Teaser Tuesday #157 ~ The Fireman by Joe Hill

Posted: May 17, 2016 in horror, New Release, reviews, Teaser Tuesdays
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Teaser

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB at Books And A Beat.

Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page.
•Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

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My Teaser for this week is from

The Fireman

by Joe Hill

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Genre: Horror

My teaser from page 94 in the eBook ARC.

“What I am is a man with a dangerously ill child and a heavy iron bar. If someone doesn’t take the one, they’re going to get the other.”

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Read on if you want to know more.

My Review

With the popularity of the apocalyptic and dystopian genres, it’s got to be hard for authors to come up with something unique to bring the world to a screeching halt.

Joe Hill does a bang up job with his Dragonscale.  People become infected with the spore, their skin becomes covered in gold and black scale like stripes. They spontaneously burst into flames and are reduced to ashes. Anything or anyone near them is quickly consumed in the flames and the world burns.

It’s almost as if Mother Nature has come up with an efficient way to cleanse herself of some pesky fleas, namely, us humans.  Sure, a lot gets burnt up, but there’s no mess, no rotting corpses, just piles of ashes. Burning a forest is often done to clear away the underbrush and promote new growth.

The story begins with Harper. She’s one of those people that light up the room when they enter. A kind and caring nurse. A sweet and doting wife. She becomes infected and her husband, the man she looks up to, can no longer hide what he really is. A loser. A coward. A bully.

When Harper learns she’s pregnant and refuses to go along with their suicide pact, Jakob goes off the deep end. He joins a group calling themselves the Cremation Squad, and Harper is high on his list for eradication.

When Harper runs for her life and hooks up with the Fireman, John Rook, and goes to Camp Wyndham, things get real interesting. I love reading about group dynamics. You put a bunch of people together, their lives in danger, and all kinds of stuff happen. The ones you thought would be stand up turn out to be the worst. The meek ones turn out to be strong.

The camp seems like a safe haven. I know better. It reeked ‘cult.’ Remember what happened with the crazy religious lady in Stephen King’s movie, The Mist, when they’re all trapped in the store? Or what about the real scenario with Jim Jones. One thing you need to do is sleep with one eye open and don’t drink the Kool-Aid no matter how good it sounds.

The horror is slow building. It creeps up a little bit at a time as the world falls apart. You need to find someone you can trust. But can you truly trust anyone? People change, and not always for the good. Hope is hard to sustain. The best laid plans fall apart.

This is quite a long book, but I didn’t realize it until after I was finished. It was that good. The story flowed that easily. And I could easily have read more. With any luck, I will. The author wraps up this story but leaves it open with the characters. There’s so much more that could be told.

My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for a copy to enjoy and review.

4 Stars

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Synopsis

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.

AMAZON

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I’ve been trying hard to resist requesting any more books from Netgalley for a bit. I couldn’t pass this one up. Been wanting to try one of Joe Hill’s story and this one was right up my alley.

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How about you? Got a tease? Tell me!

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Comments
  1. Silvia says:

    You got me SO intrigued! I noted the book down, thanks for sharing both teaser and review 😀

    Here’s my TT!

  2. Kathy Martin says:

    Sounds like a fascinating story. I have never read anything by Joe Hill. My teaser this week comes from The Thing Is by Kathleen Gerard. Happy reading!

  3. admin says:

    Sounds like my kind of read. I love horror and this one sounds quite different.

    Here’s my teaser.

  4. Quality teaser and a good review, really looking forward to this book though still about a month to the UK release. 🙁

  5. That was a great teaser, I need to get to this book but I have so many books I want to read I am having a hard time picking something and sticking with it..lol.

    Stormi
    Teaser

    • fuonlyknew says:

      I’m there right now. I have a few review books yet to read but want to read something from my TBR too.

  6. I’ve been wanting to read one of Hill’s books…the familial connection, of course, but also because the titles and blurbs sound fascinating. Thanks for sharing…and here’s mine: “CLOUDS IN MY COFFEE”

  7. Fantastic review. Now I want to read it. 🙂
    sherry @ fundinmental My TT

  8. Candid Cover says:

    This is a book that I haven’t heard of before. It certainly sounds like the characters have gone through some hard times. Lovely review and teaser! 🙂

    Here is my TT

  9. sjhigbee says:

    A great review and very tempting – but right now I’m too prone to nightmares to risk horror. Thank you for sharing – it might be one to get hold of for when I’m writing again and feeling calmer:) My TT is The Nothing Girl by Jodi Taylor – https://sjhigbee.wordpress.com/2016/05/17/teaser-tuesday-17th-may-2016/

    • fuonlyknew says:

      It’s a lot more suspense than deep horror. I liked reading about the challenges they faced and had to overcome.

  10. ohh, it looks a great dystopia this one! definitively going to put in in my TBR. thanks 🙂

  11. ljennison says:

    Good teaser and I loved your review! Definitely going on my TBR list.

  12. Eustacia Tan says:

    Woah, this sounds amazing! I need to see if it’s still available on Netgalley!!

  13. Jenn says:

    I’ve never heard of this one but now I’m interested! Great teaser

  14. Hi Laura,

    It sounds as if this man is desperate and at breaking point, with his threatening behaviour being totally out of character.

    Your review was very thorough and thoughtfully constructed and despite the fact that I probably won’t be adding this one to my own list, was most interesting and intriguing.

    With the credentials this author can boast of, I guess that quality writing and storytelling is almost a foregone conclusion. I wonder if you have read any work by either of his parents and if so, are there any comparisons you can draw?

    Thanks for sharing 🙂

    Yvonne

    • fuonlyknew says:

      I’ve not read something by Tabitha in quite a while so can’t really say if he’s influenced by her. But I sure do feel Stephen in his plot and characters. Much more like his older writing than his newer books too.

  15. Yvo says:

    I’ve added this book to my wishlist recently; it sounds like such a great read! Good to hear you enjoyed it. 🙂

  16. Luxe says:

    This sounds amazing! Great teaser, thanks for sending me a link.

  17. Christy LoveOfBooks says:

    Totally agree. It did not seem like it was that long of a book. Oh, I love that teaser you shared. Gotta love John. 😀

  18. Oh man, this sounds like an intense read! Hope you enjoyed this! Thanks for sharing!

  19. Naomi @ Naomi’s Reading Palace says:

    Love it when a long book flies by. Sounds like a good read. I like how he is ready to take action in the tease… the love for a child.

    • fuonlyknew says:

      He;s kind of creepy at first but he grows on you. LOL I couldn’t believe it when I checked and found it was that long. It read so fast.

  20. That certainly makes a striking statement! I want to know more! Thanks for stopping by! Happy reading!

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