Here Be Dragons – A Response to King Sorrow by Joe Hill

This is going to get spoilery. Go read the damn book.

So, then.

Ten years after The Fireman, Joe Hill returns to the world of novel writing with an absolute behemoth of a book (900 or 1000 pages, depending on which hardback you picked up, 275,000 words either way). It’s your basic ‘gang of friends summon a dragon to kill someone Bad without realising it’ll keep coming back every year and they’ll have to keep nominating people to die’ narritive, set agianst the backdrop of a world – our world, to be clear, from the late 80s through to 2 years ago – going slowly but surely mad, in exactly the way the world has gone mad.

And let’s get this out of the way, I think it’s pretty fucking good. As in, ‘I read it over five nights despite the insane length, and I’m so tired and yet here I am at 11.30 in the evening the day after finishing it, sitting down to write about it’ good.

So, let’s talk about why.

I guess we can start with the readability. Hill really does have his father’s talent for pacing, both structurally and on a sentence level, putting him in that elite category of writers who can keep me turning the pages not merely past bedtime but past the point of physical exhaustion. Inhaling a 900-page book over 4 days is a very unusual feat for me under normal circumstances, and honestly, my life is so batshit busy right now that I really could have done without it; yet here we are. 

Ah, you know what, as we’re here, fuck it; I’m well aware the comparison to big Papa is going to get some eyes rolling, and is unlikely to put me on Hill’s Christmas card list. In my defence:

• It’s not a compliment I throw around lightly or lazily, nor is this type of readability a talent exclusive to Hill (or King). I say it because, as most of you know, King’s a Mount Rushmore author for me, I’ve spent far more time than is healthy reading his work and trying to figure out what makes it so good, and, for my money, he’s still one of the best to ever do it. So, on the evidence of King Sorrow, is Hill, and this shared talent is one of the reasons why.
• King is not the only influence on this book, by any means. King Sorrow has elements that remind me strongly of Peter Straub (especially the sequence that we revisit several times, from multiple POVs, as the young gang first complete the ritual to summon the dragon, each sufficiently under the influence that they don’t entirely trust their perceptions, in what is a tour de force of building hallucinogenic dread). There’s also Barker’s gift for overlapping mundane reality with a dark fantasy world in such a way that the fantasy elements feel as real as the ‘regular’ world (if not realer). This book deals in folklore and mythology, weaving them seamlessly into a modern setting. Also Monty Python (and not just on the Trolls’ ‘Black Knight’ T-Shirt, either; the riddle/joke that Gwen manages to fox King Sorrow with early on in the story is lifted from Pythons’ ‘Live at the Hollywood Bowl’ movie). Though he’s a far less cynical writer, there are moments in the novel that invoke the moral dilemma at the heart of Chuck Palanuk’s masterpiece Lulaby. And there’s a pleasingly messy moral and political dimension and anxiety to this book that’s all Hill’s own. All that’s in here, but so is King, and it would feel weird not to note that.
• The book invites the comparison, not least because at several points it’s clear this book takes place in our world, but also in Kings, in ways that go beyond the Jolt Cola references in The Fireman. The rifle that John Smith used to shoot at Gregg Stillson in The Dead Zone appears in the narrative at one point, for example; furthermore, the prose itself riffs on King at several points, including a reference in the aforementioned halucioation scene to the opening line of The Gunslinger. To be clear, this isn’t a complaint, and I don’t think any of this is bad. In point of fact, I think it’s pretty fucking awesome, and I loved it. It’s just that it makes drawing King comparisons pretty much inevitable.
• It’s literally called KING Sorrow, give me a break.

…where the hell was I?

Ah, yes. Readability. 

On a sentence, prose level, of course; Hill puts us there, scene after scene, drawing deft character sketches and delivering passages of description that honestly left me awestruck. Not because they were flashy or surface-level virtuosic, but because they were actually virtuosic. By which I mean unfussy, unpretentious, projecting the movie scene directly into my brain so clearly it was eerie.

