King Sorrow

Title: King Sorrow

Author: Joe Hill

Published in: 2025

Date read: Not yet read

Score: 0/5

Genre:

Plot: (Warning, may contain spoilers):
Published in late 2025, King Sorrow is Joe Hill’s highly anticipated return to the novel format—an epic, genre-bending narrative that spans four decades. It masterfully fuses dark academia, classic fantasy folklore, and modern horror, pitting the early days of the computer age against ancient folktales.

The Plot:
The story begins in the late 1980s at the snowy, prestigious Rackham College in Maine. Arthur Oakes is an outsider and a dedicated student librarian who loves nothing more than old books and forgotten languages. His quiet academic life—and a blossoming romance with fellow student Gwen Underfoot—is completely shattered by a single, well-intentioned act of standing up for an underdog.

The good deed violently backfires when it brings Arthur to the attention of ruthless local drug dealers. They extort him into committing his worst nightmare: stealing incredibly valuable rare books from the college’s secure archives to cover a debt.

Desperate and trapped, Arthur confesses his plight to his close-knit circle of eccentric academic friends: the tech-obsessed Colin, brave Allison, and twin siblings Donna and Donovan. Together, the group devises a wild, seemingly impossible scheme to free Arthur from the dealers' grip. They decide to use a dark, forbidden grimoire from the library—the Crane Journal, bound in human skin—to perform a drug-fueled ritual. Their goal? To summon King Sorrow, a terrifying, ancient dragon-demon from the "Long Dark" beyond our reality, to eliminate their blackmailers.

The Trap:
To their absolute shock, the ritual works. The nightmare begins when the group realizes they have severely miscalculated. King Sorrow is not a tool to be wielded or controlled; he is a malevolent, highly intelligent entity with a wicked sense of humour.

The dragon fulfills his end of the initial bargain, but it comes with a devastating, lifelong catch. The pact dictates that the group must name a new sacrifice for King Sorrow every single year on Easter morning. If they ever fail to choose a victim, the dragon will claim one of the friends instead.

The Journey:
The narrative stretches from the 1980s all the way into the 2020s, following the six friends as they grow from reckless students into deeply flawed adults. As the decades pass, Colin becomes a massive tech mogul, Arthur becomes a professor studying ancient myths to break the curse, and the others grapple with addiction, guilt, and the psychological weight of their annual choice.

The real tension lies in watching their tight-knit bond slowly erode under the pressure of the dragon's rules. The friends are forced to compile lists of terrible, murderous people to justify their choices, but King Sorrow always finds horrific loopholes to maximize the chaos. It becomes a massive, high-stakes game of survival against a cosmic predator that is always watching them from the shadows.

Comments:

Books that we've read by Joe Hill (3):
Heart-Shaped Box (2007), Horns (2009), NOS4A2 (2013)