⬥

In THE FIREMAN (Morrow/HarperCollins, $28.99; available mid-May), Joe Hill’s depiction of a world staggered by an epidemic of spontaneous combustion feels fresh and strange and is rendered with haunting beauty. The only problem? Past the opening chapters, the pace turns apocalyptically slow — so that the bulk of a story about people who throw fire and face off against bigoted extermination squads ends up being surprisingly dull.

What an opening, though. Harper, a hospital nurse who lives with her writer husband, continues to tend the victims of the Dragonscale disease, as it’s popularly called, even though they can ignite into a conflagration with sudden, unpredictable ferocity. As out-of-control fires and panic cause social institutions to break down, Harper catches Dragonscale even as she contends with two other dangerous circumstances: She gets pregnant, and her husband turns into a violent paranoiac obsessed with taking her out in a murder-suicide pact. Her only choice, if she wants to live long enough to bear her child, is to join a group of infected survivors who can teach her not to die. Yet as it becomes clear that Dragonscale has a dangerous effect on group dynamics (like amplifying mob behavior), Harper realizes she’s going to have to do more than just survive; she needs to become like the Fireman, a mysterious lone wolf who has somehow learned to manipulate the flames of Dragonscale as a weapon.

All of this should be exciting — and it is, at heart-­stopping moments. However, these moments are interspersed between long segments in which Harper ploddingly figures out the obvious while other characters very slowly grapple with personal demons. Recommended for fans of slow-burn apocalyptic fiction. Less patient readers might want to cool their heels.

⬥

On the day that her family buries her half brother ­Sekou, 12-year-old Cinnamon Jones begins to read “The Chronicles of the Great Wanderer,” a strange book ­Sekou gave her before his death. The book tells the story of ­Kehinde, an ahosi (one of the famous warrior queens) of Dahomey, in the late 1800s shortly after the kingdom’s fall to the French. Amid the chaos of war, Kehinde meets a shape-changing alien creature that calls itself the Wanderer, and the two begin to journey in search of Kehinde’s last remaining relatives.

At the core of Andrea Hairston’s complex tale, WILL DO MAGIC FOR SMALL CHANGE (Aqueduct, paper, $21), framed by Cinnamon’s need to posthumously connect with her gay, dreamy, black-sheep brother, is the theme of journeying to the self. Cinnamon, as the child of a family scarred by race and class struggles, fights to carve an identity for herself out of the seemingly disparate elements of her life: femininity, art, blackness, geekdom, sexuality, spirituality. Paralleling this struggle is Kehinde, who was kidnapped from another people by the Fon and forced into the role of ahosi; she desperately seeks ways to prove that the Fon never truly enslaved her. The non-binary-gendered Wanderer, whose people subsume themselves into the lives of others as part of their natural cycle, seeks to understand itself by aiding and loving Kehinde. And wending through all these personal sagas are half-mythical characters and archetypes hidden amid mundanity: griots and ghosts; Cinnamon’s famous “hoodoo”-practicing grandparents; and the Wanderer itself, which takes on different names and incarnations as past and present merge.

The only flaw in this beautifully multifaceted story is that Kehinde’s tale outshines Cinnamon’s, though this improves over time. Both stories are worth that time, however, with deep, layered, powerful characters. Highly recommended.