I’m coming to think that good descriptive work in prose is like the best rhythm sections in rock bands; when it’s really doing its job, you barely notice it.  There was a short paragraph describing a partially demolished prison – surely no more than five or six short sentences long – that was so good, I read it out ot a friend. He looked at me for a second, puzzled – then he said, ‘Oh, right! Yeah! I can see it!’

But also structurally. King Sorrow is divided into five ‘books’, each featuring an interlude at the end (yes, yes, like IT, we’ll get into that, promise), and each book leaps time forward significantly. I’ll admit I found the first fast forward a little bit jarring, as we leap from 1989 to 1995, but the feeling melted away almost immediately as I got caught up in events.

What Hill does, with a frankly annoying level of skill, is seamlessly weave the story of the intervening years in with the action, putting the narrative pedal all the way down on the gas (in the case of the opening of Book 2, quite literally, as we join Allie desperately weaving through traffic in order to catch a plane, hoping to avoid a massacre).

So we get the epic sweep of the narrative, as this group of teenage friends grow up, find their places in the world (or, you know, not), and wrestle with the psychological weight of knowing every year they must pick a victim to be psycologically tortured, then murdered… but always through the prisim of a screamingly current and hair raisingly dangerous sequence of events. And each one is so startlingly different it really does feel like five different books; each fast-paced and thrilling, but with its own distinct setting and atmosphere.

Five times, he does this. You could go off people.

I’ve been kicking it about in my mind for the last 24 hours, and I can’t immediately locate a precedent; at least, not in prose. I mean, y’all know how much love I have for IT, and the gonzo narrative structure is certainly part of why, but there’s a focus to the way King Sorrow does this, a sense of sure-footed purpose, that I just found stunning. 

Thinking about it more, it may come in part from Hill’s comics background; the constraints of that medium make a media res opening practically a necessity, and certainly a staple of the genre. And there are sections of the book that are incredibly cinematic (allbeit with an eyewatering effects budget) – though if you’re reading this, Hollywood, maybe leave this one to Netflix; this bad boy has 10 – 12 episode season one-and-done written all over it, IMO. 

Regardless of where it comes from, the effect is mesmeric; for the vast majority of the books’ outsized running time, we’re right in the thick of the action, facing nerve-shredding situations in which nobody feels safe (and, in some cases, they very much are not). It feels like a ridiculous thing to say about a 900-page book, but for the vast majority of its runtime, the pacing is relentless, breathtaking, absolutely ferocious, and if I sound in any way envious, that’s only because I am, right down to my socks, because this simply could not be medically possible.

None of this would matter, of course, if we didn’t give a shit about the charicters, and I’m infuriated to report that, even though most of them are children of extreme privilege, and a couple of them have political outlooks that begin at repugnant and sink like a stone from there, as the narrtivie develops, I did care about them, even the assholes. Again, with only a day’s removal to examine why that is, I can only gesture at possible reasons. 

Firstly, let’s acknowledge that Hill himself is a child of immense privilege, and that the course of his career suggests a certain anxiety about that (sure, we all know now whos son he is, and, as I mentioned earlier, this novel is intertwined with King’s own work in many ways, great and small, but the name of the cover is still Hill, not King, and Hill built a pretty impressive body of work and deserved reputation before the secret came out, so, you know).

I appreciate that anxiety. I’m not the son of one of the greatest horror writers in publishing history, but I’m aware of the ways in which my white, male straightness has cleared a path for me in this world that would have been far harder had I not been born with these arbitrary characteristics. 

Hill seems very alive to the privilege of his existence, and it seems to me that at least part of what King Sorrow is doing is wrestling with that privilege; trying to examine it, understand it. And, maybe, trying to ask if that kind of personal (even if unasked for), unearned power can ever really be a ‘good’ thing; or, for that matter, produce ‘good’ people.

