It feels like forever, because it’s been nine-years, but Joe Hill‘s King Sorrow is just the novel I’ve been waiting for, a true achievement in fiction. A sprawling, emotional epic that blends supernatural horror with fantasy into one amazing tale. Despite its massive scale, King Sorrow is an intimate story driven by friendship, grief, and the terrifying cost of power, a true work of art.
Arthur Oakes is a reader, a dreamer, and a student at Rackham College, Maine, renowned for its frosty winters, exceptional library, and beautiful buildings. But his idyll—and burgeoning romance with Gwen Underfoot—is shattered when a local drug dealer and her partner corner him into one of the worst crimes he can imagine: stealing rare books from the college library.
Trapped and desperate, Arthur turns to his closest friends for comfort and help. Together they dream up a wild, fantastical scheme to free Arthur from the cruel trap in which he finds himself. Wealthy, irrepressible Colin Wren suggests using the unnerving Crane journal (bound in the skin of its author) to summon a dragon to do their bidding. The others—brave, beautiful Alison Shiner; the battling twins Donna and Donovan McBride; and brainy, bold Gwen—don’t hesitate to join Colin in an effort to smash reality and bring a creature of the impossible into our world.
But there’s nothing simple about dealing with dragons, and their pact to save Arthur becomes a terrifying bargain in which the six must choose a new sacrifice for King Sorrow every year—or become his next meal.
Having only starting to review novels over the past few years, it was exciting to crack open a Joe Hill book prior to publication date and be one of the first (well few hundred) to read one of his stories. Being from Maine, growing up only two blocks from the King residence in Bangor, makes Joe feel like part of the family. Having been nearly 10 years since the last Hill novel, King Sorrow is the epic story that I was expecting.
In this nearly 900-page behemoth of a book, Hill carries us across multiple decades with a few alternating view points as well as mounting stakes without losing any momentum. With its longer length one would expect the story to feel a bit bloated, but every scene seems to count, along with every shift in perspective adding more to the overall story at hand. Opening a book such as this can be a daunting task, but Hill sinks us into the story early enough that you feel engrossed with a need to finish the book.
With a story this large in scope, it’s inevitable to have multiple characters to follow. This, along with the length, can sometimes distract me from reading, but Hill seems to manage each of the six main cast members, along with those in the background with ease. Each of the characters are fully realized with flawed, unpredictable, and deeply human characteristics. You can feel for some, while hating others, and sometimes both. This along with King Sorrow itself, a character in their own right.
King Sorrow is a horror novel at the heart of it, but Hill crafts an epic tale that really blends horror elements with the world of fantasy. This fine line of blending of genres is done perfectly to appease those looking for the book to fall into their favorite genre. I signed on to read this chunk’r of a book for the supernatural horror side of things and was not disappointed. The horror is grounded in real emotional weight, using fantasy to help explore the grief, guilt, and power of it all. In addition to the horror and fantasy themes, Hill brings friendship, corruption, sacrifice, and moral compromise resonate to this passionate story.
King Sorrow truly feels like a story that has been years in the making. A prime example of how ambition and execution can either succeed or fail quickly, luckily for us the book succeeds on so many levels. While this book was worth the nine-year wait, I am ready for more from Joe Hill in the near future, but until then King Sorrow simply is a must-read and one of the best books of the year.
King Sorrow hits bookstores everywhere on October 21, 2025 from William Morrow. The audiobook is available via Libro.fm!
