The Fireman by Joe HIll

  At the beginning of this book there us a global pandemic of a disease called Dragaonscale where you are infected with a spore that causes a quite lovely design to appear on your skin.  At some point, you will ignite and turn to ash.  Nurse Harper Grayson was a school nurse before they closed them down now she has gone to work in the hospital bringing her Mary Poppin's attitude with her.  Her husband is against this.  Then more than one person went up at once and the hospital burned down.  Soon she finds out she is pregnant which her husband, Jakob isn't thrilled with. He's even less thrilled when he finds out she has Dragonscale.  She tells him that he probably hasn't been infected yet and to find a place to stay and wait the two weeks until he can be sure whether or not he has it.   He wants to put his plan into motion which is to kill each other.  She doesn't want to kill herself now that she's pregnant.  Studies show that the baby could be born healthy.  Jakob is convinced that he has it even though Harper is pretty sure that he doesn't. 

Jakob shows up after two weeks ready to kill them.  Earlier in the week, two kids showed up dressed in masks and brought her some prenatal vitamins and gave her a whistle to use to call for help.  Now that Jakob is here with a gun, Harper takes her Portable Mother, a project she has been working on to give to her child when it's born and she likely has to give it up and makes a run for it blowing the whistle.  Jakob comes after her but The Fireman whom she had met at the hospital trying to get a boy admitted who had something wrong with him, is there to help her.  He uses his hand to cause it to catch fire and burn Jakob's throat.   Jakob runs off and The Fireman, John Rookwood, takes Harper Grayson, now Harper Willows to Camp Wyndham a place where people have learned to control the Dragonscale. The place is run by Father Storey and his daughter Carol.  The Fireman warns you don't want to get on the bad side of Carol.  But Carol's happy to finally meet the woman who helped save her nephew, the boy the Fireman had brought into the hospital and she had diagnosed as likely having a burst appendix.   Her nephew, Nick, is nine and deaf. His older sister, Allie, is sixteen and it was the two of them that were dressed in masks that showed up at Harper's house. 

Harper sees a familiar face in the camp. Renee, a sweet middle-aged woman who was a patient in the hospital Harper worked at.  Renee read to the kids and held reading book clubs.  She had been there the longest.  Then one night she started to glow and fearing that she was going to blow up she walked out the doors. But they never found her body.  It turns out she had unlocked the secret to controlling it by accident.   At the camp, you learn to control it by joining the Bright by singing songs together in harmony that cause them to glow and get a little drunk and sometimes paw each other.  For a long time when Harper goes to church with everyone nothing happens.  But then when she's serving in the cafeteria an incident occurs there to inspire the Mary Poppins in her and she begins to sing "A Spoonful of Sugar" and suddenly she starts to glow as do the others there.  Church finally becomes bearable. 

The Fireman has two people that need rescuing. However, they're prisoners.  Father Storey believes they should be rescued so they set up a plan to do so.  Harper goes along because they are injured.  On the rowboat over there, Father Storey says that there is someone dangerous in the community that needs to be taken away.  He would take them away in the sailboat and head for VJ Martha Quinn's island where they are working on a cure and the place is a refuge for those with the disease.  There have been many things stolen at the camp and Harper believes that he is talking about the thief.  Things go wrong with the rescue.  When Harper gets back to the camp after tending to the Fireman's injuries, she finds out that someone attacked Father Storey on the head.  Ben, who has been handling weapons and law enforcement believes the prisoners did it.  They deny this of course.  And Harper remembers the conversation with Storey about the thief and how he was going to take them away and how maybe they didn't want this.

When Carol takes over with Ben the place becomes a cult that a group of them isn't interested in hanging around and seeing where it goes.  They want to head off to find Martha Quinn's island.  Will they make it or will Carol and her followers stop them?  Will the Fireman teach Harper to set herself on fire like he can and shoot fire at people and objects or will he deem it too dangerous for her after he lost his fiancee Sarah that way.   Sarah was Nick and Allie's mother and Carol's sister.   While the Fireman and Harper have feelings for each other it's hard for the Fireman who feels he is betraying Sarah.  Not everyone gets out of this book alive.  You may feel the need to throw it against the wall, but I don't recommend it seeing as how it's 752 pages long and would probably put a hole in your wall.  Maybe just drop it on the floor.  Cause you will be upset.  This was a fantastic book that really hooks you into it.  It shows how humanity acts to those with this disease even after they find out how it's spread.  Of course, the scientists don't put out that that's how it's spread.  The Fireman was a professor before all this started and he studied this sort of thing and he figured out the cause and told Harper.  But even family will turn you away.  And if they didn't, Cremation Crews would come through to collect the infected to take to a medical clinic for those with Dragonscale.  Police were killing them in the open.  Now they have to worry about each other.  Joe Hill has done it again.  This book tells a fabulous story of end times.  I loved this book and give it my highest rating of five stars out of five stars.

