Summary:
“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.”
From: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-fireman-joe-hill?variant=32206615543842
Overview:
Joe Hill makes the fantastic seem all too plausible with his longest novel to date. His attention to detail gives the story a developed, lifelike texture that aids in the monumental task of giving imagination life. But stories are not written in a vacuum. Not a single story has been put to paper without its fair share of influence, and Hill is no exception. He owns this, wears his influences like a badge of pride. He calls them out, by name, before the story gets underway. The page immediately following the dedication is reserved for naming the muses to whom he owes a debt of gratitude and citing their specific contributions not only to his complete body of work but to this book in particular. Notable among those recognized is his father—pop-fiction monolith, Stephen King. Hill confesses that his father is the author “ . . . from whom I stole the rest.” It is impossible for any who are familiar with King’s work to not notice his fingerprints on Hill’s story. The premise itself aligns with King’s longest single work, The Stand: creating a post-apocalyptic setting in the wake of a highly fatal contagion. One scene, and a particular line of dialogue, is lifted directly from this novel. Beyond The Stand, readers will see other parallels to King (the pyrokinetic abilities of some of the characters cannot be read without recalling King’s 1980 novel, Firestarter). There are other more subtle nods to his father’s work throughout the book. There are even some that the reader may start to see, parallels they may begin to draw, that turn out to be red-herrings created not by Hill but the associations of the readers’ own minds.
Thoughts:
On the whole, The Fireman is a well-crafted and enjoyable read. Its territory is familiar, but the novel’s well-trodden subject is not a hindrance. Instead it adds to the comfort, like slipping into a much loved and worn-to-tatters sweater. It also compounds the anticipation, as familiarity with this type of story and the behaviors of characters in such tales allows to the reader to see potential pitfalls that the characters, born to serve the authors intent, may not. There are a few places where a line of dialogue is jarring—usually because of a combination of the words themselves and the character uttering them—but there are bound to be such missteps when a book finds itself in the ballpark of 190,000 words. Given the overall competence of the writing and craftsmanship of the story, I think we can forgive such minor infractions.
More works from Joe Hill, available at Town Hall Library!
