King Sorrow Review by Joe Hill – The dragon-launched horror saga is a tour de force | Horror books

Six The strange but brave children fall into the path of a massive and terrible supernatural evil that has come to our world from the outer reaches of darkness. They must spend their lives fighting it, facing horror after horror in the process.

This is the rough plot of Stephen King’s novel “Him” (his best work, no arguments). It’s also the plot, more or less, of Son of King Joe Hale’s new horror door stopper, in which six friends summon the infinitely malicious ancient dragon King Sorrow of the Long Dark to help them defeat some villains. Needless to say, their supernatural rituals backfire.

Joseph Hellstrom King began his career by going to great lengths to avoid any contact with his famous father, publishing under the pseudonym he still uses today and avoiding meeting his agent in person (he bears a striking resemblance to his father). But in this latest novel, he leans into it. There are lines that deliberately echo some of King’s most famous sayings (“The man in black fled across the desert…”); A moment that brings to mind the plot point of The King (Puzzle Competition). In this tremendous novel, Hill is happy with his family relationship, and we are happy with him. King Sorrow is a huge, sprawling, and absolutely gorgeous game.

Back to those friends: five of them are students at fictional Rackham College in Maine. There’s Arthur, a bookworm and a genius, solving old English mysteries in his spare time; Colin, rich, sharp, and prone to trampling on anyone who stands in his way; twins Donna and Donovan; Beautiful Allie. And there’s Gwen, who doesn’t study with them, but becomes an essential part of their group as they dabble, half believers, half not, in the occult.

Arthur, for reasons we don’t need to go into here, is forced to steal rare books from his beloved college library by a group of local criminals. This tears at his bookish heart, especially when he is forced to take the library’s most valuable and disturbing title: the journal of occultist Enoch Crane (executed “for trafficking in the devil in 1703”; the book jacket is made from his own skin). The Scooby gang reads the magazine, discovering that they can summon what Crane describes as “a proud worm, a cunning serpent, and an armored demon” to help Arthur solve the blackmail problem—and spend the rest of the novel reaping the consequences. King Sorrow will indeed rid them of the pesky local drug dealers, but they will have to choose a new sacrifice every year or become his victim themselves. As Arthur later said: “If you sow dragon teeth, all you get is more dragons.”

Spanning four decades, Hale moves effortlessly between genres: As the friends try to deal with the situation they find themselves in, in different ways, by choosing people who are clearly evil to sacrifice, or searching for ways to slay the dragon themselves, we move from thriller to dark fantasy, black ops torture to romance to horror. My favorite transition was to an important story, Deep in the Caves Beneath Cornwall, a section filled with J. R. R. Tolkien stories and quite terrifying.

There are the trolls – the bridge-dwelling ones who live on the internet, who are absolutely terrifying and perfectly brought to life. There are magical swords and betrayals, scenes of heart-rending courage, and scenes of horrific evil, both human and otherworldly. It’s a tour de force: a horror novel that is above all a paean to imagination, love, and friendship. “We needed a story to believe in, and now we have one,” Colin says as the friends sit around the table, preparing to summon their dragon into existence with the power of their minds.

As Hill says in his engraving: “Hic sunt dracones.” Don’t miss them.