Quotes

She felt the English were themselves to blame for her feelings.  They had spent a century relentlessly marketing their detectives and wizards and nannies and they had to live with the results.

-Joe Hill (The Foreman p 14-15)

 It’s so fucking cheap when people say I love you.  It’s a name to stick on a surge on hormones, with a little hint of loyalty thrown in.  I’ve never liked saying it.  Here’s what I say: We’re together, now and until the end. You have everything I need to be happy. You make me happy. You make me feel right.

-Joe Hill (The Fireman p 42)

“There’s a reason things like Facebook and airplanes and all the other great inventions of our time were made by men.” “Yeah,” she said. “So they could get laid.”

-Joe Hill (The Fireman p 103)

You just missed a perfectly good opportunity to toast an awful Coldplay T-shirt. If I ever spontaneously combust, I hope I’m holding a whole stack of their CDs.

-Joe Hill (The Fireman p 153)

” Are you all right,” Renee asked. “You’re making a face.” “That’s my orgasm face,” Harper said, around her last bite of pie. “I don’t think it’s any accident that a slice of pie comes in the exact shape as a slice of pussy,” Allie said.

-Joe Hill (The Fireman p 163)

I wish the guys in Rush snorted coke.  Maybe it would amp ‘em up and they’d try playing real rock and roll for once, instead of that limp-dick prog-rock bullshit.

-Joe Hill (The Fireman p 299)

Carol wanted love to be like a bar of soap; a purifying, hygienic scrub.

-Joe Hill (The Fireman p 319)

The idea of dying while laughing is is more romantic in concept than in reality.

-Joe Hill (The Fireman p 324)

I have news for you, Rookwood. I’m a nurse. We don’t take the Hippocratic oath. That’s for doctors. Nurses really only swear one thing—the patient will take his medicine.

-Joe Hill (The Fireman p 489)

Sometimes I think every man wants to be a writer. They want to invent a world with the perfect imaginary woman, someone they can boss around and undress at will. They can work out their aggressions with a few fictional rape scenes.  Then they can send their fictional surrogate in to save her, a white knight—or a foreman?  Someone with all the power and tiresome interests of their own and won’t follow an outline. 

-Joe Hill (The Fireman p 491-2)

I miss Coca-Cola. That would’ve been so good with a Coke. You know, we might've fucked up the planet, suckin' out all the oil, melting the ice caps, allowin' ska music to flourish, but we made Coca-Cola, so goddamn it, people weren’t all bad.

-Joe Hill (The Fireman p 493)

“Of course I pick the Beatles. IT’s a stupid question. It’s like asking what you like better silk or pubic hair?” “Ah, that’s disappointing.” “Of course, you’d pick the Stones. Anyone who’d walk around pretending to be a fireman when he isn’t--|” “What does that have to do with anything?” “Men who love the Stones are fixated on the cock. I’m sorry, but that’s the only word.  And a firehose is a symbolic fantasy cock. It’s pathetic.  Male Stones fans are frozen at eighteen months old just discovering the thrill of yanking on the rubber band of their own phallus.   Females Stones fans are even worse.  Mick Jagger has a weird gross mouth that makes him look like a cod, and this turns them on.  They’re sexually aroused by fish-men. They’re deviants.  “So what are the Beatles fans fixated on? The glory of pussy?” “Exactly, Strawberry Fields is not just a place in Liverpool, Mr Rookwood.”

-Joe Hill (The Fireman p 495)

It is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worse cell of all, oneself.

-Graham Greene

If she couldn’t have Mary Poppins, she would settle for Hard Day’s Night.  But it turned out life was more like song the Stones wrote: you didn’t get any satisfaction, you took hit to the body after another, if you were a woman you were a bitch who belonged under someone’s thumb, and if you wanted mother’s little helper from your dear doctor you better have the silver, take it or leave it, and don’t come crying for sympathy, that was just for the devil.

-Joe Hill (The Fireman p 637-8)

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