Buddy Read with Anne 
 Have you ever thought about how it would be like to possess superpowers like being able to set things on fire with the simple power of your thoughts? Surely you have, even if pyrokinesis might not precisely be what people imagine when thinking about superpowers. Just think about it for a moment: You could wander through the streets and destroy entire cities; you could burn the people who want something bad to happen to you; you have all the power necessary to climb to the very top of the world. Some people might long to have such a power, but surely most people would not want such a dangerous ability to get into the hands of anyone. And now imagine this ability being in the hands of an eight-year-old girl, a girl who cannot control her powers and who is able to leave destruction behind wherever she goes, who is able to set a man's hair on fire by simply concentrating a little bit. A horrifying idea, isn't it? 
 Stephen King took this idea as a premise to his novel Firestarter, a novel which has never been as famous as The Shining, IT or The Stand, but can still be considered to be fairly respected within the horror genre. According to most people, he succeeded in creating a well-developed, interesting story keeping its readers on the edge of their seats and making them turn the pages. He didn't for Anne and me, though, and this can be accounted for by various reasons. 
 First off, the basic concept of the story is intriguing, but the execution merely consists of a) running because the bad guys want to use this ability for their intentions or b) rambling about how to finally stop running from the bad guys. Option c) would spoil the course of the book for those who are yet to read this, but I can promise you that it is not very different from those two aspects. Stephen King is known as one of the best storytellers out there, and I can certainly agree with this, being a fan of his works as well. I personally consider his books Different Seasons, IT, Dead Zone and Under the Dome to belong to the best books I have read so far. But in the end, Stephen King either convinces me or he doesn't, and Firestarter was one of the most boring, long-stretched, boring, uninspiring, badly-written and - did I mention this already? - boring novels I have read for a long time. Whenever something interesting actually happened, the dreadful writing immediately managed to make it uninteresting again. After finally finishing Firestarter and being relieved and happy about now being able to turn towards other books, Anne and I compared the writing in Firestarter with a passage in IT, and it felt like reading something from entirely different authors - although the books were actually published only six years apart from each other. 
 King can certainly tell a story, and he can certainly write as he proved already quite a few times. He's not the best writer, though, a deficit he is usually able to encounter with his intriguing characterizations and his well-crafted plots which never advance by contradicting the character motivations. However, in this novel, King was unable to make me care about any of the protagonists, and the only two characters who even had the potential to be interesting were John Rainbird, the main antagonist, and Irv Manders, a minor character. 
 In the end, the conclusion to the story was rather satisfying, though not quite making up for the pure boredom the first 350 pages could be called, and after turning to the last page, only two thoughts crossed my mind: Relief about having finished this, and the almost certain knowledge that even if King had released a sequel to this book (for which the potential is clearly visible), I would never even touch it. Luckily enough, I did not fall out of love with King, but for people who have never read anything by him, I would recommend choosing another book instead. However, most people seem to have enjoyed this book way more than I did, so maybe Anne and I both simply read this wrong and you, dear reader, would miss an awesome book if you trust our negative reviews. 
 If you have some more minutes left, I urge you to read Anne's review here. 
 Original review pre-finishing: 
 So, Firestarter is basically this peculiar King novel about the girl who was born with pyrokinetic powers she cannot control, this novel everyone considers to be fairly underrated. Maybe both Anne and I are simply lacking the necessary emotions for this novel, but 33% into it, Firestarter still does nothing but bore us and stand out of King's other works with its ridiculously bad writing. So far, we could also be reading this book: 
 At least Mr. King, as much as I respect him for many of his other works, seems to have put a lot of hints about how to make his readers hate this book into action. Let's hope the other 67% will become more interesting and unworthy of a - so far - upcoming 1-star rating. Never mind that everyone else loved this book. 
 Not everything is negative about this book though; it could be worse. Like ... not having someone to talk to who is just as bored by this. It helps to get through this a lot to be able to motivate each other inspite of the writing being this uninspiring.