Joe Hill’s The Fireman TV Series in Development

Notable author Joe Hill, son of Stephen King for those unaware, has already had a few of his novels adapted into live-action. His devil-themed Horns became the feature film starring Daniel Radcliffe, the novel NOS4A2 became a two-season series on AMC, In the Tall Grass made its way onto Netflix as a movie along with the Locke & Key series, and the upcoming The Black Phone from Blumhouse is based on one of his short stories. Now comes word that Hill’s longest and most ambitious novel, The Fireman, is in the works for television with Hill teaming up with Walden Media (Netflix’s The Baby-Sitters Club) to adapt the material.

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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