The brilliant TV show Succession had a very clear answer to that question; Hill is, understandably, rather more ambivalent on the subject (aided, no doubt, by his own lived experience of having millionaire parents who are, while not flawless, by all accounts fundamentally decent human beings). Add in an anxiety about America’s place on the world stage (and, oh, yes, the book absolutely goes there) and our gang of Winners (well, they’re certainly not my beloved Losers) are thrown into sharp relief; a psychological study in what happens when people who consider themsleves essentially decent are given an arbitrary, godlike power over life and death. And while things don’t get Succession ugly, they also do not go well.

And, again, Hill’s a good writer, but I’m still disturbed by how attached I became to a woman who grew up to become first a Fox News reporter and, later, a far-right podcaster and conspiracy nut, for example. Donna should be detestable, and she certainly commits some detestable acts throughout the book… but through a deft combination of a genuinely horrific and sympathetic backstory, and exquisite character work, I was disturbed to find myself rooting for her to come to her senses.

And I really am bugged by that, both personally and politically, to be clear. In the real world that we all have to live in, for our considerable sins, the Donnas of this world (and even more so their male equivilants) are a cancer, and I doubt many of them have the humanising backstory to make their behaviour understandable (and, for the avoidance of doubt, even if they did, it’s no fucking excuse for who they are and what they do). Is that a flaw in this novel, then?

Does Hill do too much to humanise awful people? Or is his ability to make Donna sympathetic and enjoyable (in part because of her unlikability) a testament to the strength of his writing?

I think maybe it’s both. 

I think Hill is going for something very specific with Donna, and I think he lands it, on both a character level and narratively. And fantasy literature (and this is unambiguously a fantasy novel, as well as a horror story) is riddled with unlikable but implacable warriors whose place in the group is earned by a combination of hyper confidence and past deeds (they’re not normally women, though, so props to Hill for subverting genre tradition there).

And Donna is juxtaposed in the group with Colin, who is truly, irredeemably evil (and his moment of reveal in the fourth book is a sublime moment in the narrative; for me, the feeling of all the clues clicking into place was delightful, and the way Hill blinds the reader to what is in retrospect a rather obvious truth by only seeing Colin, up to that point, through the eys of those who love and trust him may actually have been genius).

Hell, Donna muses on it herself, in a moment of dialogue that felt a little on the nose at the time of reading it, but which I’ve found myself reflecting on a lot since. “The world needs motherfuckers. We hold the line, and nobody misses us too much when we’re gone.” Or something very like that. And, yeah.

There’s so much I haven’t gotten into yet; I think there’s at least an essay’s worth of material in each of the five ‘books’ you could write if you wanted to (and I do mean you; I’ve got a Keene series to get back to). The book is delightfully old school in many ways, but also tips its hat to the modern and even chucks a wink at postmodernism, here and there (the moment towards the end when one of the novel’s Trolls writes a scathing one-star review bemoaning the lack of sex, and complaining that the metaphor for drone strikes was too on the nose had me cackling).

Amongst many other things, this novel is absolutely a love note to the storytelling tradition both Hill and King are a part of, and Hill’s awareness of that (even, at times, his slightly anxious, self-conscious awareness) is part of the secret sauce that makes this novel so damn powerful.

I guess I’ll close up for now with the IT parallels, because I think that while they are there, in most important respects, they’re pretty superficial. So, yes, a gang of young people and an ancient evil, check (though as King Sorrow opens, our protagonists are young adults, not children, and in KS they summon/create the evil, so already the parallels are breaking down).

As noted earlier, the structure is also superficially similar – five ‘books’, each containing an ‘interlude’ – but in King Sorrow those books follow a strictly linear structure, and are used primarily to bring each one of the gang into focus as our third-person close POV (used to brilliant and devastating effect in Book 4, when we finally get behind Colin’s eyes and find out what’s squirming in the dark there). By contrast, IT constantly jumps between 1985 and 1955, the two narratives running in parallel as the adults regain their childhood memories.

But even beyond that, they’re both about fundamentally different things. IT has at its core childhood trauma and repressed memory; there’s a sense that the brilliant adult lives enjoyed by the Loser gang stems, in part, from the trauma they faced as children, and arguably, one of the anxietiesIT explores is that if we (I guess i’m thinking about cratives here, mainly, though I guess the motivation might go wider than that) are somehow magically able to ‘face down’ or defeat the demons of childhood trauma, will it destroy the engine that made us who we are?

