The Fireman

The Fireman is a suspenseful thriller that is deeply concerned about the ambivalence of tribal behavior: the story’s fantastical elements amplify the positive side of the powerful feeling of “belonging”, but also warn us of its many dangers.

The story revolves around an apocalyptic pandemic. There’s a spore called Dragonscale that marks the person’s skin with strange stripes and eventually makes their body go up in flames. People can go on for months without triggering spontaneous combustion, but a painful death by fire is just a matter of time – and stress.

The protagonist is Harper Grayson, a school nurse who lives with her husband Jakob. Against his wishes, she decides to help out at a hospital, doing volunteer work during the crisis. Despite all her best efforts to protect herself, however, she ends up with Dragonscale and, to make matters worse, right after discovering she’s pregnant.

The first moments of tension in the book are about the pandemic itself. Schools, for example, are still open despite people everywhere literally going up in flames: capitalism, after all, is a perpetual motion machine that doesn’t let human lives get in the way of profit, so business must go on as usual even though the world is ending. Meanwhile, time is a thing to be dreaded, as it takes just a few weeks for friends and relatives to get infected and pass away. This is shown in a shocking manner at the end of an early chapter, when the narrative jumps a little bit in time and the narrator marks how some of the side characters are now simply dead.

But after Harper gets infected, the tension shifts toward her relationship with her husband, Jakob. Even before this moment, we can already see signs that there is something off with it: the condescending way in which he speaks to her (and of her) when he’s on the phone with a friend, for example, already hints at the core issue at play: “She’s fine. Didn’t know a thing about it. She’s home and we’re going to have a good old shouting match if she thinks I’m going to let her back to work anytime soon,” he says to his friend.

This passage may seem innocuous at first glance, but it is actually quite revealing. Jakob believes he lets his wife do things, that he’s in control of her, and decides her actions: if she was working at a hospital despite his wishes, it was only because he was a good husband and allowed it. He believes his will is the one that will always prevail, which is why he never doubts that he’s going to win the shouting match. Meanwhile, the “good old” qualifier also reveals that this event – and its outcome – is a routine in their relationship: they argue and he wins. In other words, Harper is in an abusive relationship. She’s apologetic and submissive, being molded and controlled by her husband. We see how Jakob’s influence on her shapes even some of her ideas, how her opinions may not be really hers, but originate from him instead:

“She had learned from Jakob to think of people who spoke of blessings and faith as simple and a little infirm. People who thought things happened for a reason were to be pitied. Such folk had given up their curiosity for a comforting children’s story.”

Jakob often dismisses her accomplishments, refuses to offer comfort, and blames Harper for everything, twisting the facts to make her feel bad about herself: if she’s doing volunteer work, it’s not because she’s altruistic, but because she’s in desperate need of validation, she’s risking her life just to seek praise. When she gets infected, then, it’s obviously her fault, for she should have known better and listened to him, even though she took all the necessary precautions at work. And what makes Harper tragic is that she feels compelled to believe it all. “I’m sorry I got sick,” she says, apologizing for catching a disease that makes people spontaneously combust, for her husband is not sorry that she will die but worried that she may infect him too.

Harper is aware that this is abusive, but she feels powerless to stop it, because her husband made feel that her “entire self-worth depended on doing and being just what he wanted her to do and be.” But the situation changes when she discovers that she’s pregnant and Jakob’s solution to their plight is contemplating suicide: the existence of the baby opens her eyes to the cruelty of her Jakob’s words and pushes her to take action.

This is when the novel moves to its central subject, for after leaving Jakob, Harper is led by a mysterious fireman to a hidden community of people that have Dragonscale but somehow manage to not go up in flames. Their secret? They claim it’s harmony. They defend that the scale reacts to the person’s mental state. If they’re happy, the scale reacts in a positive way, but if they’re scared and afraid, it ignites. In their eyes, the scale only amplifies what the person already feels. As one of the characters puts it,

“If you can create a feeling of security and well-being and acceptance, the Dragonscale will react in a very different way: by making you feel more alive than you’ve ever felt before. It will make colors deeper and tastes richer and emotions stronger. It’s like being set on fire with happiness.”

“Security” and “acceptance”: what this character is saying is related to the feeling of belonging somewhere, of being part of a group. And since this feeling is one of the most powerful a religious community can produce, it’s not a coincidence that this strange community Harper finds herself in has assumed a religious form: even though he’s not a priest of any kind, their leader is still called Father Storey, because he leads them to church every day to sing together in harmony.

“Harmony” is a term that suggests peace, control, and even a certain degree of tranquility, but some of the characters refer to these acts of communion by another term: “tribal behavior”, which has the opposite connotation, evoking notions of violence and chaos. This tension is at the core of The Fireman‘s narrative, for Dragonscale rewards people who are part of a group, acting in sync as one, but not necessarily doing good things.

