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The Hollywood Reporter brings word of the news. In a statement, Walden CEO Frank Smith told the trade: “We’re so excited to be working with celebrated author Joe Hill on The Fireman. I can’t imagine a timelier book to be developing into a series. The Fireman showcases a theme that Walden holds very dear – the idea of celebrating ordinary people who rise in extraordinary circumstances.” Perhaps the only hiccup that the series might have is that it’s a post-apocalyptic tale set after a deadly pandemic, luckily it’s one that is an overtly fictitious virus, one that makes people explode.
The official description for the novel reads as follows:
“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.”
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