THE FINAL FIRE by Dennis Smith

I have no time to watch TV

Yours is the face that interests me 

I loved you when you lost your raincoat 

I'll love you when you lose your fear 

Fire girl, say you will

HUMAN FUEL! New York City, 1975 ... a powder keg in more ways than one. Ripe for the firebugs, for the insurance fraudsters, and for the decades of deferred maintenance and subpar construction. Just waiting for a spark, a short circuit, somewhere, anywhere: in the ghettos, uptown, on Broadway ... just one little spark, and it will all go up in flames ...

Firefighter and man of letters Dennis Smith had previously written a nonfiction book about firefighters in the South Bronx, and here he turns his not-insubstantial skill at drawing out real life drama to even greater heights of fiction. You are there! As brothers Tom and Jerry battle flames and human foibles, as Smith drags us through the gritty NYC infrastructure, and as we learn, in the best disaster genre tradition, of just how badly things are about to go wrong. This is the NYC of Serpico ... and of the Wolfen, where fact and fiction spring forth from the polluted asphalt loam. This is the same lousy, stinking town of Cravens and Marr's The Black Death, where millions of souls are held for ransom by institutional ignorance and the vagaries of fate. Today, it's a dead baby in a smoked out tenement ... tomorrow, it might be Manhattan.

Around the same time he wrote The Final Fire, Smith also founded Firehouse magazine, which is still running to this day. Here, he offers a free issue and an attractive discount price for a year's subscription. Readers left slavering over his destructive prowess may want to educate themselves further on the real life issues:

Signet offers some back page ads, including David Lippincott's disaster dud Tremor Violet. No thanks, Jack! Believe the hype: The Final Fire is a 4 alarm inferno!

Signet Books, 1975

FOREST FIRE by David James

About a block from the depot, a horse pulling an empty buggy flashed by him towards the center of town. The horse would die in the fire, O'Rourke thought as he turned the corner by the burned-out feed store. It could not be helped. He did not have time to chase it.

David Hagberg returns to the disaster scene under his David James pseudonym, this time with an ambitious period piece about the Cloquet Fire of 1918, which killed almost 500 people as it swept through the isolated communities of Northeastern Minnesota. Says the Minnesota Historical Society:

What is often called simply the Cloquet Fire was really a host of fires, fifty or more, that combined in a single event. It had two major theaters, one called the Cloquet–Duluth Fire and the other the Moose Lake Fire.

Conditions for both had been building for months. Lumbering, the region’s main industry, created giant depots of cut, dry lumber and left the countryside littered with wood waste. Farmers routinely burned fields and brush. Locomotives, contrary to law, spewed sparks and embers. The summer and fall of 1918 had been extremely dry.

Hagberg focuses heavily on the locomotive factor, and on locals' disbelieving mindsets: a fire would be too terrible, unthinkable even, so it can't possibly happen. One man who's all too ready to accept the awful truth is Chief O'Rourke. His life is currently falling apart, what with a pregnant mistress and political machinations against his office (we first meet him as he stops a white-on-white lynching, earning the ire of a local big shot), and even if he sounds the alarm it may be too little, too late. Those duplicitous trains, spewing hot embers, are nonetheless the lifeblood and lifelines of the north country, and O'Rourke will need to move fast to organize Cloquet's evacuation via rail. The few citizens who own automobiles can choose to ride off down the road, at the risk of driving right into the inferno.

Writing in that far off, futuristic year of 1975, with its satellites and phone lines and computerized whats-its, Hagberg makes it starkly clear for readers how limited the toolsets were in 1918: telegraph and couriers. A distance of 20 miles becomes an insurmountable hurdle, and the search for a missing child across town becomes a Herculean task. Poor form from Belmont Tower, by the way, spoiling the fate of O'Rourke's mistress on the back cover and letting us know that there's a "miracle of Cass Lake."

