King Sorrow (2025).

With the release of his first anthology collection, 20th Century Ghosts, in October of 2005, it's been a pretty safe bet to say that novelist Joe Hill has done a pretty admirable job at cementing a name and place for himself; not just within the Horror genre, but also as a more or less permanent fixture of the pop culture landscape.  He's done it through a process that's simple to describe, yet far from easy to pull off.  Part of it comes from having the kind of outsized Imagination that most artists can only dream about.  The other piece of the equation for the artistry comes from the writer's hard won victories in honing his craft.  Open up any one of Hill's books, and you'll be confronted with an author who uses pains-taking care with the letters on the page.  To read his best work is to be confronted with a man who knows that none of his ideas count for much if the words aren't there when he needs them.  It's this artistic humility in the face of his own chosen medium that's part of what makes Hill such a pleasant read.  It's the knowledge that you're being entertained by a man who takes the actual Art of his vocation seriously.  Every book greets us with the same situation.  We meet the artist in his latest endeavor to achieve the greatest possible effect in his craft.  He does this not in the hope of achieving artistic perfection.  That sort of thing will always be out of reach for all the best storytellers out there.  Even Shakespeare could never reach that height.  Instead, each book or short story, or novella is an example of Hill's constant realization that the book is the boss, which means he needs to make sure that he gets as much, if not all, of the right words onto the page as possible.

This is something Hill admits to doing since he was just a young pup growing up listening to and watching his father Stephen King tell stories for a living.  It must say something for the impact that kind of a childhood can leave on an impressionable young mind, if it results in him writing novels like the one under discussion here today.  Hill has spoken of how he was the product of a literary household on numerous occasions.   The author and his fellow siblings, Naomi and Owen King, all grew up being read to by their parents.  It's one of those shared generational past times that families all over the world have resorted to at one time or another.  What marked the practice out as different for the King family is that Hill and his brother and sister found themselves in a remarkable agreement.  After their parents were done reading to them, sooner or a later a time would come when they were expected to turn right around and return the favor.  Once Stephen King or his wife Tabitha got done regaling their children with their favorite stories, either Hill, Owen, or Naomi would then have to choose from their parents favorite books and then see how well they could match Mom, and especially Dad as storytellers in their own right.  This whole process seems to be something that King and Tabitha decided on together. 

If I had to give a reason for why two grown adults would want to be read to by their kids, then the best answer I've got is that it all stemmed from both parents growing up as a pair of evenly matched bookworms, and just naturally wanting to make sure their kids grew up with the same sense of shared enthusiasm that they had for the written word when they were little.  The net result of these efforts seems to have been positive on the whole.  Two of the King family siblings would go on to become storytellers themselves, with Hill seeming to have managed to not just stand on his own two feet, but also to more or less place himself in an interesting sort of position.  Everything I've read from the guy leaves me with the impression that sooner or later, he's the one whose going to take up the slack once his dad is forced to retire from the writing desk for good by time and tide.  In other words, there's a good chance that Joe Hill might very well be the one to continue the legacy of the Stephen King universe.  This is something I first discovered within the pages of N0S4A2, where Hill is clearly seen setting his story within the sheltering confines of his father's own secondary world, the one which contains such pleasant locales as Derry, Maine.  This conviction has grown with each new book.

King Sorrow appears to be no different in that respect.  For the purposes of this review, some of the most crucial behind-the-scenes info Hill provides for readers into where his mind was at with the novel under discussion comes from an interview he gave to Locus Online.  It's there that Hill drops hints that his latest book might have been something like the natural outgrowth of a constant background motif in his previous work: “King Sorrow was my first novel in almost ten years, and, in some ways, it reiterates a set of beliefs that I have about what a story should do, on a much grander scale than I’ve done before. The book cir­cles back to explore ideas from all the earlier stories. Not just Heart-Shaped Box, but in The Fireman, where the world is suffering from a contagion of something called dragonscale, and there are a couple characters who literally breathe fire in that book. It seems like that flows very naturally into where I went with King Sorrow. It’s a big, multi­cast story that takes place over a number of years. So, in that way, it echoes NOS4A2. In Horns, my protagonist, Ig Perrish, has a special relationship with a number of snakes – at one point, he delivers a sermon to a few hundred snakes in a burned-out foundry, and that interest in thinking, conniving reptiles obviously returns in a story about dragons."

At the same time, Hill makes no bones about that fact that a lot of the book came from those aforementioned childhood reading sessions with his parents as a kid, and from one book in particular: “The keystone character of King Sorrow is King Sorrow himself – I always knew that when he came through into our reality, we were going to have some fun. At the risk of upsetting fans of Tolkien, I think Smaug is a much more interest­ing villain than either Saruman or Sauron – that Smaug is really Tolkien’s great villain. My parents took turns reading The Hobbit to my sister and me when I was little, and I remember that scene where Bilbo is invisible in Smaug’s treasure hoard, and Smaug knows he’s there, and the two of them have a conversation where they’re essentially ver­bally fencing with each other, because for dragons, words are just one of their weapons. They play with their conversational partners the way a cat will play with a mouse. I remember, at ten, being utterly entranced by the suspense of that scene, of Smaug playing with Bilbo and waiting for the hobbit to give away his location so that Smaug could bite him in two. I thought, ‘This is as good as suspense can get.’ So probably the seed of King Sorrow was planted 40 years ago (web)".  Let me just add that all thinking The Hobbit is better than Lord of the Rings does is to place Hill in what might be termed one of the acceptable minorities within Fantasy fandom.  Guys like him exist, and their harmless for the most part, so let's ignore them all.

