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
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