Besides Belmont Tower's spoilers, there's a certain stiffness to the narrative, maybe owing to its period setting. Whether or not we're experts on the Cloquet Fire of 1918, or had never heard of it before this book (raises hand), we know Hagberg is working with somebody else's script, as it were. Per usual, his writing is strong, but we're just missing that spark (ha!) that's present in his other 1975 disasterpieces Blizzard and Twister. We almost get there, with the firestorm proving a crucible for characters like reporter Sullivan, nursing shame from a cowardly episode on the Western Front, and poor, doomed mistress Mindy, but ... alas.

Forest Fire must have taken the most research out of the three 1975 titles, so it's disappointing that it's not quite as good. Not bad by any means, but still not as good as we know Hagberg can be.

Belmont Tower give us a nice spread of ads in the back pages, fiction and nonfiction, including the YA classic Walkabout and a story about the "confused, tortured world of the homosexual" title Boychick.

One final, humorous note: the anachronistic whirlybird almost hiding behind the title text on the cover art. Carelessness from Belmont Tower, or a deliberate attempt to hide the period setting from would-be buyers? When the smoke clears, Hagberg's Forest Fire earns a respectable 3/4 rating and sits comfortably enough alongside his other disaster work. Y'know, there's as much distance between now and 1975 as there was between Hagberg and his 1918 setting? Far out ...

Belmont Tower Books, 1975

ARCHIVAL UPDATES: THE U.F.O. REPORT & WHY ARE THEY WATCHING US?

Two vintage UFO texts from 1967 by Irving A. Greenfield are now available to read and download: The U.F.O. Report and Why Are They Watching Us? (as Allen Louis Erskine) from Lancer Books and Tower Books, respectively. In both texts Greenfield is hot for the Northeast Blackout of '65 being down to UFO shenanigans.

Original reviews are here and here.

MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: Dealey Plaza, 1963

Click to embiggen

And now, another kind of disaster ... they pulled that limousine down Elm Street slow and clean.

From JFK: The Case for Conspiracy, by F. Peter Model and Robert J. Groden.

Courtesy Manor Books, 1976.

DOME by Lawrence Huff

Mary Wolford, Ph.D., assistant to Professor Nichols, explained candidly and coolly to the mayor her understanding of the Slayer equations.

"Slayer's mathematics are rigorous. Absolutely foolproof. We've already established that on the computer. What we don't know and are trying to establish by this test run is how well his equations fit the physical conditions and characteristics of the Sodium Cooled Type Eight. If they fit we're in serious trouble.

This is author Lawrence Huff's only credited novel, and I'm not sure if he's a one-off writer or a pseudonym lost in the shuffle. A certain roughness around the edges points to a one shot author - Huff certainly lays it on thick with hero Dr. George Slayer's predictions of doom and gloom, and everyone's dialogue has a certain expository cant that reminds us over and over again that this is a DISASTER novel, all caps. Huff has some fun with it, anyways, and isn't afraid to take things to the limit ... eventually. 

In the meantime, we have to be satisfied with building premonitions of looming disaster: a missing plant worker, missing children on the causeway, a Howard Johnson's blown half sky high by a steam explosion, bugs in the system and false alarms out the wazoo. Things escalate quickly around the halfway point though, and soon enough we're all gonna be nuclear experts one way or another, the most unfortunate through personal experience ...

I said Huff has some fun with things - his hero is named Slayer, after all! He handles the coverup narrative with some appreciated subtlety, however, with General Power's minions scrambling to tell themselves it's all for the greater good even as we learn bit by bloody bit all the new and exciting ways a nuclear plant can lash out in destruction, long before we ever get to the dreaded supercritical tipping point. Who would have dreamed that a jetliner would be in danger 4,000 feet above the dome? Huff also, thankfully, gets everyone on board with the threat quickly enough once it's undeniable - there's not too much slogging through the Sturm und Drang of career worries and boardroom sniping that drag down so many mid-tier disaster stories.

At times, however, the scale is shabby and small, like a community theatre play with Huff's characters tripping over themselves on a cramped stage. At other times, Huff is successful at drawing the global stakes and invoking the awesome forces barely contained by General Power's Type 8 reactor. His character work can be clunky but his humanistic lens softens a lot of the rough craft. 

