It has been almost ten years since Joe Hill’s last full length novel, The Fireman was released. He has not been idle in that time (releasing plenty of amazing short stories – including Strange Weather – and adaptations of Nos4A2 and Black Phone). And if King Sorrow is anything to go by, it was worth the wait. At almost 900 pages, King Sorrow, like The Fireman, is a doorstop of a book but it does not feel that way. Hill, son of prolific fantasy and horror author Stephen King, has clearly learnt how to keep readers invested and the pages turning. And while King Sorrow very much inhabits Stephen King territory, Hill has developed a style and a voice of his own.
King Sorrow opens in 1989 with a group of friends who attend a small college in Maine. Central to the narrative is Arthur Oakes (yes, the first name is a deliberate reference to King Arthur) a young Black man whose mother is in prison as a result of a tragic accident. On one visit to the prison, Arthur comes to the attention of some local criminals. They blackmail Arthur by threatening his mother if he does not steal some valuable books that he as access to from the College library. Enter Arthur’s friends – roommate Van and his sister Donna, Van’s unrequited love interest Allison and their wealthy friend Colin. The five, together with Gwen, the daughter of Colin’s housekeeper, use an occult book that Arthur steals to summon the spirit of a dragon called King Sorrow to solve Arthur’s problem. Only, as with every Faustian bargain, the six do not read the fine print and King Sorrow binds them into a life of service in which they have to find new victims for him to devour every year or be killed themselves.
The rest of the novel follows the group at different points in their lives as they grow up, grow apart and become affected by their ongoing relationship with the malevolent spirit that is King Sorrow. So that King Sorrow becomes a kind of coming-of-age story, but Hill also uses the six and their experiences to chart major world events and technological changes.
One of the elements that sets King Sorrow apart is the range of styles that Hill uses. Every section of the book, while centring and building on the characters that readers know, draws on a different fantasy or horror tradition. There is a thriller section with a ticking clock set on an aeroplane under attack, there is a section that explores the issue of rendition and black sites, there is a section that draws on but modernises Arthurian fantasy tropes. This shifting of styles and focus means that even though the book is lengthy, readers will find that every few hundred pages the narrative will change gear in an interesting and engaging way.
But the centre of this novel is the lives of the six friends and the way they change and are changed by their experiences. And in the centre of that group are Arthur and Gwen, the outsider, who probably gets the most point-of-view time. Most people don’t have an infernal bargain and an evil spirit that manipulates the course of their relationships. And yet despite this heightened circumstance, Hill brings these characters to vivid life and makes their relationship issues feel earned and organic.
King Sorrow is at its heart a horror story and, to some extent a morality tale. Hill effectively deploys all of the tools in his armoury to shock the reader and create an atmosphere of tension and fear. The trick of good horror stories is to make the reader reconsider their fears of the real world, whether it be sharks or spiders or strange bumps in the night. Hill does this most effectively in King Sorrow by tying his ideas to the real world and real world events – questioning how far you would go for revenge and how that might change you, the aforementioned use black sites, the concept of extrajudicial assassinations, the failed and then successful attack on the World Trade Centre.
King Sorrow might have been a long time coming but it will more firmly establish Joe Hill in the ranks of great fantasy and horror authors. Although it is a long tale it feels effortless (although always stressful) to read, is anchored around a group of incredibly flawed characters who readers can identify with and at its centre swirls a darkly fascinating, if always malevolent, antagonist.
King Sorrow by Joe Hill
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