The world is on fire—literally. A review of THE FIREMAN

I got a paperback copy of Joe Hill’s THE FIREMAN a few years back but didn’t get around to reading it until now. Hill, the son of Stephen King, has proven to be a talented author of horror and suspense in his own right, though I don’t think he has produced anything yet on the level of his father’s best work. I did like HEART-SHAPED BOX and NOS4A2 a lot. THE FIREMAN is Hill’s 747-page end-of-the-world apocalypse epic. It’s a genre that has seen a lot of action at the book stores over the years, but Hill does come up with a novel reason for civilization’s downfall: spontaneous combustion. This is caused by a spore which infects human beings, causing them to develop a tell-tale black and gold rash on their skin that is soon called Dragonscale, and once infected it is only a matter of time—days, weeks or a few months—until they burst into flames. It begins with a few infections, and then spreads fast, and along with it, the fires caused by the infected when they combust; cities burn, and then the countryside, as the air is constantly filled with smoke and the scent of ash is everywhere.

These types of stories are told through the eyes of a sympathetic protagonist as they witness society collapse and then deal with the consequences. In THE FIREMAN, that role is filled by Harper Grayson, a young nurse who ends up working at a hospital when the epidemic of Dragonscale shuts down the school where she worked. After the hospital burns to the ground, Harper finds herself pregnant and infected. Deserted by her husband after she refuses to kill herself, she is taken in by a community of the infected who believe they have found a way to control their affliction. But this safe haven becomes increasingly precarious as internal dissension works its way through the ranks, while the threat of Cremation Crews—armed vigilantes who hunt down and kill the infected on sight—becomes an ever greater threat. Things go from bad to worse, and then it really hits the fan—par the course for an apocalypse survival story. The title character is John Rookwood, an infected Englishman in a fireman’s uniform, who comes to Harper’s aid, and whom she becomes attracted to in the course of the book.

I am a sucker for a good end-of-the-world survival story, so I’m not as critical of THE FIREMAN as some readers. As with a lot of these books in this genre, the strongest part of the narrative is the first third, where things go to hell and the suspense comes from anticipating just what calamity is coming next. The pace does lag in the middle, but the finale does generate the right amount of dread as a small group of survivors make a desperate journey to find safety. I was proved right in my suspicion that certain things were not as they first appeared, and I truly feared for Harper’s fate in the final pages. I sometimes found Harper a little frustrating as a main character, far too trusting at times, and perhaps a little too good to be true at other points. There were times when I found myself wishing Rookwood, or one of the teenage supporting characters, were the MC, if only because they were more interestingly flawed. Of course, there has to be villains to make this kind of book pop, and I thought Hill used some rather tired tropes here: armed vigilante rednecks, religious fanatics, and authority figures who are revealed to have a lot in common with the Nazis. The real rotten apple of the whole bunch is Harper’s husband Jacob, an hysterical weakling who deserts his pregnant wife because he is afraid she has infected him, and then joins a Cremation Crew and tries to hunt her down and kill her and their unborn child. How did she pick this loser? Hill also plays a little fast and loose with the spore that spawns the Dragonscale, establishing how it is transmitted and what the outcome will be for the infected early on, but then revealing a way to control it through group interactions that result in a near hive mind situation. He goes even further by having Rookwood and others become virtual super heroes in the way they control fire, and unlike Johnny Storm, the Human Torch of the Fantastic Four, somehow manage to not burn the rest of their bodies, much less their clothes.

Of course THE FIREMAN invites comparisons to Hill’s father’s apocalypse epic, THE STAND. And Hill seems to have lifted characters right out of that book. In THE FIREMAN there is a kid called Harold Cross who is a dead ringer for Harold Lauder, and more than that, there is a deaf boy named Nick, the same as Nick Andros. Harper’s plight as a pregnant woman caught up in an apocalypse is quite similar to that of Frannie Goldsmith from his father’s epic. And Jacob’s writing ambitions seem to have similarities to that of Jack Torrance. This seemed to have irked some readers to no end, but I just took it all as a shout out to one of my all-time favorite novels and rolled with it.

All in all, I thought THE FIREMAN was a good book, especially if you are into mashups of scifi and horror, but far from the best of the genre. It’s probably overlong, though some of the chapters are very short, which does help. It was written in the early 2010s and published in 2016, and I must say that parts of it read much differently in the post-Covid era, mostly in scenes concerning the official response to the Dragonscale epidemic. And in a summer where skies where hazy in the lower 48 from Canadian wildfires, not to mention the news coverage of the tragic conflagration on Maui, THE FIREMAN definitely resonated in a different way. At the end, Hill does leave open the door for a possible sequel, and I wouldn’t be averse to visiting this world again.

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