Instead of doing the best for wife and child-to-be, her husband Jakob goes off the reservation and joins one of the local Cremation Crews, wandering mobs murdering those with Dragonscale so it won’t infect anyone else.įollowing a vicious attack by her crazy spouse, Harper finds a new family in a pocket of infected folks holed up a nearby summer camp. Harper learns she’s caught it around the time she learns she’s pregnant. Those with the disease burst into flames - or give off roiling smoke for an air of deadly unpredictability - and the resulting wildfires cause widespread destruction to the landscape.
“How are we supposed to live our lives when every day is September 11?” asks the central heroine, Harper Grayson, who's obsessed with Mary Poppins.Ī highly contagious spore called Dragonscale infects millions beginning in big cities and then moving to smaller haunts like her New Hampshire town.
A sprawling and intimate sci-fi/horror tale, it surpasses mere genre mash-up by digging into love and passion while also boiling down the best and worst parts of ourselves when everything becomes literal hell. The apocalypse comes not via zombies but by an outbreak of spontaneous combustion in Hill’s superbly crackling The Fireman (William Morrow, 768 pp., ***½ out of four stars). Some people want to watch the world burn.
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