He sacrifices his own life to save her from a sinister father figure working on behalf of the Shop. His lessons have caused Charlie to live in fear of her own body, but this parental control stems from an all-consuming desire to shield his daughter from harm. He’s taught her to suppress her enormous gifts in fear that the Shop will hold her captive and subject her to cruel experiments. Despite Andy’s tendency to use his own psy talents, all he wants for his daughter is a normal life. Their daughter Charlie was subsequently born with the power to start fires with her mind along with a bevy of other abilities that continue to grow stronger as she ages. Andy McGee met his late wife Vicky during a college experiment in which they were both injected with a serum designed to enhance psychic abilities. However, the story is actually a two-hander following the titular pyrokinetic child and her father as they run from a clandestine government agency known as the Shop.
When most Constant Readers think about King’s 1980 novel, their minds naturally turn to Charlie McGee. He is the true monster and has created the Boogeyman to hide from the reality that he has killed his own children.ĭavid Keith as Andy McGee in ‘Firestarter’ Even worse, an alternative reading of King’s story implies that the Boogeyman is merely a manifestation of Lester’s own rage. An abusive bigot, he casually mentions assaulting his wife and hints that he would rather his son die than turn out to be what he calls “a sissy.” His story is horrifying, but it’s difficult to feel too much sympathy for the grieving father when he describes sending his young son back to his crib alone to divert the Boogeyman’s attention away from himself. While Savage’s version is understandably despondent, King’s original Lester is much more unpleasant. Both versions of the character visit a psychiatrist hoping to share the tragic story of their children’s deaths and both versions insist that the child killer is a shadowy monster lurking in darkened closets. The Lester Billings we meet in Rob Savage’s adaptation of The Boogeyman is a far cry from the despicable father haunting the pages of Night Shift. The bulk of these paternal characters appear in early phases of King’s career, but the prolific writer has continued to create complex and conflicted fathers for the past five decades.Īs Father’s Day approaches, let’s celebrate the good, the bad, and the dastardly dads that weave their way through Stephen King’s body of work.ĭavid Dastmalchian as Lester Billings in ‘The Boogeyman’ The newest King adaptation to hit the big screen, Rob Savage’s The Boogeyman, reimagines a story from the author’s first collection Night Shift in which a surly father mourns the deaths of his three young children.
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Equating writing with therapy, he often seems to be working through issues that underlie his novels and one can often pick out themes and seasons of life peeking through the windows of his work.īefore hitting the bestseller list, King was a young husband and father struggling to make ends meet and the weight of supporting a family frequently appears in his early writing.
In addition to his poignant memoir On Writing and a multitude of forwards and afterwards in his Uncle Steve voice, the Master of Horror tends to inject his fiction with characters that bear a striking resemblance to his own persona. Stephen King has always been a self-referential writer. Beware! Spoilers for the work of Stephen King abound.
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