Such is the verdict of pop culture as a whole, so far as I can tell.  What remains to be said is that Hill makes it sound very much as if that initial childhood encounter with Middle Earth is one that's managed to stay with him across the years.  It's just possible that a similar phenomenon happens to a lot of pop culture nerds.  We'll each have that one story, whether a book or film, that we just happen to catch or have read to us at the exact right moment, and it sort of tends to leave an indelible impression on our sense of both life and art.  It was An American Tail by Don Bluth and Steven Spielberg for me.  In Hill's case, it turns out to have been The Hobbit.  What this means in terms of Hill's artistry is interesting.  It implies that Tolkien is one of the constant influences that are always lingering somewhere in the background of the writer's Inspiration.  If this is at all the case, then what remains to be seen going forward is the way Hill interacts with Tolkien in two ways.  The first is to see how his enjoyment of Middle Earth plays out when it is filtered through his own American Gothic lens.  The second aspect is to see how this Tolkien influence interacts with the work of the second major influence in Hill's ongoing repertoire, that being no less than the artistry of the writer's father, Stephen King.  

Iron Lung (2026).

Sometimes it helps to go into a movie blind.  Perhaps there's something to be said for having no more than the bare minimum of background information and context to hang your expectations on, at least when it comes to watching certain types of film.  That was more or less my own experience of the recent sleeper hit Iron Lung.  Directed by Mark Fischbach, known also as the internet personality Markiplier, and created and developed by David Szymanski, Iron Lung functions as a film adaptation of the indie Horror game of the same name.  That was just about the extent of all I knew going into this movie.  I had a few more bits of knowledge, most of which I owed to the review of YouTube critic Ryan Hollinger.  However, aside from that one note of good press, I had very little else to go on.  My own experience with Markiplier, for instance, is very close to that of Hollinger.  He was just one of those names you're bound to run into when looking up clips of various video games online.  That's pretty much all that happened, really.  Fischbach's online name and videos were tossed up by a friendly algorithm, and he remained an on-and-off presence in my search history here and there on occasion.  I can't recall even watching much of his stuff in the lead-up to realizing the film had an honest to goodness theatrical release.  If I'm being brutally honest with myself here, it's probably telling that my initial impression to news that Markiplier, of all people, was making a movie based on a video game, existed somewhere on a limited spectrum, one that ran from muted, to mixed, to nothing at all. 

It was just another one of those bits of passing trivia that you can't help running into sooner or later, because the Web never exists in a vacuum, and stuff like this is bound to make the rounds.  I think the initial coolness I had to the idea was bound up with a lot of personal experience that I'd had with movies at the time.  It's no secret that Hollywood seems to be going through a creative drought period.  There's a lot to complain about with the way Tinseltown has been handling both its new material and its legacy media.  I'd gotten so used to not getting worked up about the latest film announcements, even if it was something I liked, that I more or less automatically assumed the same arrangement with Markiplier's efforts in his big screen debut.  My overall reaction at the time was at least a bit understandable.  It also turns out to have been very unfair to both of the artists involved, and I'll explain why later on in the review proper.  Before we get there, however, I've since learned at least something about the nature of, as well as the context behind the making of this film and its source material.  Giving newcomers at least some background information about the thinking and culture that exist behind Iron Lung can go a long way to explaining both what the movie is trying to achieve, as well as my own critical reactions to it.

In order to do that, we have to say a brief word about the true creator behind Iron Lung, and the artistic milieu his efforts emerged from.  If I knew just the bare minimum about Markiplier before I watched this film, I knew even less about David Szymanski, the video game developer who got this whole project started.  Iron Lung began its life as an indie console title that slowly became something of an overnight sensation in both Gamer and Horror circles.  We'll get further into the thought Szymanski put into the game, and how that all translates to the screen in a minute.  For now, it's enough to state the bare facts.  Dave seems to have been a gaming enthusiast from an early age, and its a passion he shares with his brothers John and Evan, both of whom have created their own well known Horror game title with My Friendly Neighborhood.  In addition to liking video games, David seems to share an equal passion for works of Gothic Fiction, with critics like Hollinger pointing to what appears to be a clear influence of H.P. Lovecraft on the nature of Iron Lung as both a game and film.  There seems to be a bit more to it than that, yet before we dive into the movie's storytelling mechanics, there remains just one final background component to talk about, one that kind of helps establish the context of this movie.

