Joe Hill returns to the horror landscape with King Sorrow, a sprawling gothic nightmare that asks a deceptively simple question: What would you sacrifice to save yourself? The answer, as six college students discover one frigid Maine winter, is far more complicated—and infinitely more horrifying—than they could imagine.
Set against the backdrop of Rackham College in 1991, the novel opens with Arthur Oakes, a thoughtful student librarian caught in an impossible trap. Drug dealers have coerced him into stealing rare books from the college’s special collection, and his desperation becomes the catalyst for a supernatural pact that will haunt all involved for decades. When Arthur and his friends—including his burgeoning love interest Gwen Underfoot, wealthy Colin Wren, firebrand twins Donna and Donovan McBride, and brilliant Alison Shiner—perform a ritual using the infamous Crane journal (bound in its author’s own skin), they summon King Sorrow, an ancient dragon dwelling in the Long Dark.
The Architecture of Dread
Hill constructs his narrative with the patience of a master craftsman building a cathedral, brick by blood-soaked brick. The novel’s structure fractures time like shattered glass, moving between the fateful summoning in 1991 and the consequences that ripple through subsequent decades. We witness Easter mornings in different years—1992, 2002, 2022—each one marked by the arrival of King Sorrow to claim his annual tribute. This temporal kaleidoscope creates a mounting sense of inevitability, as if we’re watching dominoes fall in slow motion across thirty years.
What makes Hill’s approach so effective is how he uses this fragmented timeline to examine the psychology of complicity. The friends who made that initial bargain—promising King Sorrow a human sacrifice each Easter in exchange for protection from their enemies—must live with the weight of their choice year after year. They age, change, drift apart, yet remain bound by their terrible secret. Hill explores how ordinary people rationalize extraordinary evil, how they construct elaborate moral frameworks to justify the unjustifiable.
The prose throughout carries Hill’s signature blend of literary sophistication and visceral horror. His sentences can shift from the contemplative quiet of Arthur studying medieval manuscripts to the bone-rattling terror of King Sorrow’s arrival with seamless precision. There’s an almost Dickensian quality to his character work—each figure rendered in sharp, memorable detail—combined with the modern horror sensibility that has made him one of the genre’s most distinctive voices.
Characters Caught in Amber and Fire
Arthur Oakes anchors the novel with his quiet desperation and intellectual curiosity. He’s a Black British student far from home, navigating class divisions and cultural displacement while pursuing his dream of studying at Oxford. His romance with Gwen Underfoot, the housekeeper’s daughter who works crossword puzzles in her spare time, provides the novel’s emotional core. Their relationship unfolds with genuine tenderness, making the moral compromises they face all the more devastating.
Gwen herself emerges as the story’s conscience, the character most troubled by their annual ritual of murder-by-dragon. Her journey from college-aged optimist to middle-aged woman confronting mortality forms one of the novel’s most affecting arcs. Hill refuses to let her—or any of them—off the hook easily. Even decades later, when Gwen faces terminal illness, she cannot escape the shadow of King Sorrow or the guilt of what they’ve done.
Colin Wren, the wealthy puppet master who seems to orchestrate events from behind the scenes, provides a chilling counterpoint. Where Gwen represents troubled conscience, Colin embodies dangerous pragmatism. His willingness to weaponize King Sorrow, to turn their dragon into a tool for vigilante justice, reveals how easily power corrupts even those with ostensibly good intentions.
The McBride twins, Donna and Donovan (Van), offer another perspective on trauma and survival. Donna, a talk radio host haunted by her childhood friend’s murder, channels her rage into righteousness. Van, struggling with addiction, represents the difficulty of escaping cycles of self-destruction. Their dynamic—protective yet combative—adds depth to the ensemble cast.
The Dragon in the Details
King Sorrow himself stands as one of contemporary horror’s most memorable monsters. Hill wisely keeps him partially obscured for much of the novel, allowing him to exist as much in the characters’ minds as in physical reality. When he does manifest, the descriptions are breathtaking and terrifying in equal measure: golden scales that shift like living metal, eyes that burn with ancient intelligence, a voice that reverberates through multiple dimensions.
But what makes King Sorrow truly frightening isn’t his physical power—though Hill makes clear he could level cities—it’s his mastery of language and contract. He’s as much lawyer as dragon, carefully constructing the terms of their bargain so that escape becomes impossible. His protection comes with invisible strings, and each year those strings tighten.