Too, Dome is a relic of a certain time, the era of The China Syndrome and Three Mile Island, when nuclear power was a visceral, immediate threat. Nowadays, in the thick of the plague years of police state terrorism, genocide, and climate apocalypse, what's an old fashioned meltdown? It's almost quaint ... until we get to the very end and realize how high the stakes truly have been. Slayer's been playing for keeps while the rest of us were rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic, as it were.

As stated, Huff ties things up well enough by the climax, with some exciting derring do and dutiful philosophizing. In the end, his nuclear powered downer earns a 2/4 rating. As far as disasters go, this is an also-ran with some grody highlights ... but not grody enough!

One final note: it's funny that the moody cover art portrays a more recognizable cooling tower front and center, with the titular containment dome hidden in the back right of the image.

Pocket Books, 1979

FIREWIND by Hank Searls

He'd spent too long sniffing like a bloodhound in the toyon bush, had isolated himself on the landward side by a ring of fire around the city. He was sure that the wild, howling gusts would prevent helicopter rescue, even if he called for one.

He'd violated the rule of firemen and burglars: never close a door behind you.

He had a sinking sensation in his belly. It was not fear of the encircling fire. He knew back-country topography, roads, and fire trails crisscrossing the Santa Ynez and San Rafael mountains as well as any man alive, and had lived all his life in Santa Ana winds. It was from fear of the firebug trapped somewhere with him, in the brush-covered hills to the north.

Fear of the firebug - he's on everyone's minds, from Nisei fire spotter Hash Ono lost in the toyon, to Chicano cop Shawn Ortega torn between two lovers, to every firefighter white, black, and brown from up and down the state brought in to battle the encroaching blaze. He may walk among the firefighters with stolen valor, like a criminal obsessed with the police, laughing and boasting in their favored watering holes, picking up chicks with tales stolen from another life ... or he may actually be two or three or more perpetrators. Ortega's got a profile on him, but it may be worth less than the paper it's printed on. Everyone's sure that he's a he, at least.

And if they don't find him fast, the 70,000+ souls in Santa Barbara are doomed.

Son, you're playing with fire 

The kid will live and learn

As he watches his bridges burn

To the point of no return

Author Hank Searls delivers an overstuffed would-be epic disaster story that, sadly, gets bogged down in its own unfolding minutiae. Race hate, domestic strife, office politicking, and the requisite crash course on wildfire fighting all compete for oxygen, along with some unconvincing psych work on the firebug - would you believe he's got the voice of an old shrink in his head that he keeps up a dialogue with, complete with dated counterculture and psych jargon about society and the man, maaaaan?

Author Hank Searls (1922-2017)

If I, a humble blogger, were to try to fix up this novel, I'd trim it down by about 100 pages, probably by axing some minor character arcs (but NOT Hash Ono's, as he's aces), and either make the firebug more of a cipher, or more of a grounded personality. Either way, I'd ditch the Shrink, as these sections are the least convincing of Searls' otherwise very well written story, to the point where the otherwise exciting climax is slightly deflated by some cheesy dialogue from the firebug.

The detective work chasing after the firebug also drags on, with the cops and firefighters one step behind him maybe one too many times. As it is, we're busy enough with the domestic drama: married Ortega is mixed up with a white woman up on the hill, who's mixed up with Ortega's best white friend, whose ranch is right in the path of the wildfire. There's almost not enough room for the fire itself!

Searls cheekily references his own Jaws 2 near the end, which is a rookie move for such a veteran writer: never remind the audience of another, better book they could be reading. His Jaws 2 novelization is rightfully held as an excellent work of adaption, I would say better than Benchley's original even. That Searls could construct such a killer novel out of such a lamented sequel makes it all the more disappointing that he whiffs it with Firewind.

Here come those Santa Ana winds again ... Searls is (mostly) more than capable, but his Firewind smolders for too long, earning a truly disappointing 2/4 rating.

Berkley Books, 1982 (original pub. 1981)