The Fireman is a horror novel from Joe Hill.
From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box comes a chilling novel about a worldwide pandemic of spontaneous combustion that threatens to reduce civilization to ashes and a band of improbable heroes who battle to save it, led by one powerful and enigmatic man known as the Fireman.
The fireman is coming. Stay cool.
No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it’s Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies—before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.
Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she’s discovered the telltale gold-flecked marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if they became infected. To Jakob’s dismay, Harper wants to live—at least until the fetus she is carrying comes to term. At the hospital, she witnessed infected mothers give birth to healthy babies and believes hers will be fine too. . . if she can live long enough to deliver the child.
Convinced that his do-gooding wife has made him sick, Jakob becomes unhinged, and eventually abandons her as their placid New England community collapses in terror. The chaos gives rise to ruthless Cremation Squads—armed, self-appointed posses roaming the streets and woods to exterminate those who they believe carry the spore. But Harper isn’t as alone as she fears: a mysterious and compelling stranger she briefly met at the hospital, a man in a dirty yellow fire fighter’s jacket, carrying a hooked iron bar, straddles the abyss between insanity and death. Known as The Fireman, he strolls the ruins of New Hampshire, a madman afflicted with Dragonscale who has learned to control the fire within himself, using it as a shield to protect the hunted . . . and as a weapon to avenge the wronged.
In the desperate season to come, as the world burns out of control, Harper must learn the Fireman’s secrets before her life—and that of her unborn child—goes up in smoke.
Why did I read The Fireman?
Joe Hill. After NOS4A2, I'm a fan for life.
The Strengths
Joe Hill. Joe Hill inherited some hella good genes. There is a lot of Stephen King in Joe Hill and that's a great thing.
The Fireman is original and a lot of it has stuck with me even though it's been months since I read it.
Dragonscale - the virus - is more than just a cool premise. I thought "OK, this is one of those times I'm just going to have to go along with the imagination of the King family", but it went and got all science-y on me which made me love it even more.
The Weaknesses
You won't hear me say this very often, but The Fireman was too long. I love me a chunky read, and I really love a chunky read from Joe Hill, but I felt like The Fireman was chunky for chunky's sake. It didn't need to be that long and that ultimately hindered my enjoyment of the book.
Would I recommend The Fireman to others?
Yes! The Fireman was one of my favorite reads last year.
8/10: Great Read
Review copy provided by publisher
