I rarely ever re-read books, but maybe I should after 15 or more years have gone by. The last time I read Firestarter was when I was in high school and reading it again now was like reading it for the first time; I forgot so much of it. Back in high school I was on a huge Stephen King kick and read everything of his I could get my hands on. I still enjoy his novels, but I have widened my reading habits to many other authors. Now I was reading this on the iPhone and the iPad in iBooks.

In college Andy McGee wanted to make some extra cash so he took part in a psychological drug experiment headed up by one of the professors in the Psychology department named Wanless. Another student who decided she was going to make some extra money was Vicky who would later marry Andy. The experimental drug was called Lot-Six and it had some horrifying effects with some of the students. With Andy, it gave him the power to “push” people. He could use his brain to push someone into doing something that he wanted them to do. However, any push would be followed by a debilitating headache. Vicky got a minor power of being able to close a refrigerator door from across the room, but that was the extent of the drug on her. Who it really affected was Charlie, their daughter. Charlie had pyrokinesis or the ability to start fires just by thinking about it. Whenever she got upset something would light up. The parents kept fire extinguishers all over the house when she was a baby. They eventually scared her enough into not using the power kind of like toilet-training a toddler.

However, the government agency known as “The Shop” that did the experiment are now after the family, and in particular Charlie. Now we have a good guys (Andy and Charlie) on the run and eventually fighting the bad guys (The Shop) story. After eluding the Shop guys for only so long there is a confrontation at the Manders farm and Charlie really shows what she can do. Flames go out in every direction, the cars explode, the chickens at the farm go up like popcorn and several people get burned alive. From there Andy and Charlie head to Vermont but the Shop agents get smarter too and take Charlie out with a tranquilizer dart from a long distance. From there Andy and Charlie are captured and taken to the Shop compound in Virginia. The rest of the book details the tests that go on there and the eventual plan of release.

I thought this was a fun book as most Stephen King books are plus it was a very quick read. Some things are a little dated as this book was written in 1980, but the story still holds up.

It starts with rain. Actually, it starts with a torrential downpour that comes out of nowhere, late one night. Molly, a writer, happens to be awake when the rain starts. She notices that the rain glows, and smells funny, and comes with an ominous and disturbing feeling about it.

Molly decides to do what one would expect the heroine of a horror novel to do: she goes outside to investigate. A large group of silent and nervous looking coyotes have gathered on her porch. They seem to be afraid of the bizarre rain, or, possibly, some evil force that Molly can sense in the nearby woods. Amazingly, the coyotes have no problem with Molly when she impulsively decides to step out on the porch, and stand among them. This short scene feels very mystical, and is my favorite part of the book.

Molly’s husband, Neil, a former priest, also feels an ominous presence coming from the rain. He starts murmuring strange statements while he is still asleep, somehow.

From here, things get really freaky. Molly and Neil experience some seemingly impossible things. Molly’s collection of music boxes spontaneously go off all at once. They both start to see a shadowy form that appears to be right behind them when they look in the mirror, but does not seem to be in the room with them.

They turn on the television and learn that this strange rain is happening pretty much all over the world. There are many floods. A strange typhoon has appeared in the ocean. In some places, it is snowing, and children are playing in the odd glowing snow. No one knows what is causing it. One of the live newscasts ends with a camera man dropping the camera, and half of the reporters severed head landing on the ground. Whatever is going on, it’s not good.

Conveniently, both Molly and Neil not only have a gun, a rifle, and plenty of ammo for each, but are both skilled with using these weapons. They take these with them when they decide to drive to the center of town, believing that gathering with other people will be safer then staying by themselves.

A radio broadcast plays audio from the Space Station, which seems to currently staffed by half the countries in the UN, based on the quick glimpse we get. Molly and Neil listen as unexplained alien invaders phase through the doors of the station, and slaughter the astronauts.

Who are these alien invaders, and what do they want? This is unexplained for most of the book, which adds to the tension in the story. I give Koontz credit for creating an extremely creepy setting. It seems that these aliens have come to Earth to take it, in every sense of the word. The description of the alien looking landscape, and the creatures that come out of it, is vivid enough to make my skin crawl.

Unfortunately, I had a lot of problems with this book. So many things are just too convenient. Molly and Neil just happen to have guns and ammo lying around the house, and both are trained to use them. Molly has a nearly photographic memory for phrases and words, and this ability makes her able to instantly recognize when other characters start quoting poetry. She even knows what poet wrote it, and what poem the quote is from. Despite the horrible things happening around her, she manages to memorize a phrase that appears to be gibberish that was said by the alien that invaded the space station….. and decode it later on!

Molly’s past includes a traumatic event that happened when she was a child, which (not to give too much away), involved her protecting some other children that her father was trying to kill. Later, she and Neil become protectors of stray children.

Neil just so happens to have once been a priest, in a book filled with biblical references, few of which come from him. If you are not a person who is familiar with the Old Testament part of the bible, or someone who doesn’t happen to belong to a faith that believes in it, much of this book is going to have little meaning for you. I was not impressed by this. I like my horror stories to be scary, creepy, and even a bit disgusting at times. I don’t want to get to the end of the book only to learn that the events that happened were because the God of the Old Testament wanted them to happen. Such a disappointment! Why did all this destruction and horrible things happen? Why did so many people die? Because it was God’s plan. This is not an ending, it is a cop out.