Or will any attempt to face those demons ultimately see us consumed by them? I’m not clear how much in denial King was about his own drug and alcohol addictions whenIT was written, but the anxieties he talks about (albeit in code) in his introduction of Nightmares And Dreamscapes, his first short story collection to feature stories written by both drunk King and sober King feel to me to be all over IT (and it’s interesting that both King and Hill ultimately come out on the side of optimism).

King’s childhood trauma is ultimately the mundane one of growing up poor without a father, but the commonality of that experience doesn’t detract from the damage it does, especially to a bright, sensitive, empathic kid.

Some of the characters in King Sorrow have also faced childhood trauma, but that’s not a central thematic plank of the novel; indeed, the characters as we meet them aren’t children at all, but young adults completing their education, and for the most part, they’re not really anxious about their place in the world. Hill does a good job teasing out their differences in terms of relative privilege, but they are all children of privilege, and one of the thematic threads that runs very strongly through the novel is an anxiety about that privilege.

Specifically, Hill seems to be asking searching questions about if such power can ever really be used for ‘good’… and what the costs of trying might be, along with consequences both foreseeable and unforeseeable. Which makes perfect sense, given Hill’s biography and also his place as a global citizen (another core difference is that IT is – and I mean this as a compliment – stiflingly parochial, the anxiety dream of one who has come from nothing and found success and imagines someday being dragged bck to who and what and where they were before – whereas King Sorrow is unapolagitically international, albeit as seen through an American lens).

In other words, there’s an element of survivor’s guilt to IT, whereas King Sorrow’s guilt is more generalised and amorphous; a very American/western guilt borne of comfort purchased (as we are all, on some level aware) at least partly at the expense of people no less real than us that we will never meet.

So the two novels are very different, because, despite superficial structural similarities and the literal shared DNA of the two writers, both their life experiences and the lives they inhabit are very different.

Except.

Except they’re both about America. In IT, Derry is America’s vision of itself domestically – the friendly, quietly prosperous small town, and mainly during two ‘golden eras’ (which admittedly were, under the surface, anything but) – the 50s and the 80s. And it’s about the monster that lives under the small town that is America, occasionally eating its children in exchange for that quiet prosperity – a deal most of the adults seem perfectly willing to tolerate, as long as they’re not forced to think about it.

King Sorrow takes a more international lens, but it’s still interrogating America’s view of itself – in the international context, as the ‘world’s policeman’, using its awesome military might to strike down ‘foes’ and ‘bad guys’ – and looking at the squirming horror of collateral damage and vested interests that prioritise, if not outright invent, those ‘bad guys’ slated for destruction. And in the third book, for my money the strongest section of the novel, it also examines how those power structures might respond to a citizen activism that seeks to make its own determination as to which targets might be righteous struck down.

And I love how, in King Sorrow, the young adults know from the start that they’re making a deal with the devil, that the course of action they’re undertaking is unwise… but also that the call of deadly violence without apparent consequence, and the rationalisation for using it in a ‘just’ cause is ultimately too seductive to be resisted. 

Because, yeah. 2025, here we are.

Anyway. Hell of a book. Let me know what you thought of it.

KP

2/12/25

King Sorrow by Joe Hill

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.

‘A brilliantly Faustian fable with a heart as huge as a dragon’s, and a stinging twist in its tail. I devoured it.’ RUTH WARE
‘A wild, genre-defying journey, packed with all sorts of unexpected twists and turns’ DAILY MIRROR
‘A glorious, wild ride’ NEW YORK TIMES
‘Epic! KING SORROW is Hill’s best and most ambitious work to date’ LINWOOD BARCLAY
‘Magnificent – by far and away Hill’s best book to date’ SFX
‘When they talk about “natural born storytellers,” it’s Joe Hill they’re talking about’ JOHN SCALZI
‘A monster of a book…a vast, brimstoned, relentless zinger’ NICK HARKAWAY

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