The Fireman - Joe Hill

Draco Incendia Trychophyton, better known as Dragonscale, is the hottest plague to sweep the nation - literally.  Once contracted, it's only a matter of months before the sufferer spontaneously combusts, sometimes setting off chain reactions with other Dragonscale victims and creating conflagrations capable of destroying entire city blocks.  The world has looked on in horror as civilization crumbles into a sea of flames and molten concrete, unable to trace the source of the infection or the method of its transmission.  Amidst the chaos and smoke, a mysterious man known only as The Fireman has emerged like an urban legend.  It's said that he can control the 'scale - bend its flames to his will - without being consumed. He comes to take the infected to a place where they can be safe from the threat of spontaneous combustion, or worse, execution by their frightened friends and neighbors.  Newly-infected Harper Grayson hopes that these rumors are true, if not for herself, than for her unborn child, who may yet be uninfected.

You may recognize Joe Hill from the movie Horns starring Daniel Radcliffe.  Or you may have read Locke and Key, a fantastic dark fantasy/horror graphic novel series.  My first exposure to Hill's work was through Locke and Key, and it wasn't until much later that I discovered that he was Stephen King's son.  (Although I guess if he'd kept his father's name, he'd be Joe King....)

The idea of a plague that not only kills you, but kills you in such a horrific and destructive fashion, was intriguing.  Sure, zombies are scary, but they are a threat that can be contained and dealt with given enough time.  Walking, contagious wildfires, however, are a different story.  I was fascinated by the level of detail and thought that had gone into the nature of the infection, its transmission, and its management.  If not for the whole possibly-ending-in-flaming-death-throes thing, Dragonscale sounds like a pretty cool thing to have.  Unfortunately, Dragonscale was about the only unique thing about this book.

When you get down to it, this book is just Lord of the Flies meets Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix while playing with matches.  People separate into tribes - infected/uninfected, those in the Bright/those outside of the Bright, with us/against us - and try to take over limited supplies for the good of their tribe.  Mother Carol, the eventual leader of Camp Wyndham, is basically Professor Umbridge without all of the pink, and Harper's plucky band of rebels is Dumbledore's Army - complete with its own traitor.

That wouldn't be so bad in itself if the author had just stopped trying to cram stuff into the book to compound the horribleness of the situation. And what would make things worse, you might ask?  Oh, a roadtrip from hell while pregnant and being pursued by your crazy ex-husband might qualify, I suppose.  Really, it's just absurd the amount of awfulness that happens to these people.  Even Lemony Snicket knew to spread the awful out across thirteen books.

Another complaint I had about this book is Hill's tendency to tell readers that a chance to discuss something would never come after all, or that a character was about to act really horribly toward another character instead of letting the action unfold on its own.  I seriously considered making a drinking game out of it.  Authors, for the sake of my liver, please don't do this.  Remember, show, don't tell.

Finally, there are the characters. The titular Fireman is actually only in about a third of the pages, and he spends almost all of his page-time recuperating from injuries or doing something that gets him injured.  I was kind of hoping for a cool superhero-like character, but instead I got an angsty Brit with broken ribs, so that was disappointing.  Harper is pretty bad-ass, but after a while her obsession with children's literature and movies got annoying. It seemed that she couldn't be on-page for a few paragraphs without making reference to Mary Poppins or some other sugary-sweet children's story.  The only characters I felt were even remotely believably written were Allie and Renee.  Everyone else, even the side characters and villains, felt like strawmen or caricatures rather than real people.

Fans of Stephen King may enjoy this book, if nothing else than for the shout-outs to King's works. I've only ever read It, so I couldn't tell you any specific references that I noticed, but I did feel like this book had a lot of the same pacing and ending issues that It had.  Around the second third of the book, everything slows to a crawl and it's really hard to keep up the desire to keep reading.  The action picks back up toward the final third, but then you get to the end and it sort of fizzles out like a wet match.  There is an afterword hidden in the author acknowledgements at the end that may be setting up for a second book, so if you do decide to read this one, make sure to read it all the way through.

Overall, I thought that the book had an interesting premise, but the execution was lacking.  It may just be that it was being executed in the wrong medium.  This story makes for a long and laborious read as a novel, but the visual language used to describe the ways the Fireman can manipulate fire, as well as the shoot-outs and car chases, make it ideal for making a graphic novel or t.v. series out of it.  I mean, with fire, it's more captivating to watch it than to read about it.