Firestarter

In America, the 1970s began with the Kent State massacre perpetrated by the National Guard and the Watergate scandal. It concluded with revelations about the CIA’s MK-Ultra programs, undermining American confidence in the government and stoking fears about secretive and harmful overreach. Firestarter reflects the mistrust of the government that was pervasive at the time, heightened by the nuclear threats of the Cold War.

In Firestarter, King implies that the MK-Ultra project was well known throughout America. For example, Irv Manders, a farmer in rural New York, tells Andy that he believes his wild tale of secret government agencies and shadowy scientific testing; he has heard of “CIA guys giving people drinks spiked with LSD” (110). This speaks to how broadly suspicions of the government had spread.

King portrays authoritarian forces as antagonistic, with Firestarter being his most direct critique of the American government. As King writes in the Afterward, it is an “undeniable fact that the U.S. government, or agencies thereof, has indeed administered potentially dangerous drugs to unwitting persons” (402). His epigraph is the opening line of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), a novel about a dystopian government’s overreach. This frames Firestarter as a critique of governmental authority.