#1 New York Times Bestseller From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box comes a chilling novel about a worldwide pandemic of spontaneous combustion that threatens to reduce civilization to ashes and a band of improbable heroes who battle to save it, led by one powerful and enigmatic man known as the Fireman. The fireman is coming. Stay cool. 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. In the desperate season to come, as the world burns out of control, Harper must learn the Fireman’s secrets before her life—and that of her unborn child—goes up in smoke.
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Dark speculative fiction and graphic storytelling reached new audiences through the haunted, supernatural architecture of Locke & Key, a multi-volume comic series detailing a New England estate filled with mystical keys and otherworldly dread. Joseph Hillström King, writing under the pen name Joe Hill, established his career by combining classical horror tropes with psychological realism and dark fantasy. His bibliography includes bestselling novels such as Heart-Shaped Box, NOS4A2, and The Fireman, alongside award-winning short story collections that blend domestic drama with terrifying supernatural intrusions.
Born in Bangor, Maine, Hill initially built his literary career under an assumed identity to ensure his fiction would be evaluated strictly on its own merits rather than his family lineage. Since making his professional debut, he has earned major accolades across horror, fantasy, and comic art, with many of his works adapted for film and television.
Joe Hill was born Joseph Hillström King on June 4, 1972, in Bangor, Maine. He is the second child of authors Stephen and Tabitha King, and grew up alongside his younger brother Owen King, who also became a writer. Hill attended Vassar College, earning a degree in English in 1995. Earlier in his youth, his sole screen appearance occurred at age 10 when he acted in the 1982 film Creepshow, directed by George Romero and co-written by his father. Outside his creative work, Hill has three sons from his first marriage to Leanora Legrand, whom he married in 1998, and later had twins after marrying editor Gillian Redfearn.
Determined to establish an independent reputation as an author, Hill adopted his pen name in 1997, shortening his given name in tribute to the executed labor leader Joe Hill. His first professional sale occurred that same year in 1997. Over the following decade, he accumulated significant literary recognition without revealing his parentage. He received the A. E. Coppard Long Fiction Prize in 1999 for his story "Better Than Home", served as a recipient of the Ray Bradbury Fellowship, and earned the William L. Crawford award for best new fantasy writer in 2006. His novella "Voluntary Committal" won the 2006 World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. During this early period, his short fiction appeared in prominent periodicals such as Subterranean Magazine, Postscripts, and The High Plains Literary Review, as well as major anthologies including The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (edited by Stephen Jones) and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, and Gavin Grant).
Although online speculation regarding his lineage began circulating as early as 2005, Hill's identity remained unconfirmed until a 2006 article in Variety broke the news. Hill publicly confirmed his background in 2007. By that time, his literary reputation was securely established. On September 23, 2007, at the thirty-first Fantasycon, the British Fantasy Society presented him with the inaugural Sydney J. Bounds Best Newcomer Award. Among his archival materials is an unpublished, partly completed collaboration with his father titled "But Only Darkness Loves Me", preserved within the Stephen King papers in the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine in Orono, Maine.
Hill's prose and narrative structures bridge traditional gothic horror, contemporary dark fantasy, and emotional family drama. His works frequently explore themes of inheritance, trauma, personal redemption, and the unexpected invasion of supernatural terror into everyday domestic lives. By grounding terrifying premises—such as a vengeful ghost attached to a suit, a deadly spore causing human spontaneous combustion, or a predatory immortal driving a 1938 Rolls-Royce—in precise character development, Hill creates suspense that relies as much on emotional vulnerability as on physical peril.
In addition to his prose fiction, Hill has made major contributions to sequential art. Co-creating the comic book series Locke & Key with artist Gabriel Rodríguez for IDW Publishing, he demonstrated a mastery of visual pacing and long-form comic storytelling, earning the Eisner Award for Best Writer in 2011. His versatility extends across formats, from short stories and novellas to epic novels and graphic expansion series like Wraith, while several of his works have successfully transitioned into major screen adaptations, including Horns, NOS4A2, and the film The Black Phone.
