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 crime: stealing rare and valuable books from the exceptional college library.
Trapped and desperate, Arthur turns to his closest friends for help: 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 work: 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
KING SORROW – JOE HILL
Joe Hill, author of several modern horror classics, including Heart-Shaped Box, NOS4R2 (NOS4A2 in the US), Horns, and The Fireman, alongside a plethora of short-story collections (20th Century Ghosts, Strange Weather, Full Throttle), returns with his first novel in nearly a decade! But, he’s not content with just giving us one normal length novel, oh no. Hill has decided to bequeath us with an absolute BRICK of a book, one that is heavy enough to smite your enemies with! However, I promise you won’t want to be using this book for anything other than reading, as it’s a book that I challenge you to not cherish come the end of this 900 page epic.
Firstly, elephant in the room. Yes, I did finish this book last year, mere days after it had been released. And yes, I did think that I had posted a review already for it, however, it seems I didn’t and then I promptly forgot to talk about this masterpiece! Look, I was busy, okay…
King Sorrow follows Arthur Oakes and his friends, college students at a prestigious arts college in Maine (ayuh), as they get wrapped up with a group of small-time but violent criminals, and Arthur is tasked with stealing rare and valuable books from the schools library to pay a debt. To get out of this situation, the gang decide to summon a dragon.
It’s giving hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby. I promise this is the last time in this review that I will use a Gen Z-ism.
However, King Sorrow is so much more than that. The summoning of the titular lizard enters the gang into a pact where they must provide a sacrifice to King Sorrow on the anniversary of his summoning or instead become the sacrifice themselves.
And it’s from here that this book sprawls into directions you’d never see coming! Spanning from the year 1989 to the late 2010’s, we watch this gang grow from young adults pissing about at college, all with dreams and aspirations, to postgraduates in young love, the early starts of their successful careers, and then showing us the established, damaged adults they finally morph in to. And, miraculously, Hill pulls off every one of these characters arcs with depth and complexity, creating a core cast that – whilst it is rarely deviated from – is compelling in their flaws and believability. This also might be one of the most real feeling stories of relationships with life-long friends I’ve ever read. The way these people, so similar and yet different and close with each other at such a formative time, their fates and futures bound together from a mistake to escape a desperate situation, change and yet stay the same, becoming more scarred (figuratively and literally), how they live their lives spill out into a thousand different choices and directions. We gradually see that their outlooks on life are different from one another, and oftentimes those gaps in differences between them turn into chasms, but when they get together, they see each other as they once were, and those old emotions – the lost loves, the hidden hates, the protectiveness, the anger and rage, brotherhoods and bonds – come gliding out in full, destructive force. This gang are Loser’s Club level of nuanced, and they are the kind of ride or die characters you have to follow until the bitter end because they are just that compelling. It’s seriously a masterwork in character writing, and a gold standard in how ensemble casts should be portrayed. And that isn’t even mentioning the supporting characters – some of whom flit in and out of the core group, and some that appear only once – who all feel like they earn their space in this stacked roster.
What Joe Hill does here with the structure of this book is also very interesting. Split into multiple parts (usually with a short interlude between them), each part feels like its own contained serialised novella. They all have a differing POV (always from the main gang), but they also have their own unique flavour. One is paranormal slow burn crime with a distinct magical air to it, one is a literal airplane thriller that doesn’t just run but fucking sprints at 1000 mph, one is a Crichton-esque techno thriller complete with shadowy organisations, another is a dungeon-crawling fantasy descent. The list goes on. Even the interludes, which act as a palate cleanser between the bigger parts, feel like they play homage to the King “slice-of-life-tinged-with-the-supernatural” playbook, providing additional character and plot context needed between the time skips. In fact, some of the most memorable moments (in a sea of memorable, iconic moments) take place in these interludes. The prison sequence is, honestly, perfection.
Whilst we are on the subject of King, it’s a known fact that Hill likes to play around with his father’s legacy, and this is no different. It never detracts from the story, and it always feels like a homage or a fun easter egg/hat tip, but when my partner and I (both of us being huge Dark Tower fans) witnessed THAT line, well, let’s just say we were very excited (by excited, I mean we paused the audio narration and made incomprehensible noises at each other!)
And how have I got through all these words and not really mentioned King Sorrow himself! Everyone loves dragons, and King Sorrow is rightfully deserving of his royal status. If you listen to the audiobook, you are going to be in for an incredible performance by all VAs, but King Sorrow really steals the show. Even in the written text, whenever King Sorrow is on the stage, his heat, his presence, his ability to play mind games with people whilst also being AN UTTERLY HUGE FIRE BREATHING DRAGON is just such fun to witness. King Sorrow is one of the best villains in literature.
With all of this in mind, King Sorrow is also a celebration of stories and storytelling, of legends and myths – namely, the Arthurian legend. It’s a love letter to the horror genre, to fantasy, to Narnia and LOTR, to epics and the power of words, and the cumulative force of books and our collective imagination, both destructive and constructive. It’s a celebration of love, life, sacrifice, of pissing about with the ones you love, of reuniting after years apart, the bittersweet ashen taste of those we have lost and the roads not taken, driven by destiny and fate. It’s also a loving embrace to our friends, the relationships that we build and the ones that crumble, the bonds forged in fire. And it’s an ode to dragons. Big, scary, scaly, indestructible, pyromaniacs with wings, with the power to level buildings, city blocks, and turn human beings into KFC.
But King Sorrow isn’t without its flaws. For one thing, it ends. Like it has an ending (a great one) and it isn’t just an ongoing story for us all to continuously enjoy. Secondly, FU Joe for what you did to [REDACTED]. I shan’t forgive you. Thirdly, I have to wait until Hill releases his next book (it’s criminal that I have to WAIT for good things). In all seriousness, I’d be hard-pressed to find anything I could point out as a blemish, without it just being nitpicky.
King Sorrow is a masterpiece and will go down as a story that stands up to the legacy of other horror epic masterworks. This is a perfect book for fans of magical realism, fantasy, horror, thrillers, coming-of-age, you name it, this book likely has it. A book with equal amounts of blood, fiery deaths, horror and trauma as it does laughter, friendships, love and hope. This is undoubtedly Hill’s best work to date (and I consider his other books to be nothing short of five-star reads), and King Sorrow is a huge, grand, sprawling tale that you’ll be excited to enter into a pact with, and it’s one deal that you won’t want to break for a very, very long time!
With thanks to Headline for a copy of ARC… and apologies for taking so long to post something about it!
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