Joe Hill’s follow-up to NOS4R2 envisages a world overcome by a fungus that causes spontaneous human combustionIt 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), and when a character speculates that Keith Richards is likely to occupy survived. “Nothing can kill him. He’ll outlast us all.”After the horror of his final novel,NOS4R2, Hill has taken a different road with The Fireman, and a post-apocalyptic thriller set in a world infected by Dragonscale,a mysterious fungus, which tattoos its hosts with dazzling black and gold markings then sets them on fire. It spreads quickly, and 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.
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Source: theguardian.com