Fear the fireman
Ken Strongman is swept up in Joe Hill’s latest fast-paced apocalyptic novel.
Whether or not one likes his horror-tinged themes, there is no doubt that Stephen King is an extraordinary storyteller. Joe Hill is his son and, judging from his latest book The
Fireman, he is no less adept at spinning a yarn.
And his theme is just as creative and unusual as those of his father. The result is an apocalyptic, fastpaced novel that is difficult to put down.
Dragonscale has taken hold of the world. It is a contagious fungus that marks humans with wonderful black and gold patterns across their skin. Eventually those who are marked by the fungus spontaneously combust, rapidly dying in flames. Much of the world has been extinguished by this fire, leaving pockets of survivors, some with dragonscale and some not.
The setting is New England and the central character is Harper Grayson, who at the start of the tale is tending infected patients. Soon, her hospital burns to the ground and she discovers the black and gold markings on her own skin. She has a fierce determination to survive, at least until the child she is carrying is born.
Harper becomes part of a kind of commune consisting of people who have, by chance, found a way of controlling, or at least living with, the fungus. They do not quite understand how this control works but have begun to treat what they are doing as something of a religious ritual.
The eponymous Fireman, however, has developed a way of fully controlling the fire that the fungus embraces and Harper has to become involved with him to survive.
The Fireman is an extremely fast-paced book. At one level it is an action novel, involving derringdo and some unusual weapons and methods of survival. At another level entirely, it is an allegorical treatment of society as it currently exists, particularly in its more extreme forms.
The way in which those who are running the commune develop all manner of superstitious, semireligious behaviours demonstrates some of the dangers of such closed groups. Meanwhile, on the ‘‘outside’’, organised gangs of those who have not yet been infected by the fungus seek out those who have to kill them.
As well as two other novels and a collection of short stories, Joe Hill began his writing career with a long-running comic book. One can see this background in The
Fireman. It is so graphically written that it is a little like watching a fast-moving film. The best comparison of The
Fireman is with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. But Hill has written a book about potential survival and hope amid the kind of end-of-the-world horror that might not be that far away.