It is difficult to know whether to be more taken with the moment in Joe Hill’s The Fireman when, with humanity all but wiped out by spontaneous combustion, JK Rowling bites the dust (shot for using her money to save the infected masses), or when a character speculates that Keith Richards is likely to have survived. “Nothing can kill him. He’ll outlast us all.”
After the horror of his last novel, NOS4R2, Hill has taken a different road with The Fireman, a post-apocalyptic thriller set in a world infected by Dragonscale, a mysterious fungus, which tattoos its hosts with beautiful black and gold markings then sets them on fire. It spreads quickly, the world as we know it disappearing rapidly as vast swaths of America burn and unofficial “cremation crews” of the uninfected form to kill off those who spread the disease.
Hill’s story, which he credits, among others, to “Ray Bradbury, from whom I stole my title [and] my father, from whom I stole all the rest”, is centred on school nurse Harper, who watches a man burn in the playground as the novel opens, before returning home to her husband. “School was suspended statewide that evening, with assurances they would reopen when the crisis passed. As it happened, it never passed.”
Prone to looking on the bright side, quoting Mary Poppins (“spit spot”) and singing A Spoonful of Sugar, when Harper finds out that she’s pregnant, and has been infected with Dragonscale, she’s determined to survive long enough to have her baby. Husband Jakob, however, disagrees, and becomes increasingly psychotic as he attempts to persuade her to join him in a suicide pact. Harper escapes to a community of people infected with Dragonscale who appear to have found a way to handle the virus, but discovers that this seemingly idyllic refuge may have sinister undertones.
The Fireman’s plot could be a little tighter: it has a tendency to sprawl. But it’s also a fantastically compelling read, Hill making the end of the world into a real and visceral thing with the deftest of touches. The desperation Harper feels when she tries to Google something, and finds a holding page. “The button on the left read: Our Search is Over. The button on the right read: We Were So Lucky.” The dispatching of celebrities from Rowling to George Clooney and even rightwing commentator Glenn Beck.
And in this summer of dreadful news and political insanity, who wouldn’t want to lose themselves in a post-apocalyptic vision of it all being burned away? “Dunes of grey ash had drifted across the road... The landscape was the colour of concrete. Carbonised trees stood on either side of the road, shining with a mineral gleam.”
But Hill doesn’t leave us hopeless. One of his characters, Renee, brings up another post-apocalyptic story, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. “People hunting dogs and each other and frying up babies and it was awful,” she says. “But we need kindness like we need to eat. It satisfies something in us we can’t do without.” Too right.
The Fireman is published by Gollancz (£20). Click here to buy it for £16
