KING SORROW
Joe Hill (joehillfiction.com)
Headline (headline.co.uk)
£25
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It’s 1989 and Arthur Oakes is in his third year at Rackham College, with his best friend Donovan “Van” McBride and Van’s twin sister, Donna, Allison Shiner and Colin Wren. His mother is incarcerated in Vermont’s House of Correction and his father is dead. Arthur and his friends spend most of their time off-campus in the sprawling estate owned by Colin’s grandfather, The Briars, and it is there that Arthur meets the soon-to-be love of his life, Gwen Underfoot, the daughter of Llewellyn Wren’s housekeeper. On his monthly visit to his mother, Arthur meets Jayne and Tana Nighswander and Jayne’s boyfriend Ronnie Volpe. Making the mistake of doing a good deed, Arthur’s act only serves to bring himself to the attention of Jayne and Ronnie, drug dealers who live and operate in the small down that Rackham College calls home. Using the threat of violence against his mother as leverage, they demand that he steals valuable books from the college’s well-stocked library, where Arthur enjoys his job as assistant librarian. When the theft gets out of hand, and Jayne starts demanding more and more valuable books, Arthur and his friends use an ancient spell to summon a dragon, the eponymous King Sorrow, to help rid Arthur of his burden. The dragon agrees to kill Jayne and Ronnie the following Easter, but it isn’t long before Arthur and his friends discover they have been duped: King Sorrow returns year after year, demanding a sacrifice on Easter, or he will kill one of the group. Finding a way to kill King Sorrow, or to banish him permanently back to the Long Dark, is the obvious next step, but it was never going to be that easy, was it?
King Sorrow is Joe Hill’s first novel in almost a decade, a vast sprawling tome that shares more than heft with his last novel-length outing, The Fireman. Both books are steeped in cleansing fire, though on a very different scale – where The Fireman’s fiery virus wipes out huge portions of the world’s population, King Sorrow’s fire is a much more targeted, and personal, affair. While King Sorrow himself is the driving force behind Hill’s latest outing, we see surprisingly little of him during the proceedings, hearing his “deep, plummy, resonant, good-humoured” voice only a little more often. King Sorrow is very much a character-driven piece, which tries to ignore the elephant – or dragon – in the room for as long as possible, to examine friendship, ageing and lost love. It’s the kind of fantasy-horror that only Joe Hill could write and it is, in a word, sublime.
When the book opens, we are introduced to the group of friends, and to the situation that will drive them to seek help from a dragon. But as we all know, mythological creatures can be tricksy beasts, and humans have a tendency not to read the small print. So when they fail to specify that this is a one-time deal, King Sorrow takes advantage and returns year after year to claim another soul, each one bringing him ever closer to breaching the membrane between the Long Dark and the reality of Arthur and his friends. The novel takes the form of five more-or-less self-contained stories – an Airport-style disaster story, an entanglement with a top secret government agency with a secret underground headquarters, a visit to a troll’s cave somewhere in England, and so on – that give us brief glimpses into the lives of the central characters as the years pass and they grow older. From 1989, we jump to 1995, then 2000, 2006 and 2016. With each jump our heroes grow older and more jaded, if not necessarily wiser, bowing under the pressure of having to select a new sacrifice every single year. Some cope better with this responsibility than others, but the bonds between them remain tight throughout, as they search frantically for a way to absolve themselves of any further debt to the creature. Not everyone will survive to the end, and some of the deaths are more devastating than others, but each leaves us with an empty feeling, as if we’ve lost someone close, testament to Hill’s ability to bring his characters to life, and make us care about their fates. Surprisingly, Hill’s most devastating strike is not through death, but through the outcome of a side-deal that Gwen Underfoot makes with the dragon that changes the course of history for this close-knit group of friends.
As with Hill’s earlier fiction, King Sorrow is full of references and callbacks, Easter eggs for the eagle-eyed reader that show us a glimpse into a wider universe that seems to be shared on some level with that of his father’s fiction. The most obvious crossover here comes as we learn about the items in Llewellyn Wren’s “Cabinet of Curiosities”, “weird shit” that he has amassed over a lifetime, and which includes a rifle:
“Who’d this belong to? Lee Harvey Oswald?” Donna asked, cheek pressed to the stock as if she planned to put a slug into the player piano.
“Close,” Llewellyn said. “A substitute English teacher with a history of mental illness attempted to assassinate a Senate candidate, Greg Stillson, with that gun. The shooter, John Smith, supposedly suffered from the gift of prophecy. He for sure suffered from a brain tumour…”
One chilling callback to Hill’s own works takes us right back to Heart-Shaped Box:
The Black man recoils and looks away — looks toward the camera — and his eyes are covered in scribbles, a mess of weird quivering lines sketched right into the picture…
At almost 900 pages, King Sorrow is a hefty beast, but the novel’s structure keeps the action moving at a steady pace: the breakdown into separate, almost standalone stories allows us to digest the tale more easily, and to spend time with the characters, getting to know their quirks and foibles, and trying – as much as anything – to understand how a group of such different people manage to remain friends after more than 30 years. As usual, regardless of genre, Hill’s character work is second to none and it’s the relationships between this bunch of misfits that keeps us turning the pages, rather than the giant fire-breathing dragon that, we discover very early in proceedings, is very much the villain of this piece. There is a part of me that would love to see Joe Hill be a more prolific novelist than he is now — yes, the comics and the short stories are excellent, but it’s through his novels that Hill really gets to shine, in my opinion — but if he continues to produce novels of this calibre, then the gaps between them are just an excuse to go back and revisit old friends.
It’s not everyone who can take a dragon, give it a plummy accent, and make it terrifying, but Joe Hill proves that he’s the man for the job in King Sorrow. You’ll laugh; you’ll most likely cry; you’ll definitely spend an inordinate amount of time perched on the edge of your seat as one life or another hangs in the balance. For the length of time it takes to read, you will become a part of the friendship group that consists of Arthur and Gwen, Van and Donna, Colin and Allison. You’ll feel their joys and sadness and, most importantly, their terror, as they dabble with forces they don’t understand and allow their naïveté to get them into trouble — which proves my father right: most smart people have brains to burn, but not an ounce of common sense. If you’ve read and enjoyed Joe Hill’s stories in the past, I’m here to tell you that King Sorrow is his best work yet, and that the long wait has definitely been worth it. If you’re new to this incredibly gifted author, King Sorrow is as good a place to start as any. Its arrival is perfectly timed to coincide with the nights closing in, so get yourself comfortable, and buckle in for the adventure of – quite literally – a lifetime. You might want to leave a light on, though, when you finish up for the night and head to bed.
Reader Dad - Book Reviews 