The Fireman by Joe Hill

 

Well, this was my reading this weekend, nearly 800 pages. It was interesting to read a plague-apocalypse novel that all happened in the apocalypse, no aftermathy stuff, no gods or devils or AIs playing at either: Just people trying to survive a disease with some traits that at least look supernatural on the surface (fungi are occasionally weird, but I'm not gonna buy spontaneous human combustion as a symptom, here). The characters are mostly distinct and believable, but there's some incident that skitters on the edge of implausible, even in a novel that at least gestures at the supernatural being possible in it. It's easy to point at precedents, here, but this mostly ends up standing on its own, and it's pretty good.