The act of belonging makes a person feel great, but to achieve this, to really belong, people can do harmless things, such as sing and pray together, or they can haunt and hang the ones their group deems inferior or dangerous. Human beings are social creatures by nature, so much so that when we finally feel we are part of a community, our bodies release a hormone called oxytocin, which gives us a pleasurable sensation. The problem is that tribal behavior doesn’t care about morality to release this hormone, which means a prayer and a murder can feel the same. Since Dragonscale amplifies this feeling, it makes the prospect of a group turning violent even more worrisome in Harper’s plague-torn world. As the narrator explains, when referring to the amplified effects of oxytocin as “being in the Bright”,

“When you were in the Bright, everything felt good, everything felt right. You didn’t walk. You danced. The world pulsed with a secret song and you were the star of your own Technicolor musical. The blood leaping from her carotid artery would be as beautiful to them as a sparkler throwing a burning red shower of phosphorus.”

The novel, then, is concerned with the kind of power leaders can acquire in these types of tight communities. Since their will is rarely questioned – notions of “loyalty”, “union”, and “holyness” are reinforced to ensure that – these leaders can form and control a collective ire, guiding it against a particular group of incovenient individuals, weaponizing the faith of their flock. The story presents an argument: that when one of these leaders creates a discourse that justifies and legitimizes violence – even if they have the best of intentions when doing so – the feeling of belonging – the oxytocin – makes believing this hateful rhetoric an appealing prospect for the members of their community. What Dragonscale does, then, is amplify this danger and make its duality more pronounced: it’s called “being in the Bright” because the characters literally glow when they are under the effect of oxytocin, shining beautifully while murdering their peers.

The leader of Harper’s newfound community, however, is Father Storey, who is seen by his flock as a hopelessly optimistic man. He acts as if people will always choose to do the right thing, even though the circumstances hint at the opposite outcome. If there’s a thief on the loose, Storey will urge them to come forward and repent, ensuring all will be forgiven – the thief, of course, doesn’t do that. And when a man is causing trouble – risking all their lives by contacting outsiders – Storey is there to prevent his community from taking drastic measures, ensuring them that the man (an incel named Harold, probably referencing Stephen King’s The Stand) will see the error of his ways.

But what his people doesn’t understand is Storey’s motivation: he’s doing these things not because he really believes people are good, but exactly the opposite. He fears what will happen if his community becomes violent, and so tries to smother out their anger before it engulfs their souls: “Every time I see them sing and shine together, I always wonder what would happen if they formed a lynch mob. Do you think the Dragonscale would like a lynch mob as well as a chorus? I do,” he confesses to Harper. But Father Storey won’t be there forever to pacify his people – he’s an old man and this is a long book – and the next in line may not have the same insight. Violence, then, becomes a matter of time.

The Fireman’s narrative succeeds in connecting Harper’s personal plight with this collective danger. While she’s in a journey to take control of herself and her body and become independent, Jakob wants to dominate her, and so does her newfound community. When the titular fireman – a snub, arrogant, but good-hearted man – tells the protagonist of the place, he also warns her about not getting too carried away with their rhetoric: what he’s alerting her is that being part of a group is great, but its ideology can shape her worldview just like her husband’s opinions used to do, making her do and think things she wouldn’t otherwise. So, when Harper opposes her community – refusing to put a stone in her mouth, for instance – she’s making a statement, saying that she won’t let them control her – and, just like Jakob, they don’t take that gracefully.

The other major antagonist in the book is the Malboro Man –an apt name for a villain in a story about people being killed by fire and the dangers of pleasurable sensations. The Malboro Man represents the cruelty of people who believe the other is a thing that must be destroyed: he doesn’t have Dragonscale and so he hunts down those who do, because in his eyes they represent a danger to everyone else. We can clearly see that he’s sadistic – he brags about the people he killed – and that he dehumanizes his victims precisely to justify this sadism: it’s not wrong to enjoy killing if who you’re killing is not a person but a dangerous monster. Sadism, in other words, can be justified by the identity of the victim. And there’s a great moment in the book – packed with political undertones – when Harper recognizes who this genocidal sadistic villain is… by the American flag he wears on the back of his shirt.

The narrative in The Fireman is also divided into several small chapters that end with a hook, usually with the narrator hinting at the horrible things that are going to happen. This creates a suffocating atmosphere, since the narrator is usually crushing the characters’ hopes and dreams. Someone will say something akin to “I hope it’s not too late,” and the narrator will immediately end the chapter with, “It was though.” However, the problem is that this impacts the ending of the novel, because we are expecting this “it was though” to appear, but it never comes, making the resulting hopeful tone feel strange, false even, since it’s at odds with the previous build up.

The Fireman is a thematically-driven thriller that explores the complexities of group relations, human nature, and the feeling of belonging. Its ending doesn’t quite land, but the discussions its narrative proposes more than make up for that.

September 07, 2021.