Smoke Eaters

What does it mean to run toward the flames when everyone else runs away? Harvey Jerrold O'Higgins answers this with a collection of unvarnished stories about the men of Hook & Ladder Company No. 0, New York City's finest and most foolhardy. These are not heroics in the sentimental sense - these are working men who eat smoke, spit black buttons, and joke about death the way other men joke about the weather. Captain Meaghan commands a crew of Irish immigrants, second-generation Americans, and a few men who simply couldn't do anything else. They fight fires in tenement buildings, chemical plants, and the occasional hotel where rich people's mistakes go up in smoke. Each story captures a different rescue, a different close call, a different way men find humor in horror. The writing is compact and restrained, but possessed of a force that keeps you pinned to the page. This is the firehouse as a world unto itself - its rituals, its rivalries, its particular kind of love between men who trust each other with their lives. For readers who want fiction that smells like soot and tastes like black coffee.