A Plague That Makes You Glow, and Somehow Also Cope

A Spore That Turns You Into a Human Sparkler

Here’s the setup, and it’s genuinely one of the best hooks in modern horror: there’s a spore, nicknamed Dragonscale, that tattoos itself across your skin in gold and black filigree, and then, eventually, sets you on fire. Not metaphorically. You combust. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes not, and the not-on-purpose version is how entire neighborhoods burn down with people still in their beds. Harper Grayson is a school nurse, pregnant, married to a guy named Jakob who curdles into one of the more upsetting portraits of controlling-husband-under-pressure I’ve read in genre fiction, and when Harper gets infected, Jakob’s reaction is the first sign that this book cares more about people than it does about the outbreak itself.

Harper ends up taken in by a community of the infected who’ve figured out something strange: if you sing together, if you get into a kind of collective rhythm, you can control the burning. There’s a man in this camp who wears a fireman’s helmet, who can somehow command flame instead of being consumed by it, and who never quite tells anyone his real name. That’s the Fireman. He’s magnetic in the way Hill’s dad, a guy you may have heard of, writes magnetic weirdos: funny, evasive, clearly hiding something, and you like him anyway.

The Good, the Bloated, and Harper Grayson

Look, the reason to read this book is Harper. She’s a Mary Poppins obsessive, she’s stubborn in a quiet way rather than a shouty one, and she spends the entire novel refusing to become either a victim or a saint, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. Hill gives her actual interiority, actual jokes, actual rage, and when she finally turns on Jakob (I won’t spoil how), it doesn’t feel like a plot twist, it feels like a woman running out of patience after months of being gaslit by a man with a gun. That relationship is the best writing in the book, hands down, better than any of the fire stuff.

Now the criticism, because I promised myself I’d actually give one instead of just gushing. The camp politics in the back half of the book go on forever. There’s a whole cult-leader-versus-the-people arc involving a character named the Marlboro Man that becomes almost a different, more generic novel, the one where an apocalypse produces a power-mad tyrant and our heroes have to outsmart him. I’ve read that book a hundred times. It’s competently done here but it’s not why anyone picked this up, and it eats a huge amount of real estate that could’ve gone to the Fireman himself, who honestly gets sidelined for long stretches for a guy the whole book is named after. By the time the climax hits I was ready for it to be over, and not in the good, tense way.

Tangent, but it’s worth saying: this book came out in 2016 and reads eerily like it was written after 2020, all the mask debates and lockdown politics and people screaming about whose fault the plague is. It wasn’t. Hill just has good instincts about how humans behave when they’re scared and contagious, and rereading it after living through an actual pandemic hit different, as the kids used to say.

The prose itself is confident, occasionally very funny (there’s a bit involving Harper’s Mary Poppins fixation and singing “A Spoonful of Sugar” while the world burns that’s both silly and weirdly moving), and Hill is clearly having a blast blowing things up. I just wish an editor had told him the camp subplot needed to lose thirty percent of its runtime. If you want to see the book, or just decide for yourself, here’s where to find a copy.

The scariest thing in this book isn’t the fire. It’s how fast ordinary people build a hierarchy out of who gets to say who dies.

About Joe Hill

Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son, and for years he wrote under a pen name specifically so nobody would hand him anything on that basis, which tells you something about how he wants to be judged. He earned it anyway: Heart-Shaped Box and NOS4A2 are both excellent, and his short fiction (20th Century Ghosts especially) is some of the best horror writing of the last two decades, full stop, no asterisk. He writes like someone who grew up around the genre’s best practitioner and decided the only way to survive that shadow was to be genuinely great rather than merely competent. Mostly, he manages it.

If This One Got Its Hooks in You, Read These Next

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, for a quieter, more literary pandemic novel that trusts silence more than spectacle. The Stand by Stephen King, obviously, because you’ll want to see where the family talent for apocalypse fiction comes from and how the father handles the same scale of collapse. Wanderers by Chuck Wendig, if you want another door-stopper outbreak novel with a huge cast and body horror to spare. And NOS4A2, Hill’s own book, if what you actually wanted was more of his specific, unsettling brand of magic-as-menace.

For your book club

1. Harper stays hopeful for most of the book in a way some readers find inspiring and others find implausible. Which side are you on, and why?
2. Jakob’s descent gets blamed on Dragonscale, sort of, but is it really the spore, or does the crisis just remove his reasons to hide who he already was?
3. The camp’s reliance on singing to control the fire is one of the book’s strangest ideas. Did it work for you as metaphor, mechanism, or both?
4. Did the Marlboro Man subplot add tension for you, or did it feel like a detour from the story you actually wanted?
5. Reading this after living through a real pandemic, what did Hill get right about crowd behavior, and what did he get wrong?