Stephen King knocks out formula tales about ordinary people, folks much like you or me -- except that they can see into the future or cause stones to rain from the sky. These protagonists are pitted against, and triumph over, the evilest of forces. King doesn't for a moment aspire to a high plane of literature, but his work does show a degree of craftsmanship. His characters, while not as clearly defined as possible, are believable, even if their settings are not, and King has the sharp visual acuity of a filmmaker as he shifts time and space to effect. His faults are few, but they're major: he is both overly cute and excessive. The latter is his undoing. He lacks the keen awareness that less is indeed more, pushing his hefty narratives far past the point of credence, and ultimately, enjoyment, as if a book had to weigh a lot to be good.

Firestarter is the story of a young girl who's born with the power to start fires at will (as a result of a group drug experiment in which her parents participated) and her father (the mother has been murdered), both on the run from pursuing government thugs intent on annihilating them. The first 250 pages are engrossing and entertaining, but then the fantasy that King has concocted falls flat, the spell he's cast is broken, and the reader is left with a runaway novel that leads to a stale, purposeless conclusion. King's recent books (The Dead Zone, The Stand) have not been up to the level of Carrie, the tight, well-paced drama that gave him his first major success; in Firestarter, an overpriced cheap thrill that becomes an exercise in endurance, King re-tills painfully familiar soil but grows no new shoots.