mweiss33 's review for:

The Fireman by Joe Hill

3.0

---

I greatly enjoyed NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box, and I was anxious to read The Fireman. I started, then I put it down. Not a great sign, but I hadn’t given up, and I picked it back up and, about 200 pages from the end, I realized that I just didn’t care about these characters any more. The bad guys weren’t bad enough, and the good guys weren’t compelling enough. Often, the story stagnated. The shout-outs to Stephen King’s The Stand (and, yes, I am aware who Joe Hill’s father is) were more distracting than cute. I am charitably awarding three stars based primarily on the fact that the ending was not nearly as bad I had come to expect. Sometimes, good authors write stinkers. Joe Hill’s dad has them, too.