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The Fireman: A Novel by Joe Hill
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The Fireman: A Novel (edition 2016)

by Joe Hill (Author)

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2,5391585,777 (3.81)151
Fiction. Horror. Literature. Thriller. HTML:

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 bodiesâ??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 liveâ??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 Squadsâ??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 lifeâ??and that of her unborn childâ??goes up… (more)

Member:KatyBee
Title:The Fireman: A Novel
Authors:Joe Hill (Author)
Info:William Morrow (2016), Edition: 1st, 768 pages
Collections:Read but unowned
Rating:***1/2
Tags:None

Work Information

The Fireman by Joe Hill

Recently added byjbrownleo, LordPetros, private library, LaraCM, Boopster, Rini55
  1. 10
    The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition by Stephen King (aethercowboy)
    aethercowboy: Both books cover the subject of the aftermath of a terrible widespread disease.
  2. 10
    Bird Box by Josh Malerman (Shelby_Kuzma)
    Shelby_Kuzma: Both books deal with a female character attempting to protect herself and her children in the wake of a widespread, apocalyptic event.
  3. 00
    The Last One by Alexandra Oliva (jmiserak)
    jmiserak: Plague, apocalyptic scenario in a city setting, found family
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English (155)  Italian (2)  All languages (157)
Showing 1-5 of 155 (next | show all)
I loved the idea behind this book. A mysterious spore plague that manifests like literal dragon scales on people's skin and then causes them to spontaneously combust? Yes, please! Unfortunately, a great premise was squandered by uneven pacing and an overly long, monotonous execution.

The characters fell flat, too. The heroes were heroic, the bad guys extra bad, all without the shades of grey that make up human complexity. I really wanted more nuanced personalities to engage with.

Kate Mulgrew's narration of the audiobook was the highlight of my experience with this book. Her voice is dynamic, engaging, and captivating.

Overall, this story had all the ingredients to cause an inferno, but only ended up smoldering lightly. ( )
  Elizabeth_Cooper | Mar 3, 2024 |
Wonder if the author intended the protagonist to be unlikeable, or if I just hated her? Would have given 4 stars if it weren’t for that little ninny. ( )
  jilldugaw | Jan 27, 2024 |
I can’t think of any way to review this without spoilers, so even though this will be a very brief review, I’m spoiler tagging this entire post. It’s also probably not very coherent, but here it is:


The Fireman offers an interesting take on the dystopian post-apocalyptic story. We see what happens when a society is so enamored with a charismatic leader that they surrender their individual liberties for the promise of safety. We see peer-pressure for conformity and intolerance for dissenting opinions carried to its inevitable conclusion.

We look at the mechanics of a developing mob mentality, understanding why and how a group of individuals surrenders themselves to the pleasure of becoming one with the group. How those ordinary people can be so secure in their righteousness that the end justifies the means, and how those means may start with small breaks in our moral code but may grow to terrible atrocities.

Unfortunately, the actual vehicle that carries these ideas is problematic. I found the romance awkward and implausible. The attempt to provide a semi-scientific explanation for the disease fell flat for me as it seemed contradictory to actual events in the story. There were also enormous plot holes and other contradictory events. I found it wholly implausible that a school nurse (disclosure: I’m an RN with 2 decades of experience) would have the knowledge and skills to provide the sort of field medicine that our heroine routinely engaged in. And finally, I found it wholly implausible that a group of intelligent and resourceful individuals would be so stupid as to take the “Martha Quinn Island” story at face value. In this day and age, only fools and the cognitively impaired would unreservedly believe something they found on the internet.


Audiobook version. Kate Mulgrew's performance was excellent. ( )
  Doodlebug34 | Jan 1, 2024 |
This book has joined a very exclusive list on my bookshelf - those which I did not finish.
I got halfway, which was in May, and when reviewing my outstanding booklist in December, I realised that it was just too boring to finish. ( )
  BluezReader | Nov 12, 2023 |
Ugh, that was crappy. Hill can't fill a huge volume without adding useless crap. ( )
  cwebb | Oct 30, 2023 |
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Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Joe Hillprimary authorall editionscalculated
Mulgrew, KateNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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Epigraph
Outside the street's on fire
in a real death waltz...
--"Jungleland," Bruce Springsteen
Though I spends me time in the ashes and smoke
In this 'ole wide world there's no 'appier bloke.
--"Chim Chim Cher-ee," Robert and Richard Sherman
It was a pleasure to burn.
--Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Dedication
For Ethan John King, who burns bright. Your Dad loves you.
First words
Harper Grayson had seen lots of people burn on TV, everyone had, but the first person she saw burn for real was in the playground behind the school.
Quotations
Humanity is a germ that thrives on the very edge of catastrophe.
The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good.
But we need kindness like we need to eat. It satisfies something in us we can’t do without.
There’s something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out. Of course, I suppose everyone always dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your children. Or your grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies.
FOX said the Dragon had been set loose by ISIS, using spores that had been invented by the Russians in the 1980s. MSNBC said sources indicated the ’scale might’ve been created by engineers at Halliburton and stolen by culty Christian types fixated on the Book of Revelation. CNN reported both sides.
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Fiction. Horror. Literature. Thriller. HTML:

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 bodiesâ??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 liveâ??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 Squadsâ??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 lifeâ??and that of her unborn childâ??goes up

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