City on Fire

City on Fire is a historical novel by debut novelist Garth Risk Hallberg. Published in 2015 by Knopf, the narrative centers around a shooting on New Year’s Eve before a blackout in 1977, and the various people these events affect. The book was nominated for the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction. Hallberg writes for publications including The New York Times Magazine, Best New American Voices, and The New York Times Book Review. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and was a 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Fiction.

City on Fire is a sprawling epic—it provides snapshots of 1970s New York across all social classes and how they link together. It’s necessary to understand the background to the characters before you can make sense of the dense narrative—which is deliberately written as a commentary, rather than a plot.

On New Year’s Eve, 1976, a young girl is shot and killed in Central Park. Her name is Samantha Cicciaro, and she’s a student at New York University. She’s also the editor of a 70’s punk zine magazine, The Land of 1000 Dances. She’s passionate and very critical of the world she’s growing up in, which is what made her start the zine in the first place.



Her best friend is a younger boy called Charlie Weisbarger. He’s very shy and is still only in high school in Long Island. However, he and Samantha have a lot in common, and he helps her with the zine. They both love a punk rock band called Ex-Nihilo, and they watch them play gigs around the city. They both left their other friends behind out of town, and they came to New York hoping for new experiences.

The band members are all unique. The would-be leader, Nicky Chaos, calls himself an anarchist. He makes it difficult for anyone else in the band to make decisions. However, he’s not the real leader—Billy Three-Sticks is. He’s stuck in a creative rut and, though he formed the band, he pretty much lets Nicky Chaos run the show.

It’s Billy who links the band and these anarchist teenagers to the wealthy New York elite. Billy is not just a punk rocker—he’s heir to the Hamilton-Sweeney family fortune. They made their money on shady corporate dealings, and Billy can’t stand capitalism. He’s also gay, which offends his family. He lives with his boyfriend, Mercer, who’s a friendly schoolteacher.



When he’s with the band, Billy feels like he can be himself. However, Billy doesn’t realize how dangerous Nicky is. Nicky wants to eliminate the wealthy—including Billy, whose real name is William III. He plans on killing Billy and starting an arson campaign, but Billy of course doesn’t know that yet. Nicky must first get the money together—and he will look for it in surprising places.

On New Year’s Eve, Mercer walks through Central Park after leaving a party. He attended Billy’s family party, and there was a big showdown. Mercer needs time to clear his head on his own. When he’s passing through Central Park, Mercer sees Samantha lying dead in the snow.

When he gets closer, he realizes she’s not dead, but she will be very soon. She’s been shot, and she’s got hypothermia. He gets her to a hospital, and she spends the rest of the book in a coma. When Billy finds out what happened from Mercer, he realizes he knows Samantha, and he becomes preoccupied with working out who tried to kill her.



Mercer meets Billy’s sister, Regan. She’s stuck in a very unhappy marriage to a man called Keith, and she’s trying to file for divorce. She moves out for a while and tries to reconnect with Billy, whom she’s lost touch with.

However, Mercer discovers Keith has a secret. Mercer visits Samantha in the hospital, and he finds Keith there. He’s been seeing Samantha—who’s much younger than him—and no one else knows about it. Mercer doesn’t want to get involved, and he decides not to mention it to Billy.

Meanwhile, Nicky’s still obsessed with taking over New York and destroying the wealthy elite. He hates Billy because Billy is everything he doesn’t want the wealthy to be—kind and genuinely good. Nicky wants to believe everyone with money is horrible and deserves to die. His beliefs garner a lot of support—which triggers a city-wide blackout in 1977.



During the blackout, Nicky tries to blow up Billy, but his plan is foiled. We learn that Samantha’s killer is an old friend of hers from the punk scene, and it had nothing to do with capitalism. A message to take from City on Fire is that, while there are bad people, such as Nicky and some of Billy’s family, they don’t speak for everyone.

Although we learn who killed Samantha, the fates of the rest of the characters—and indeed if Samantha will wake up—are left largely unresolved. The book is more of a comment on 1970s New York than a narrative with a self-contained plot.