Maxim Jakubowski June 2016 Highly Recommended.
Tales of overwhelming pandemics striking our world are like buses: you wait for ages and all of a sudden, like a plague, they all emerge at the same time. Recent months have witnessed, among others, the Cronin trilogy reach its conclusion, Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven and, soon, Ezekiel Boone's The Hatching and now here is a veritable doorstep of a catastrophe book by Joe Hill (son of Stephen King, who himself penned The Stand...). And it's an undoubted winner; one of the more original examples to hit the genre. A new disease sweeps the globe, infecting people with Dragonscale, which eventually has them self-consume in flames. Frightening enough but where Hill ups the odds is not just in his evocation of a world in overdrive to destruction but in creating a gallery of truly memorable characters like doughty, infected and pregnant nurse Harper and, of course, the eponymous Fireman whose superpowers and unusual talents might well hold the key to mankind's survival. Breathless adventures, pulsing emotions, things that go bump in the night and so much more, with surprises lurking on the corner of every page: a major achievement in a genre that many had thought had nowhere further to go. Will provide you with nightmares and epiphanies in equal share.
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From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box comes a chilling post-apocalyptic thriller 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 in this harrowing survival story.
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, a gripping vision of societal collapse. 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 in this dark sci-fi horror: 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.
The Fireman features in the following genres: eBooks of the Month, Books with reviews by our Reader Review Panel, Crime and Mystery, Thriller and Suspense, Recommendations, Fiction
The Fireman is available in Paperback, CD-Audio, Hardback
The Fireman was written by Joe Hill and published by William Morrow & Company an imprint of HarperCollins
The Fireman has 768 pages