King Sorrow A Novel

"King Sorrow" (2025) is an epic new horror novel by Joe Hill, author of "NOS4A2", the plot spanning 33 years, about a group of six college friends from Maine. When one of them gets into trouble, they come up with a desperate plan to help. It's 1989, and when Arthur, student at prestigious Rackham College, who has a mother in prison for manslaughter and is intensely focused on literature, is blackmailed for stealing rare books from the library in order to to stop a prison attack on his mother, he turns to his friends Colin, Donna, Allie, Van, and Gwen. Meddling with drugs and the occult, the kids decide to use a supernatural ritual from a strange, apparently human-skin-bound grimoire to summon the cruel, dragon shaped King Sorrow from the Long Dark. While this solves Arthur's immediate problem, they find themselves in a Faustian bargian, that compels them to select one victim for the demon to consume each year until they die. Over the next three decades, they struggle to keep the evil pact while trying to get rid of King Sorrow, and live with the consequences of what they started. This secret shapes not only their personal lifes, but also their relationships, and identities. "King Sorrow" is as much a horror or urban fantasy story about dark magic as it's a novel about loyalty among friends, love, power, corruption, the weight of responsibility, and guilt. The book might be a doorstopper, but it's also a page turner containing numerous plot twists, dark humor, and captivating characters you care about. The cast is huge, so reading requires quite some commitment. Hill takes his time to indroduce and develop his emotional story and protagonists, cleverly weaving real life with the supernatural. The initial late 1980s setting feels quite nostalgic with its wired telephones and IBM computers. After that, each part of the book takes place in a different year with the world changing around the six friends, which is fascinating to see on its own from a historical point of view. One of the best sections takes place on a transatlantic flight and could almost pass as a stand-alone novella. The ending is almost as ambivalent as the the one in "It", the masterpiece by Joe Hill's father Stephen King, and the human antagonists of Arthur and his friends, the Nighswander family, are almost as scary as the eponymous dragon. Maybe Joe Hill could have made the book a bit shorter, but "King Sorrow" is a masterpiece of its own that will haunt the reader even after finishing the last page. I highly recommend it. Thanks to Headline and NetGalley for providing me this ARC.