It’s been nearly a decade since Joe Hill’s last novel, The Fireman, hit shelves, and while he’s certainly been plenty busy working in short fiction, comics and TV and film, longtime fans of the modern horror master have been waiting impatiently for his next novel. Now, King Sorrow is finally here, and at nearly 900 pages jam-packed with story, Hill’s readers will get their money’s worth. More than just his longest novel yet, it’s also his most ambitious, and affirms his place as one of the great genre writers of the 21st century.
Set across a period of more than 30 years, King Sorrow begins in the late 1980s in Maine, where burgeoning academic Arthur Oakes lives a normal life, working at the college library and surrounded by friends Colin, Allie, Van, Donna and Gwen. Together they spend evenings in Colin’s family mansion, getting drunk and high and plotting their futures, but the comfort and joy of their days are numbered. When a local drug dealer threatens to harm Arthur’s incarcerated mother unless he steals rare books from the library, the sextet of friends sets out to solve their problem once and for all.
Their plan comes together hastily, with the help of a mysterious, ultrarare occult journal bound in human skin. They will summon an extradimensional dragon beast known as King Sorrow, use him to get revenge and then go about their lives. But King Sorrow is not only real, he’s hungry, and he demands yearly sacrifices, or else they’ll all be devoured.
King Sorrow is a great blending of genres, throwing occult horror and sword-and-sorcery fiction into a dread-laced fable about friends whose bonds are unbreakable—even if they’d like them to be. It wouldn’t work at all if we didn’t first care about Arthur, Colin, Van, Allie, Donna and Gwen. Hill’s prose, as crisp and bright as it’s ever been, ensures that we are ready to follow these six people to hell and back, and that’s a very good thing, because they just might end up there.
With his characters established and their dynamic engaging, Hill begins to slowly build out the lore of this strange new world he’s conjured, and that’s where the high page count comes in. Within the first 200 pages of this epic, relentless thrill ride, you think you understand what King Sorrow is, what he can do, but that’s only the beginning. As the friends age, and their bargain with the dragon persists, things shift in mighty, powerful ways that’ll have you gripping the book with white knuckles. It’s a story that’s constantly expanding, yet it never loses its warm human core, and that makes King Sorrow a must-read for horror fans and a welcome return for Joe Hill.
