King Sorrow

By Joe Hill

Review by Ant

Some books you read; others you negotiate with. King Sorrow falls firmly into the second category. My carefully signed copy has been sitting on the TBR shelf for some time now, 900 pages of it, glowering at the slimmer volumes that kept jumping the queue and seeming to take up a little more room every time I glanced over. It's a genuinely unwieldy object; too heavy to read comfortably in bed without risking a broken nose, too big for a coat pocket, the sort of book you don't so much carry as haul. I picked up that signed copy at a convention some time ago, managing to catch the author at a quiet moment (and not at all because I raced across to the hotel to get to him before he ran out of books), and managing to have a quick chat with him too.

It has been a decade since The Fireman, which I reviewed back in 2016 and called nothing short of spectacular, and I stand by that. In the years between, Hill has kept himself busy with short fiction, comics, and screen work, but a new full-length novel from him is an event, and Headline clearly agrees; they've published this one at a size that could double as structural building material. Hill has always been an author who improves with each book; Heart-Shaped Box was a fine debut, Horns was fantastic, N0S4R2 and Strange Weather confirmed a writer growing more thoughtful and more confident with every outing. The question hanging over King Sorrow, then, is whether ten years of anticipation and 900 pages of heft can be justified. The short answer is yes. The longer answer is the rest of this review.

The story opens in Maine (where else) in the late 1980s, at the fictional Rackham College, all frosty quads, handsome old buildings and an exceptional rare books library. Arthur Oakes works in that library; he's a reader and a dreamer, one of very few Black students at an expensive New England college, and his mother is serving a prison sentence nearby after a protest went catastrophically wrong. When a local drug dealer with a grievance connected to his mother's incarceration decides to blackmail Arthur into stealing rare volumes from the collection, including a notorious journal bound in the skin of its own author, Arthur is trapped. He turns to his friends: wealthy and irrepressible Colin Wren; brave Allie Shiner; the perpetually squabbling twins Donna and Donovan McBride; and clever, bold Gwen Underfoot, with whom Arthur is quietly falling in love. Their solution, dreamt up in a haze of drink and desperation, is gloriously stupid: use the skin-bound journal to summon a dragon and have it deal with the blackmailers.

The horrible joke at the heart of the book is that it works. King Sorrow arrives, ancient, vast and disturbingly chatty, and he is happy to help. Dragons, however, do not do favours; they make bargains, and the terms of this one are simple and appalling. Every Easter, the six must choose a new sacrifice to feed him, or one of them will do instead. What follows spans roughly four decades, following these friends from students into middle age as the bargain warps every life it touches.

If that setup sounds like a Stephen King novel, well, yes. The comparison is unavoidable, has always been unavoidable, and Hill has long since stopped running from it; there are knowing nods to his father's work scattered through the text, and the structure (a group of friends bound together by a monstrous secret, revisited across the decades) will be familiar to anyone who has read IT. I've said in previous reviews that Hill stands entirely on his own merits. King Sorrow doesn't change my mind. It demonstrates that he can work at his father's epic scale, with that same generous, sprawling, character-first storytelling, while remaining unmistakably himself. The humour is drier, the fantasy elements more overt, and the monster, crucially, talks back.

King Sorrow himself is the book's great triumph. It would have been easy to keep the dragon off stage, a shadow and a scream and a smell of sulphur, but Hill gives him a voice, and what a voice it is; sardonic, patient, endlessly amused by human self-deception. He taunts, he flatters, he philosophises. He is, in the most literal sense possible, a troll under a bridge, and Hill has enormous fun with the double meaning; the novel's later sections, as the timeline moves into the internet age, draw a straight and rather pointed line between the ancient sort of troll that eats people and the modern sort that merely ruins them. Some of the political jabs land harder than others; occasionally the satire is unsubtle, but the anger underneath feels earned rather than performative.

The human cast is just as strong, which for a book of this length is not optional. Arthur and Gwen are the emotional core, and their thread caused me genuine distress in the best way, but it's the slow fracturing of the whole group that gives the novel its power. These are people who love each other and who have done something unforgivable together, and Hill is very good indeed at showing how a shared sin curdles; how the annual obligation gets rationalised, delegated, dressed up in ever more elaborate moral clothing. Nobody here is a villain in their own head, which is precisely what makes some of them villains. It's the same clear-eyed, unjudging characterisation I admired in Horns, where every character was a different shade of grey, applied now across a far larger canvas and a much longer stretch of years.

Is it too long? I was originally thinking maybe, a little, but in hindsight it's just as long as it needs to be to tell the tale Hill wants to tell. A harsh edit could have cut a few pages, but I can't recall any that wouldn't have harmed the story in some way. Here's the thing: despite the size and scale, it never plods. The pacing is almost indecent for a book this big; chapters end on hooks, decades turn like pages, and the thing reads far faster than its bulk suggests. I went in braced for a slog and instead kept finding myself at one in the morning promising just one more chapter, which is the oldest lie in reading. The prose helps; as I've mentioned above, the author improves with each book, and here the writing is exceptional - Full of warmth and wit, and there are images in here (a few of the Easter scenes in particular) that I suspect will stay lodged in my head for years, whether I want them there or not.

And the ending delivers. I won't spoil anything, but after 800-odd pages of escalating dread, the final confrontation is genuinely epic, drawing together the book's mythology of oaths, contracts and old magic into a climax that feels both surprising and inevitable. Endings are hard, especially at this scale, and Hill sticks the landing with room to spare.

King Sorrow is a huge, ambitious, and thoroughly wonderful novel; a dark fable about the debts we take on when we're young and the interest they accrue, wrapped around one of the most memorable monsters in modern horror. It rewards the commitment it demands, and it demands quite a lot: of your time, your emotions and your wrists. Nearly a decade on from The Fireman, Hill hasn't just returned; he's expanded, and on this evidence, the wait was worth every year.

I feel it's a little unfair to compare Hill to his father, but I'm struggling to find a better reference. It's like the very best of King's writing, if anything, improved upon. It is (mostly) devoid of middle sag and absent of the "everything happens in the last 50 pages" feeling - although, of course, a lot does happen, but then again it does throughout the book. Then there is the fact that, despite being set in America for the majority of the time, it has a distinct feeling of Englishness about it - not least of course from the obvious nod to Arthurian legend. As a lifelong fan of King, I can't think of any higher praise. King Sorrow is simply one of the finest stories I have read in recent times.

Written on 21st September 2026 by Ant .