The inferno of tragic fires in California in 2018 destroyed thousands of homes, incinerated hundreds of thousands of acres, and killed many people. Some of these California fires were ignited intentionally. A 51 year-old man has been charged with starting the Southern California Holy Fire. A 32 year-old man has been linked to five California fires. What sort of person is compelled by pyromania to kill, terrorize, destroy lives and property, and devastate the beauty of nature with fire? Arson can be used as a weapon of revenge or motivated by some other conniving, covert, destructive aim, but fire-setting is also an irresistible compulsion for some, recognized as a form of mental illness. More research is needed, but typically, fire-setting is viewed not as a distinct disorder, but as a behavior that stems from another deep-seated pathology. Fire-setters appear to be a discrete group of criminal offenders with a distinguishing constellation of psychological characteristics. This suggests the necessity of specialized treatment to target these individuals in prison and before they become offenders. A small study of 63 male and female patients with a history of deliberate fire-setting, published by Tyler and her colleagues in 2018, has tracked the efficacy of intervention programs for the mentally disordered offenders. The results suggest that the treatments significantly reduced the compulsion to start fires, but far more research is necessary to extend and confirm this small-scale study. Views toward arsonists have changed over time, according to a 2018 review of pyromania in Western Europe between the years of 1800-1950, by Lydia Dalhuisen, a criminologist at Ultrecht University. The data show the pendulum swinging back and forth from being viewed as a crime to being regarded as a mental illness. If viewed as an illness, punishing arsonists for a form of insanity becomes an ethical dilemma, but there is no doubt that more needs to be done to reduce the horrific destruction by fire that society is suffering. Increased support for psychological research and greater mental health services would seem to provide an effective and easily attainable way to fight this inferno.