KING SORROW, by Joe Hill
What do you do when your friends jokingly decide to summon a dragon assassin to slay your foes, and it not only works but haunts you for the rest of your life?
Buckle up, because “King Sorrow,” Joe Hill’s first novel in almost a decade, explores just that in a glorious, wild ride.
Arthur, a student librarian at a small liberal arts college, has a problem. Two local drug dealers are blackmailing him, threatening to hurt his incarcerated mother unless Arthur steals valuable books from the school’s library for them to sell. Fortunately, Arthur has friends he can turn to: Donna, aggressively hardened by a childhood trauma; Van, joyful and already careening toward addiction; Colin, the coolly brilliant grandson of a government psy-ops specialist; Allie, the object of Van’s affections who is secretly in love with Donna; and Gwen Underfoot, the practical, charming townie who joins their group by virtue of being conveniently, well, underfoot.
After a violent confrontation with Arthur’s tormentors, his friends decide to help him. While perusing his biggest theft yet — an occult book bound in human skin — they learn about King Sorrow, a demon dragon from the Long Dark, a world beyond ours with borders that are permeable, under the right conditions. In this case, those conditions are cannabis, a lot of alcohol and “Puff the Magic Dragon” played on the piano.
In Hill’s world, intent and desire are more important than arcane ritual. The magic operates like childhood dares, fed by imagination and fear and desire. And so, good news: Arthur and his friends succeed in summoning King Sorrow, whose voice is “deep, plummy, resonant, good-humored.” There’s no formal language or Old English coming from this demon. Just playful, insatiable menace.
The bad news: Arthur and his friends succeed in summoning King Sorrow. Unfortunately, the friends fail to realize the full scope of their deal. “The problem with inviting the unnatural into your life is it might decide to stay.” King Sorrow has been freed, and once a year, every year, he must be fed. Either a victim of the group’s choice … or one of them. With that, the six friends are forced to grapple with the fact that the rest of their lives are now mortgaged to a monster. As one character muses, they’re “contaminated. Fire followed them wherever they went. Fire and garish death.”
The introduction of the dragon, anchored in Arthur’s point of view, takes up about a quarter of the book. And then everything changes: Arthur’s dark academia turns to Gwen’s clever but tragic side deal with King Sorrow turns to Allie’s locked airplane murder quest turns to Donna and Van’s government thriller turns to Colin’s fairy-tale search for a sword. On and on the novel goes, pivoting between various subgenres and points of view. The narrative glue that holds it all together is the core friendship — this crew always returns to one another: “They lived curious, haunted lives, as close to each other as lovers, and at a slight remove from the rest of the world.”
This format has tremendous pros. Hill gets to flex many different storytelling muscles, and he excels at them. It also has a few cons. Arthur essentially disappears from the narrative for hundreds of pages and some of his friends are held at arm’s length for so long that by the time their story lines converge again, the emotional punch doesn’t hit quite as hard.
Still, every single main character here could headline their own book. Even the ones who are the most extreme — Colin, who grows up to be a vaguely sociopathic tech-bro billionaire, and Donna, who becomes a Fox News pundit — are compelling. (Colin alone is not only fine with their deal, but is happy about the opportunities it creates. “If there has to be evil in the world, then I’d at least like to be in charge of it,” he says.) The minor characters shine, too, especially Robin Fellows, a fiercely brave woman drawn into the friends’ troubles after surviving the plane ride from hell, and Tana Nighswander, the heartbreaking sister of King Sorrow’s first victims.
A minor complaint: A running gag about troll farms veers too far into absurdity, stealing a little of King Sorrow’s giddy threat. But even that doesn’t take away from Hill’s achievement. Balancing this many characters and subplots in an 880-page novel is tricky, but the payoff is tremendous. I teared up when all the threads and characters and decades came together as the remaining friends face the monster they pulled into the world — and the ones they became by doing so.
KING SORROW | By Joe Hill | Morrow | 881 pp. | $40
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