Review: The Fireman by Joe Hill

Did Not Finish The Fireman by Joe Hill.

I read this book because it is voted the best horror story in Goodreads Choice Awards 2016. Sadly, in this case, what is voted as best by some do not sit well with me and I decide to throw in the towel at 2% shy of a quarter of the book.

The story starts off well with a sense of mystery and foreboding. However, the plot degenerates soon enough and I feel as if I am reading a meaningless novel about controlling and manipulating fire as a weapon to protect and avenge the wronged.

This book just seems wrong on so many levels; I am not sure why it is a horror story in the first place let alone understand it as the best. One thing I know for sure, at least for me, is that this book will bag the award for the biggest disappointment of 2016 if there ever is one.


Publisher: William Morrow
Publication date: 17 May 2016

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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.

*Blurb from Goodreads*

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