The invading aliens are vicious and violent. To me, the inclusion of aliens in this book appeared to be specifically so the author could create new and incredibly disturbing ways to torture people. Now, I understand that there are a lot of people who enjoy books and/or movies that involve graphic scenes of torture. I am not among them. To me, this was overkill, and largely unnecessary. It especially bothers me that tons of people got tortured in this story not because of a war, or because of insanity, or even because someone was possessed by a demon or other evil force. It was because God said so. Oh really? So, for no reason then. Great.

This was not my favorite Koontz book, by far.

Stephen King has written some long books in his career, most notably The Stand.  At over 1000 pages and 35 hours long for the audiobook (which I listened to), Under the Dome can join those ranks.  I’ve been listening to this book since December and last night I finally finished it.  Like most Stephen King books it doesn’t start picking up the pace until three quarters of the way through it. The beginning is all set up and with a whole town full of characters as are in this book there is a lot to set up.

As you can guess from the title, a mysterious glass dome has completely covered the Maine town of Chester’s Mill.  The dome is completely clear and when it falls, a man giving flying lessons to a woman in a Cessna-like plane crash into it killing them both foreshadowing a bigger and more devastating plane crash outside of the dome later in the story.  Birds line the edges of the dome where they have flown into it and have been crushed to death.  The dome goes several miles into the air and deep under the ground.  It also has an effect on people where the touch it for the first time they feel a big electric shock and then every time they touch it after that they are fine.  If someone has a pacemaker or a hearing aid they are dead on contact with the dome.

The hero of the story is Dale Barbara or “Barbie” for short.  He was a sergeant  in Iraq who got a job as a short order cook at the local eating establishment Sweet Briar Rose.  He got in a fight with the town hoodlums including Junior Renny, Mel Searls, and  Carl Thibodeaux (spelling may not be right as I listened to the book and didn’t read the pages) in a bar parking lot. Barbie was leaving town on foot after the fight when the dome fell and he was trapped in town.  Meanwhile Junior  has these horrible migraines caused by a brain tumor and he murders two young girls in this house and they become his “girlfriends”.  Junior’s father James Renny is the major villain in the story. Big Jim Renny is a used car salesman and the town’s second selectman.  He has also been involved in a huge national Meth ring.  The police chief Randolph is worthless and cowers to Renny letting Renny basically run the town as a dictator when the dome falls.  Renny hires his son Junior and the other thugs involved in the fight with Barbie as police officers and this is the beginning of Chester’s Mill becoming a police state with much similarity to Nazi Germany.

The book then turns in the direction of a good and evil story under the dome with the good side being Dale Barbara and his friends including Julia Schumway, head of the newspaper, and Rusty Everett, the medical assistant, who becomes main doctor when the doctor dies.  The bad side is the new police force, Big Jim Renny, and his cronies involved in the Meth ring before the dome fell.

I found this book to be an entertaining and interesting character study of a trapped town.  Several themes stood out for me such as the corruption of power, how easily people can side with the Big Jim to the point where people are wearing blue handkerchiefs tied to their arms as armbands, and then when we find out the origins of the dome the theme shifts to shameful things everybody has done sometime in their lives.

At the end of the book is an author’s note where Stephen King says that he first started writing this book in 1976 and could only get about 70 pages into it.  He went back to it again in 2006 and started over from scratch, but keeping the same opening idea that he had way back then.  I thought that was really interesting.  The reader Raul Esparza did a really good job of capturing the personalities of the many different characters in this book.

This book was published in 1971 and it was amazing to me that the prologue was set in Northern Iraq.  In the prologue a priest who is along for an archaeological dig  gets his first encounter with the ancient demon that plays a bigger role at the heart of the story.  The book is about a famous movie actress Chris McNeil who lives in the Georgetown area of Washington D.C.  She has a pre-teen daughter named Reagan.  Other people in the house include Sharon, the tutor and Chris’ secretary, and Carl and Willie, husband and wife servants from Switzerland.

Reagan starts to be visited by what Chris thinks is an imaginary friend named Captain Howdy. It starts innocently enough through the Oija Board, but soon Reagan becomes inhabited with the demon. She begins shouting obscenities, shaking the bed in convulsions and then wetting it and exhibiting multiple personalities.  This is where the book becomes both very interesting and ultimately frustrating.  Chris starts taking her to the family doctor. The doctor is convinced she doesn’t need psychiatric help, that what is wrong is a physical condition with the body.  They do all of these tests on her, give her Ritalin, and theorize that she may have Frontal Lobe disorder in her brain.  When all of the tests come up negative, the doctor has to concede and refer her to a psychiatrist.  They can’t do anything either except give her Librium to try to calm her down.

One evening Chris has a dinner party and meets Father Carris for the first time.  He is a Jesuit priest and a specialist in psychiatry and eventually becomes involved in the Reagan case.  Also in the meantime a movie director friend of Chris’ is found dead outside her home and a detective begins coming around asking questions.  Reagan has deteriorated to the point of being strapped down to the bad and is visited by many demonic personalities and can speak in many different languages.  By this time the book starts to become a little frustrating because I’m saying “Do the exorcism already!” Father Carris want to make absolutely sure Reagan is possessed before he gets permission from the church for the exorcism.

It is an interesting book from a psychological/psychiatric perspective and how all of these doctors try to rule out every kind of mental disorder. There is also some interesting exposition about the history of satanism, possession, and exorcism.   The demonic scenes are kind of fun to read also and how the demon tries to trick and cajole Father Carris.  I listened to the audio book and it was narrated very well by the author. He had some great accents for some of these characters where it really did play like a movie in your mind.  The characters are well developed enough that the reader can identify with them.