Review: The Fireman

Joe Hill's great strength as a horror writer has always been his ability to play out finely observed interpersonal and emotional conflicts within the constructs of the genre. In Nos4a2 and his comic Locke and Key, Hill showcased his skill at putting highly developed, likable characters through the wringer without seeming sadistic or capricious. His fourth novel, The Fireman, expands the scope of his worldbuilding, but maintains the same, almost perverse level of compassion for characters that Hill constructs only to relentlessly pull apart.

It is perhaps unavoidable that The Fireman will be compared with Hill's famous father Stephen King's magnum opus The Stand or Justin Cronin's more recent novels The Passage and The Twelve. Like those novels, Hill's is an apocalyptic epic that depicts modern society falling apart in the face of a devastating plague. The culprit is Draco Incendia Trychophyton, a fungal infection that characters colloquially refer to as Dragonscale for the oddly beautiful scale-like patterns the fungus forms on infected skin. The 'scale also has the unfortunate side effect of burning the host alive.

Harper is a young nurse as eager to help out Dragonscale victims in the early days of the plague as she is to escape her domineering husband, Jakob. When she becomes infected, Jakob is--let's say--less than supportive, leading to the first of many exceptionally staged, utterly frightening scenes that lend The Fireman the nerve-jangling urgency of great horror.

At around 700 pages, The Fireman is an ambitious story stuffed with surprising plot developments. The titular fireman, for example, doesn't make the transition from a symbolic figure lurking around the edges of the narrative to a central character until hundreds of pages have passed. Hill takes a long-game approach that awards patience while constantly building up new and enticing mysteries.

Hill isn't a showy writer, preferring to lean on his characters and reserve literary flourishes for critical scenes, but he can certainly turn a phrase. Consider this description of an ancient fire engine: "The engine had rolled out of a Studebaker factory in 1935, forty-eight feet long, as red as an apple, and as sleek as a rocket in a Buck Rogers strip. It would always look splendidly like the past's idea of the future, and the future's idea of the past."

Hill's knack for dark, offbeat humor also makes an occasional appearance. For example, Jakob, who becomes an enduring villain for Harper to tackle, is a failed novelist with a hilariously pretentious manuscript called Desolation's Plough. Harper models herself after Mary Poppins and sings her favorite Disney tunes to calm herself in moments of crisis. And then there are the many, many fire-based puns that characters employ as gallows humor.

The Fireman is a dark and grueling novel, but likable characters and sparks of humor give it a warm, humane core. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

Shelf Talker: The Fireman is popular horror writer Joe Hill's inventive, highly successful foray into the genre of post-apocalyptic epics.

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