Finishing this book leaves you with a feeling of grateful exhaustion, like you’ve lived a whole other life alongside Arthur, Gwen, Colin, and the others. It’s a wild, genre-defying journey. King Sorrow is not just a good book; it is an experience. And in a world full of stories, that is the rarest magic of all.

A Dragon for Our Time: Soaring Through Joe Hill’s King Sorrow

Opening a new Joe Hill novel feels like meeting an old friend you haven’t seen in years, only to find they’ve learned incredible new tricks. With King Sorrow, his first novel in nearly a decade, Hill doesn’t just return to the bookshelf; he breaks it with a 900-page epic that is as intimate as it is immense. This isn’t just a horror story or a fantasy tale, it’s a sprawling, decades-spanning examination of friendship, consequence, and the terrifying monsters we invite into our lives, both mythical and all too human.

The story begins with a simple, desperate problem. Arthur Oakes, a bookish student librarian at Rackham College in Maine, is being blackmailed. Local drug dealers are threatening his incarcerated mother, forcing him to steal precious, rare books from his own library. Trapped, he turns to his closest friends: the wealthy Colin; the brave Allison; the battling twins Donna and Van; and the brainy, charming Gwen. Their solution, hatched in a haze of alcohol and cannabis, is as wild as it is unbelievable: summon a legendary dragon assassin named King Sorrow from another dimension to solve their problems permanently.

The magic here isn’t about complex Latin incantations. It operates on the raw power of childhood dares, fueled by imagination, fear, and desire. The good news is they succeed. The very, very bad news is they succeed. King Sorrow, a demonic dragon with a “deep, plummy, resonant, good-humoured” voice, arrives. He is a playful, insatiable menace personified, with no intention of leaving. The friends quickly learn the full, horrifying scope of their deal: once a year, every year, they must provide King Sorrow with a human sacrifice. If they don’t, he will claim one of them. With that, the six friends find the rest of their lives utterly mortgaged to a monster.

What makes this leviathan of a novel work, what makes its nearly 900 pages of wrist-spraining weight not just manageable but utterly compelling, is that the dragon is almost a secondary character. The true heart of King Sorrow is the six friends.

Hill crafts them with such care and humanity that they cease to be characters on a page and become people you know. You feel the weight of Arthur’s burden as a young Black man navigating a predominantly white space. You understand Van’s struggle with addiction and his sense of never quite measuring up. You ache for Allie as she grapples with her sexuality in an era less accepting than our own. You witness Donna’s battle with a temper forged in childhood trauma.

We follow them for over forty years, and this is where the book casts its most powerful spell. You grow up with them. You watch as teenage love deepens, heartbreaks shatter, friendships strain under the weight of their terrible annual obligation, and life pushes them down paths they never anticipated. Colin evolves into a vaguely sociopathic tech billionaire. Their journeys feel startlingly real and grounded, even as a mythical dragon waits for his yearly feast.

The narrative structure is a bold and masterful choice. After the initial summoning, told largely from Arthur’s perspective, the story explodes outward. It pivots between genres with a thrilling audacity. One section is a locked-room murder mystery on a hellish transatlantic flight. One is a government thriller, and the other is a fairy-tale quest for a mythical sword. When you think you know what kind of book you’re reading, Hill changes the game, keeping the experience fresh and unpredictable across its vast length. Short, punchy chapters pull you along, making “just one more chapter” a constant, dangerous promise.

King Sorrow himself is a magnificent antagonist. He is not a mindless beast but a cunning, philosophical predator who revels in taunting his sacrifices. His voice is a character in itself, dripping with dark humour and ancient malice. He forces the characters, and by extension, the reader, to confront a brutal philosophical question: Does sacrificing evil people make you a hero or a murderer?  By choosing society’s worst, terrorists and criminals, are they performing a dark public service, or have they simply become the very monsters they sought to defeat?  This moral rot seeps into each of them differently, shaping their lives and worldviews in profound ways.

Hill uses this high-concept horror to hold a dark mirror up to our own world. The novel is steeped in real-world history and injustices, from casual references to political figures to the growth of the internet age and the rise of troll farms. The story becomes a powerful allegory for the consequences of our choices, the seductive nature of power, and the ways we justify our own evils for a greater, or at least more convenient, good. It’s a novel that seriously contemplates the costs of power, suggesting that the real horror may be that there are plenty of dragons to go around in our own world.

Is the book long? Unquestionably. You will feel its weight in your hands, and your wrists might complain after a long reading session. Yet, it is a testament to Hill’s skill as a storyteller that the pacing feels almost relentless. The language is lean, mean, and direct, providing elegance without sacrificing pacing. There is never a dull moment. The book is packed with twists, turns, and breathtaking set pieces.

Some narrative choices, like a running gag about troll farms, might teeter on the edge of absurdity for some. And with such a vast cast, a character you love, like Arthur, might disappear for hundreds of pages, slightly diluting the emotional impact when they return. But these are minor quibbles in a story of such magnificent scale and heart.

When all the threads of these chaotic, haunted lives finally draw together in the final act, the payoff is tremendous. It’s emotionally resonant, a culmination of decades of love, loss, and the unbreakable, if badly frayed, bonds of friendship. You may find yourself, as I did, with tears in your eyes, not just for the fate of the characters, but for the journey itself being over.

King Sorrow is more than a return for Joe Hill; it is a coronation. It gloriously resurrects the doorstop horror blockbuster for a new century, proving that Hill is a titan of the genre in his own right, a natural-born storyteller operating at the peak of his powers. It’s a commanding, captivating read that is both epic and painfully intimate.

Finishing this book leaves you with a feeling of grateful exhaustion, like you’ve lived a whole other life alongside Arthur, Gwen, Colin, and the others. It’s a wild, genre-defying journey. King Sorrow is not just a good book; it is an experience. And in a world full of stories, that is the rarest magic of all.

King Sorrow by Joe Hill

SOME PROMISES SHOULD NEVER BE MADE…

***A BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB PICK***

‘With King Sorrow, Joe Hill gloriously resurrects the doorstop horror blockbuster for a startling new century.’ ALAN MOORE
‘A soaring epic and painfully intimate. You won’t be able to stop burning through the pages’ PAUL TREMBLAY
‘Epic, exhilarating and haunting in equal measures’ DAILY EXPRESS
‘A commanding, captivating read’ FINANCIAL TIMES
‘Epic…a ­multi-layered, rich response to the horrors and hopes of living today’ DAILY MAIL

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

Praise for Sunday Times bestseller Joe Hill:

‘Fantastically compelling’ THE OBSERVER
‘Clever, gripping and packs a hell of a punch’ JOANNE HARRIS
‘Character-driven stories that enthral and thrill’ DAILY MAIL
‘Original and gripping’ GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

   Horror Book Reviews on Ginger Nuts of Horror

For dedicated horror fans seeking their next chilling read, Ginger Nuts of Horror has established itself as a must-visit destination. Driven by a passion for the genre, the website offers more than just standard reviews, providing a deep dive into the world of dark fiction that keeps a global community of readers coming back for more.

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