The Fireman by Joe Hill
Although I am not a fan of the horror genre, I still tend to delve into thrillers now and then. When it comes to horror or anything scary, Joe Hill is pretty much my uppermost limit.
Stephen King is not my go to author at all. His work is grows so quickly that I seriously wonder if he is writing the actual work or if it's just his name. The onl y Kin book I have read was " The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon." It wasn't even a horror book but I was not terribly hooked on it as a story. So it was no wonder that when I learned that Joe Hill was Stephen King's son, I had so many doubts. After reading the first few pages of the graphic novel, Locke and Key, I had no more doubts. Just higher levels of fear of the paranormal.
Since Locke and Key, I had read through a few more books by Joe Hill before I got to The Fireman. This was a Random Book Club pick to have fun during Halloween.
The boook is actially not a horror book in terms of monsters or ghosts. It is horrific in tersms of how far people will go to seperate themselves from others.
In the book, there is a strange pandemic of people spontaneously erupting into fire. It occurs quickly and without warning. Soon, society structure completely breaks down as pople just go up into smoke. The cause of the problem is isolated to be a bacterium. The only visable signs are "scale" like markings on the body. Once the visual markers were identified, people were quick to shift themselves away from one another. Fear became the widespread monster in the novel.
As the chaos and the crazy continue to escalate, a pregnant young woman recently makred with the afflication has to make her way from rapidly deterioting relationship with her husband to a secluded society for those who have learned to keep from burning to death. She has to trust not only those around her but the one they call "The Fireman," the one who can also summon the fire within willingly.
This novel added another element to my post-apocalyptic "what if" scenarios. A defenite fear inducing element is fighting something horrible that is on a microscopic level. If the key was to keep calm , then that was definitely going to cull out the herd.
It is fasicnating how the seperation of one another just becomes more and more fractured. As the chances of survival becomes slim, the people become so desperate. Their actions are understandable but that does not take away how deplorable many of them become.
Random tidbit, by the time I was reading one of the final scenese, it echoed veery similarly to the last scene for "The Magnificent Seven." Just as action packed and anxiety.
This book is definitely elicits a high recommendation from me. It is not a short novel but it is sucj a story that I flew right on through the pages. Such a great read!
