The Fireman: A Novel

Joe Hill

May 2016 · Sold by HarperCollins

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

Joe Hill as usual it did not fail at impressing me when describing scenes in his books and creating characters that I love. the main character Harper is so caring and overall just a good person you cannot help but loving her. I really did love this book my only downfalls and the reason why I'm giving it three stars is because I feel like it was over 100 pages too long. the story should have ended when they escaped from the camp before she even had her baby. I feel like the ending was dragged out entirely so much that I ended up skipping through the end after reading over 700 pages.

This book might honestly be the worst piece of literature I've ever had the displeasure of reading. From lackluster and flat characters that are constant contradictions of themselves to a plot line riddled with holes and unnecessary details this book is purely time I wish I had back. Joe Hill leans on profanity and the absurd as a crutch which he tries to pass of as witticism. His story is riddled with bad pop culture references from an era that has no business in the age range of the characters but that doesn't stop him from slapping you in the face with it constantly. We get it Joe Hill, we get that you know bad music, congrats. Dystopian is the claim of the book but it's really no more than a bad summer camp during the winter. Any attempt at creating a dystopian world is lost in non stop inconsistencies and a generally poorly thought out idea. Everything that happens is predictable but Joe Hill is like a child with a good report card, pointing things out to you that you already figured out. When you don't pay attention to him he just gets angry and points more aggressively. As a writer he seems to think himself above the reader but no, we came to the conclusions already without being battered by it because you're terrible at subtlety. I could go on and on but I'd rather not waste any more time on the Fireman or Joe Hill. This will be the first and the last book of his my eyes will ever set themselves upon.

Joe Hill chose to write semi-pseudonymously for a decade before he was outed as Stephen King's son because he wanted his work to stand, or fall, on its own merits. As he told Writer's Digest in 2014, "[w]hen I was a younger guy, I was really insecure. I was afraid if I wrote as Joseph King that publishers would publish a lousy work because they saw a chance to make a quick buck in the last name." I suspect that any such insecurity is long gone given the success of Hill's previous works, but if not, he should rest assured that his own spot in the pantheon of great horror writers will be further secured by his achievement in The Fireman. I hate to compare Hill to his father, but as he himself acknowledged to Writer's Digest, "it's really impossible to have a lifelong career as a novelist and not write stuff that is occasionally reflective on my parents." The Fireman reflects the best of Stephen King while still being uniquely Hill's own. At times I felt its 725 pages were a little long, but looking back, I can't identify a single part I would have cut. In those 700+ pages, Hill gives us the full gamut of horror, from the scientific (a spore that causes humans to spontaneously combust), to the supernatural (what was really going on with Nelson Heinrich?), to psychotic cult leaders, to the worst horror of all: man's inhumanity to man. Each character's actions, no matter how heinous, made perfect sense in the context of that character's background, personality, and interpersonal relationships, which I think is what the best horror fiction is meant to achieve: that feeling of "there, but for the grace of God, go I." The Fireman, Harper, Allie, Carol, Ben, Michael, the Seacoast Incinerators, the residents of Machias, and, yes, even Jakob - c'est moi. I received a free copy of The Fireman through Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.

About the author

Joe Hill is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Fireman, NOS4A2, Horns, and Heart-Shaped Box; Strange Weather, a collection of novellas; and the acclaimed story collections Full Throttle and 20th Century Ghosts. He is also the Eisner Award–winning writer of a seven-volume comic book series, Locke & Key. Much of his work has been adapted for film and TV, including NOS4A2 (AMC), Locke & Key (Netflix), In the Tall Grass (Netflix), and The Black Phone (Blumhouse).