In many ways, it helps to see Iron Lung, whether as a game or film, as the product of a still ongoing process of creation and discovery within the modern Horror genre.  I don't know how many in the audience have been keeping track of this, yet there's a process of creative and artistic experimentation that's been ongoing in field of Things that Go Bump in the Night for some time now.  It seems to have got started with not just the release of The Blair Witch Project, but also it's somewhat innovative use of viral marketing.  It's been cited as the first instance of a successful ARG, or Alternate Reality Game.  While it's a mistake to claim that Blair Witch was a complete trailblazer in any of these storytelling tactics, it was the one to bring a lot of the techniques we now associate with un/fiction into a broader pop-culture awareness.  It was the cultural mainstreaming of these hybrid styles of storytelling performance that allowed a slew later talents to be Inspired by the Folk Horror brainchild of Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick.  It's like the makers of Blair Witch touched a nerve in similar creative types in a way that acted as a form of giving permission, for lack of a better word.  It showed indie filmmakers and artistic talents everywhere that, yes, you can realize the projects and dreams in your head.  No matter how crazy or obtuse they may seem, there's an audience out there waiting for it all.

The result seems to have been one of those creative wellspring whose various elements and products are only now starting to be realized by most viewers and readers as part of a much larger, and still ongoing creative development within the realm of Horror.  Thanks to the success of Blair Witch's ARG approach, there have been countless others that have followed in its wake.  In the process, artists like Kris Straub and Kane Parsons have taken up the mantle set down by Sanchez and Myrick, and expanded it into the realms of the subgenre now known as Analog Horror.  The fact that the format itself seems to be reaching a point of coming full circle with the successful release of The Backrooms might point to the small Renaissance started in the backwoods of Burkittsville as starting to gain some kind of further mainstream traction.  In addition to the various shared breakthrough efforts featured on movie screens or the internet, it seems as if the un/fiction tropes spotlighted by the Blair Witch franchise has also managed to find its way into the realm of the written word.  Starting out with a simple subreddit dedicated to telling scary stories in a style similar to that of Found Footage films, the efforts of a just a bunch of folks chilling together and entertaining one another with who can tell the best twisted tale has since morphed in The NoSleep Podcast, thanks to the efforts of creators Matt Hansen and David Cummings.  Other writers like Craig Groshek have started their own Simply Scary anthologies.

The major consequences of endeavors like these have been the creation of what's often known as Creepypasta storytelling.  All it amounts to is the old practice of Urban Legends transferred to the electronic, digital campfire.  It's where authors like the aforementioned Kris Straub got the idea for "Candle Cove" and the larger Analog Horror series that has spun off from it.  Dave Szymanski's place in this ongoing proliferation comes from the world of video games, and the effect that this underground, New Wave Horror Boom has had on the format.  The trends appears to have reached even into the gaming sphere, as we've seen Analog Horror artists Remy Abode take his Gemini Home Entertainment series and craft an actual game set in the universe of his online ARG.  The developers of an upcoming title known as Giggleland, meanwhile, have resorted to Analog Horror/ARG in the marketing of their product.  Szymanski belongs to this same cadre of indie devs who are busy trying to see how well they can craft games that share an equal amount of art with the usual sort of entertainment that most players still expect from any halfway decent platformer.  In Szymanski's case, that's meant crafting a series of dark secondary worlds beset by various types of terrors, many of which owe their Inspiration to Gothic masters of the Weird such as H.P. Lovecraft and filmmakers like Tobe Hooper.

In terms of overall game aesthetic, David tends to design his titles in an intentional kind of throwback style.  His games tend to harken back to the type of visual design that was most prevalent during the early 90s, with some 80s arcade influences thrown in to the mix.  He's basically a fan of the retro gamer approach to platform design.  You can expect most of his output to at least look like it was designed at or around the time that, say, the original Alone in the Dark was released for Mac and PC.  Iron Lung proved to be David's big breakout title, and as of this writing it still seems to be the game he's most known for.  Before we proceed any further, all that remains to be said by way of introduction is that the original video game incarnation quickly became a major favorite in YouTube's endless supply of Let Play streams, with professional platform players like JackScepticEye recording their playthroughs of Szymanski's major mainstream hit.  This created the kind of feedback loop you might expect, where the more internet personalities showcased them game on their Lets Plays, the more they all just served to boost Iron Lung's popularity, and sooner or later Szymanski found that he had a hit on his hands.

It was the experience of one online player in particular that seems to have started the gears in the back of his head turning, and that lead to a surprising amount of first personal, and later on an even greater deal of shared ambition and collective drive to see how a game like this could be fleshed out.  All that happened was surprisingly simple, at least to start out with.  Markiplier heard about the game like everyone else, and he decided to record his own playthrough, complete with the usual amount of hilarious and comedic actions that he was best known for at the time.  What I don't think any of us expected was for Fischbach to be so taken with Szymanski's quasi-Lovecraftian, yet otherwise very simple platform release to the point where he soon developed the enthusiasm to see if he could turn it all into an actual, legitimate Horror film.  What happened next has become something of a legend in itself.  For the longest time after that initial moment of Inspiration, Markiplier was very much living an underdog story where it was just him and his friends and family chipping in to help make this dream a reality.  When you go back and find out about all the heart and soul the man poured into this project, you tend to feel bad for being so dismissive in the first place.  All that is getting ahead of things, however.  The point is, Markiplier and Szymanski got their film made, and now here are the results.