Synopsis
Bookish dreamer Arthur Oakes is a student at Rackham College, Maine, renowned for its frosty winters and beautiful buildings.
But his idyll – and burgeoning romance with Gwen Underfoot – is shattered when local drug dealers force him into a terrible stealing rare and valuable books from the exceptional college library.
Trapped and desperate, Arthur turns to his closest friends for the wealthy, irrepressible Colin Wren; brave, beautiful Allison Shiner; the battling twins Donna and Donovan McBride; and brainy, bold Gwen. Together they dream up an impossible, fantastical scheme that they scarcely imagine will to summon the fabled dragon King Sorrow to kill those tormenting Arthur.
But the six stumble backwards into a deadly bargain – they soon learn they must choose a new sacrifice for King Sorrow each year or one of them will become his next victim. Unleashing consequences they can neither predict nor control, this promise will, over the course of four decades, shape and endanger their lives in ways they could never expect.
Review
This was a complete FOMO read. I’ve not read anything by Joe Hill (or his father) before, but seeing the massive dragon on the cover and so many people calling this their top book of 2025, I had to give it a try.
As with most of my books, I didn’t look at the blurb so went in as unbiased as possible. It’s a contemporary story set in Maine, where six college-age friends hang out together. From the get-go, the dialogue really threw me. I didn’t find it hard to follow per se, but I struggled to wrap my head around the style of speech, colloquialisms, and what I was supposed to be feeling.
One of the group ends up in hot water with some local drug dealers and he ends up stealing rare books from his college library to try and pay off the debt. When things escalate (alongside our main cast being almost constantly drunk and/or high and/or horny, which was a little tiresome at best and uncomfortable at worst with one particular pairing), he and his friends try to figure out a way to fix the problem for good. Thusly there is a deal made with the devil.
Unfortunately, the deal isn’t a one time thing, and the rest of the book dives into the decades-long consequences.
This really felt like five books smooshed into one. Each was tonally different, and each mostly followed one of the main group. As the book went on, it became apparent just how horrible and unlikeable they all were. There is a huge amount of time spent on casual racism, sexism, violence, sexuality, drugs, drinking, and horrible people generally being horrible, while occasionally having moments of clarity about how horrible they’re being.
The titular King Sorrow could well have been a devil, or demon, although in the final quarter we get more mythology/fairytale/lore, with trolls, giants, and lots of crude humour. There’s a lot of “imagination” magic, surrealism, visions, and what feels like drug-filled trips. How the deal was made, and how it ends, is all a bit hand wavy.
Overall it felt a bit like blending Forrest Gump (with our crew inserting themselves into various global tragedies, which felt a bit dismissive of the emotional weight they hold for people) with a political thriller, with a crime novel, with a supernatural urban fantasy, with an adventure quest. It is trying to be so many things at once, and I wonder if it would have worked better as a book series where each story had more time to stand on its own, in its own way, instead of one behemoth of a mash up.
I don’t know what I expected with this book, but unfortunately I didn’t really click with it. The audiobook was well-narrated and kept the tension high where needed
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