The novel explores dragons not as simple monsters but as forces of mythological reckoning. Hill draws on Arthurian legend, Norse mythology, and Eastern dragon lore to create a creature that feels both timeless and terrifyingly contemporary. King Sorrow has witnessed human atrocity across millennia—Dresden, Rwanda, countless horrors—and has learned to exploit humanity’s capacity for rationalized violence.
Where the Scales Lose Some Luster
Despite its considerable strengths, King Sorrow occasionally buckles under its own ambition. The sprawling timeline, while thematically rich, can leave certain plot threads feeling underdeveloped. Some secondary characters—particularly those introduced in later time periods—don’t receive the same depth of characterization as the core group.
The novel’s middle section, focusing on various Easter massacres across decades, risks becoming repetitive. While each incident showcases different aspects of King Sorrow’s power and the friends’ moral deterioration, the pattern of “selection, justification, destruction” can feel formulaic. Hill works to differentiate each sequence, but the fundamental structure remains similar.
Additionally, readers seeking straightforward horror thrills may find the novel’s meditative pace challenging. Hill is more interested in exploring moral philosophy than delivering constant scares. The horror, when it arrives, is devastating—Hill’s descriptions of King Sorrow’s attacks are genuinely harrowing—but long stretches focus on character introspection and moral debate.
The resolution, while thematically appropriate, may leave some readers wanting more definitive closure. Hill opts for ambiguity over easy answers, which suits the novel’s complex moral landscape but might frustrate those seeking traditional catharsis.
A Dragon’s Legacy
King Sorrow ultimately succeeds as both a supernatural thriller and a profound meditation on complicity, guilt, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive our own choices. Hill has crafted something that operates on multiple levels: as a page-turning horror novel, as a character study examining how people change (or don’t) over decades, and as a philosophical exploration of when—if ever—the ends justify the means.
The novel resonates particularly strongly in our current moment, when questions of moral compromise and systemic violence feel urgently relevant. The friends’ annual selection of “worthy” victims—serial killers, war criminals, abusers—mirrors real-world debates about vigilante justice and extrajudicial punishment. Hill doesn’t provide easy answers, instead forcing readers to confront their own capacity for rationalized violence.
For readers familiar with Hill’s previous work, King Sorrow feels like a natural evolution. It shares NOS4A2‘s ambitious scope and fantastical horror, Horns‘ interest in moral corruption, and The Fireman‘s examination of how communities fracture under pressure. Yet it also represents something new: a more mature, reflective work that trades some of his earlier maximalism for deeper psychological complexity.
The Verdict
King Sorrow is a challenging, rewarding novel that demands patience but offers substantial returns. It’s not Hill’s most accessible work—the fractured timeline and philosophical density require active engagement—but for readers willing to meet it on its own terms, it provides a rich, unsettling experience. The prose sparkles, the characters breathe with complex life, and King Sorrow himself ranks among contemporary horror’s most memorable creations.
This is a book about the terrible weight of consequences, about how a single desperate decision can echo across decades, corrupting everything it touches. It’s about the dragon we all carry within us—that voice suggesting the ends justify the means, that this one compromise won’t really change who we are. Hill reminds us that dragons are patient creatures, and they always, eventually, collect what they’re owed.
For Readers Who Enjoyed
If King Sorrow captivated you, consider these similarly ambitious works:
- The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova – Another novel that blends historical research with supernatural horror and spans multiple timelines
- The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins – Features a group bound by supernatural bargains with dark consequences
- Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia – Combines gothic horror with social commentary and historical depth
- The Ninth House by Leigh Barducci – Explores the moral compromises of secret societies with occult power
- The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix – Examines how ordinary people rationalize and combat extraordinary evil
Final Thoughts
King Sorrow confirms Joe Hill’s position as one of horror’s most thoughtful practitioners, a writer unafraid to use genre conventions to explore complex moral terrain. It’s a novel that will linger long after the final page, its questions and images refusing easy dismissal. Like the best horror, it holds up a dark mirror, forcing us to examine what we might sacrifice, what compromises we might make, if the price seemed right and the consequences distant enough.
The dragon is real. The dragon is us. And King Sorrow knows we’ll always, eventually, make the deal.