealous functionaries of The Shop are torturing her to get information on the whereabouts of her child. Charlie, whether she'd been born a boy or girl, was doomed from the moment she was conceived. The fact that the representatives of The Shop were never able to see her as anything more than a commodity sets the bar for distortion of self incredibly low.

Do I believe Stephen King is a perv for writing Firestarter? No. Wait until we get to It, foolios. Even if it could be argued that the pedo-razor's edge innuendo was relegated to the Rainbird point of view alone (it wasn't), I would still say King was a product (and perhaps victim) of the times, just like everyone else. Love's Baby Soft ads may have been the outermost of provocation, where even the people within the time period were like not groovy, man, but the subversive sexualization of little girls was going on way before the free loving 60s and the dirty birdy 70s. Eventually, people started talking about the dark things they wished never happened. By the time the 80s rolled around, the milk carton kids had come to town, rumbling in on a haunted old milk truck, their innocent faces grinning gap-toothed from the last pictures they would ever take. People's heads were finally, begrudgingly, being pulled out of the sand. Serial killers hunted young women, good girls, bad girls, all girls. They took all children, did unspeakable things, buried them unsanctified and lost forever, and porch lights lit across the land like fireflies, exponential, keening stars, left to burn day and night for weeks, years, decades.

And maybe it was because some of the people started to understand that "innocence is sexier than you think" wasn't just falling on like-minded ears, where we all stand shaking our heads and laughing uneasily because that's inappropriate and I can't believe they got away with it. And maybe some of those people figured out that every bogeyman wasn't some dark figure in a trench coat skulking round the garden with a boner and a butcher's knife. And maybe some of those people realized that objectifying young girls, teen girls, young women wasn't really doing them any favors except setting unrealistic expectations, at best, and, at the very worst, planting a bullseye on their backs. And NOT because those girls are weak, stupid, too trusting, too vulnerable. The age of blaming the victim must end.

Internet archive audiobook! Despite my unfortunate experience, I'm
tempted to try again with Cujo . . .

Thank God for those Millennials. Thank God for those Gen Z babies. They saw our raging Animal House mentality, our Sixteen Candles privilege, our Porky's pedagogy, and Just Said No. It is not to say that everything was, in fact, Terrible. It's just that The Whites were running amok, getting away with just about everything, and rolling in the decadence of free will on the pill. These shenanigans have not stopped, but they've gone underground: sometimes elusive, insufferably persistent, interminably complex. Women are still dehumanized, compartmentalized, bartered, sold, and flattened into two-dimensional receptacles for misplaced rage and rampant oppression. But the kids are leading us all out into the light, globalized and realizing we have a human problem that requires a human solution. One of which is not placing a man with dubious character with a legitimate assault accusation against him on the Supreme Court of the United States.

. . . because this time around I looked up the person who read the
Cujo audiobook and I'm more than a little intrigued to hear it. Who
didn't love Drag Me to Hell? The reader is Lorna Raver, the terrifying
old lady who doesn't get a mortgage extension and hexes the loan officer.
She's so good . . . I can't imagine what she'd do with Cujo!

Charlie McGee would have been a Gen-Xer, one of the forgotten generation, the do-nothing glumdrum first-gen gamers that wallowed in grunge music and still somehow managed to find jobs, gain assets, and grow 401k's. I'd like to think a real Charlie would not be the dumb-and-doe-eyed doll her mother was. I'd like to think she'd have shaken the ashes of the world into a better "new world order," given a different origin story to the term "fire crotch," led us down the path sooner and faster than we have been, stumbling blind, stupid, and lost into the insipid, beery light of The Real World.

* People can be more than one thing. I've searched in vain for the reference, but cannot find it despite using every iteration of the gist. Perhaps it is more ubiquitous than I previously thought, though I swore there was a gripping, very recent study of it in some form of entertainment, either a movie or tv show. If you know what I'm trying to remember, drop it in the comments!

Grade: D
Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 2. The scariest thing about Firestarter is the depthless evil of The Shop and, by extension, the American government. Considering that I am writing this in early May of 2020, in arguably the worst era of American cynicism and depravity in the midst of the global, Covid 19 pandemic, the straightforwardness of The Shop's bad acts is almost . . . endearing. Charlie's pyrokinetic talents are more impressive than terrifying, though there is a moment when she sort of offhandedly considers that she could do something to the sun if she really tried which is, I will admit, thoroughly chilling. Otherwise, the scariest thing about Firestarter is the objectification of Charlie, a CHILD, which is a horror story of its own.
Warnings: Yay, the n-word is back. Worse yet, it's used by the primary antagonist, Rainbird, to describe himself. Take note that he is also a disfigured Native American veteran, none of which I could bear to get into since I wasn't about to spend one more minute thinking about this mess. Paper women abound.

Artifact: Oh boy oh boy, this is the part I'm most excited to talk about because it was a new discovery and has opened up all kinds of reading/listening options while the libraries have been closed. The Internet Archive is The Coolest. It is also free, though you are of course invited to donate, which is understandable considering the resources available. I had my pick of so many different editions of Firestarter that had been painstakingly scanned in, plus the audiobook version that I eventually (regrettably) experienced.

It's odd that this is the very first time I've listened to an audiobook, considering how long they've been around, but I liked how freeing it was, leaving my hands and eyes open to play videogames, sketch, do chores. The flip side is that you're stuck with the voice provided and it can (and did) make it very hard to get into the flow of the story. Every time poor Dennis Boutsikaris would say "Daddy" in that baby voice I would just about DIE. Charlie says "Daddy" a lot.

One of the first things I hated about ebooks was the lack of Bookness. Sure, they're techysexycool, little buttons, realpaper screens, etc., but they read like shit. There are no "real" pages since it all depends on the settings . . . and those early ebooks were so badly formatted sometimes. Woof. It's completely contrived, but there's more than just weight and depth to the artifact of a book, that spicy smell, the glint of the pulp, the idiosyncrasies of the printing. A book in your hand is real, it is authored, typeset, and printed. It is legitimized by it's very existence. An ebook is a nebulous inconstant. It can conjure every single vampire book imaginable, from the boring to the criminally boring, or Moby Dick, or the complete works of Shakespeare, or Taken By Swarm: Seduced By Werebees. It can make itself into literally anything. But the heft of the machine never changes. Which is amazing, of course . . . but you lose something. I suppose this is why I found the scanned books on Internet Archive such a delight. You get to see the book as it was, with all the weird ad pages and order forms necessary in an age gone by, the yellowing edges, the turgid type beaten into the grain. The next best thing would be the book itself, but at least they've got the visual remnants, if not the tactile embodiment.