The Fireman

The Fireman by Joe Hill

Fiction/Dystopia

2016 HarperAudio

Narrated by Kate Mulgrew

Finished on January 5, 2021

Rating: 3/5 (Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

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 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.

I came across Joe Hill's debut novel (Heart-Shaped Box) over a decade ago and quickly became a fan. I read 20th Century Ghosts (his collection of short stories) and Horns a couple of years later, but never got around to reading The Fireman when it was released. It wasn't the premise of the book that made me hesitate, but rather its heft! The print edition has 768 pages and the audio clocks in at over 22 hours of listening time. I really needed to be in the mood for this chunkster!

I began listening at the beginning of October, but had to pause when it came time to listen to American Dirt for my upcoming book group discussion. I was actually at a point in The Fireman when I was tempted to call it quits, so it was probably good to have a little break and listen to something else. I didn't resume listening right after finishing American Dirt, but went on to another audiobook that had been in my queue. When that was over, I decided to see if I could finish The Fireman since I had already invested so much time in it. Surprisingly, I was able to pick up right where I left off without any confusion or need to refresh my memory on the plot or characters.

Going into The Fireman, I had no idea that book centered around a pandemic and as I listened, I felt as if Hill could be writing about our early days in the COVID pandemic. Confusion about how the virus spread, as well as the division between members of society on prevention and treatment, sounded all too familiar. Thank goodness we don't have to worry about bursting into flames!

Kate Mulgrew does a fine job with the audio narration, but I never felt completely hooked and wonder if a different reader would have pulled me in better. I'm thinking of someone along the lines of Scott Brick, who did an outstanding job with The Passage and The Twelve by Justin Cronin. Or, maybe this is one which should have been enjoyed in print rather than audio. I'm not sorry that I read the book, but it was far too long for my liking, losing steam around the halfway mark. Heart-Shaped Box remains my favorite, but I still haven't read NOS4A2, so that may change.