Hot Moppet

By Michael Demarest

FIRESTARTER by Stephen King Viking; 428 pages; $13.95

Stephen King, 32, is the hottest author of supernatural-occult novels around.

Firestarter, thematically at least, is his highest Fahrenheit reading to date. King, who wrote Carrie, The Shining, Salem's Lot and The Dead Zone among other bestsellers, centers his plot this time on a little girl with the psychic power to set objects, people, even buildings and landscapes afire.

King dubs this inflammatory forte "pyrokinesis," a combination of the Greek words meaning fire and movement. Blond, pigtailed, eight-year-old Charlie McGee is so hyperpyrokinetic (she can project 30,000DEG) that she is judged capable of melting whole cities and "eventually creating a nuclear explosion simply by the force of her will."

Charlie's napalm-to-nuclear capability is the result of a Government-sponsored experiment in which her mother and father, both college students at the time, had volunteered to be injected with a powerful new hypnotic-hallucinogenic drug that is euphemistically known as Lot Six and is called dilysergic triune acid, obviously a by-blow of LSD. Vicky, the mother, develops telekinetic ability, manipulating objects without physical contact. Andy McGee comes off the couch with the power to dominate and direct --"push," in King's word--other people's minds. The drug has changed both parents' chromosomal structure; it is this mutation, not convincingly explained by King, that has produced Charlie's pyrokinesis.

"The Shop," a Government agency behind the experiments, sorely wants to eliminate Vicky and Andy, the only survivors with extrasensory powers (nine other drug volunteers have died, committed suicide or gone mad). Most of all, the agency wants to capture pretty

Charlie, who could be of greater strategic value than the neutron bomb. After torturing and killing Vicky, the Shop kidnaps Charlie, who is rescued by her father's "push." Thereafter, and for most of the book, Andy and Charlie flee through the Northeast, pursued by a brutal bunch of Shopworkers who anticipate the fugitives' every move. While Andy's psychic powers fade, Charlie's grow ever more explosive-- and repulsive to her.

Inevitably, many of their would-be captors get flash-fried by Charlie, whom her father calls "one great big Zippo lighter." They are imprisoned for six excruciating months while the agency tries to plumb their powers. Equally inevitably, there is ultimately a vast and glorious incineration at the Shop.

Despite the pseudoscientific hokum, a vital ingredient to roman a la King, Firestarter-- a bestseller weeks before its official publication date-- is the most realistic, even credible novel he has written. Andy McGee and Charlie come across as tender and courageous victims; even some of the stooges, notably a half Cherokee named John Rainbird, show complexity and charm. Though he is not an elegant writer -- he is addicted to such objurgations as "You blind, obsessive fools" -- Maine-based Stephen King is a superb plotter with a fine eye for terrain and, indeed, pyrotechnical detail.

Firestarter Charlie McGee, with all her destructive powers, is one of the most touching waifs in current popular fiction.

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