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.  

The Story.

Once upon a time, in a far out of the way corner in the state of Maine, there lived two princes and two princesses.  One of these prince's names was Colin Wren, and he was considered a well liked friend by the other three.  Now one of the prince and princesses were in fact brother and sister, Donna and Donavan McBride, the latter of whom was known simply as Van, for short.  The last princess was named Allie Shiner, and she had known the latter three almost since she was still just a girl.  While these three belonged to noble households, they did not hold themselves aloof from others.  Indeed, there must have been something in the way of charity about these monarchs, for they were known to pal around with commoners a great deal.  Colin, Donna, Van, and Allie were especial friends in particular with a man named Arthur Oakes.  Despite his name, there was nothing unique about him.  There was nothing of royalty in Arthur's bloodline that would link him to his famous namesake.  His father was a learned man, a humble scribe and scholar of some renown, and his mother was a simple pastor who had recently been arrested for a public protest gone wrong, thus resulting in a mandated stay in the Black Cricket Women's Correctional Facility.  Arthur himself, meanwhile, was little more than an apprentice scribe.

When our story opens, Arthur has taken on a paid custodial job as a library assistant at Rackham College, where he is studying for his degree, which will allow him to realize his own personal ambitions.  His father used to have the sort of renown that can go far in academic circles, yet means very little beyond the Ivied Halls of  places like Oxford University.  That was the goal of Arthur's father.  He was aiming for acceptance to the same Chair of English Literature that was once occupied by C.S. Lewis way back in the day.  A letter of acceptance to such a position would have been both a ground and barrier breaker.  Arthur's father could have been the first Black man to teach English at Oxford, and made a name not just for himself or his family, but for others like them as well.  So of course it's only natural that death creeps in one day unannounced and removes Mr. Oakes Sr. from the equation.  It's pretty much the standard sort of procedure for fairy tales such as this.  It's left Arthur with the drive to realize his father's dreams; to prove to himself that you can make a difference through work and perseverance.  Luckily, he has good friends who are ready to support him all the way.  For some reason, this humble apprentice scribe has the aforementioned princes and princesses as his comrades.

In addition to that, Arthur has met up with, and has slowly begun to fall in love with a humble peasant girl by the name of Gwen Underfoot.  Her family has served as staff and retainers for the ancestral home of Colin's family for quite some time, and its on one of his frequent visits as a welcome guest that Arthur and Gwen meet, and begin to slowly become drawn to one another.  Since everything about this fairy tale setup is becoming too neat, it is of course necessary for a gang of brigands to enter the tale and stir up mischief for our heroes.  This comes in the form of the Nighswander Clan.  A family of ruffians who Arthur bumps into by accident while visiting his mother in prison.  In the best Shakespearean tradition, this simple exchange brings about unforeseen, and therefore tragic results.  The brigands turn up at the apprentice scribe's doorstep, and demand payment in cooperation for not harming his mother while is imprisoned in her tower.  In order to meet the ruffians' demands, Arthur must resort to swiping the most valuable books from the Rackham Library for the Nighswanders to sell on the black market.

Eventually, the young squire takes his troubles to his friends, the princes and princesses, along with Gwen.  It's Colin who suggests a very diabolical solution to Arthur's problems.  His grandfather Llewellyn spent the vast majority of life collecting many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten, not to say downright forbidden lore.  The old King Grand-Pater was able to accumulate these occult texts in thanks for services rendered to the U.S. Military as part of the Pentagon's research into ESP and Psychic ability.  In laymen's terms, the U.S. Armed Forces seems to have actually tried to see if supernatural phenomenon was real, and if it could be harnessed as a weapon.  I guess people will resort to anything when they're desperate, or at least believe that's how things are.  The funny thing is how these experiments were a success, at least in part.  Llewellyn Wren and his army cohorts really did prove the supernatural existed by establishing contact with the other world.  Only trouble is, they discovered it wasn't easily bent to the whims or concerns of humans caught up in petty conflicts, so it closed down.

Llewellyn kept those occult volumes, however, and in one of them is instructions for how to summon what might be termed a kind of helper.  A creature from a realm known simply as the Long Dark.  This creature is said to have a name.  It calls itself King Sorrow, and he is nothing less than a fire-breathing dragon straight out of the Tolkien books that Arthur's dad used to keep his son spellbound with as an eager and loving child.  At the same time, that's sort of the problem.  King Sorrow more than lives up to the all the best mythology about dragons.  What this means in practice is that when the King makes an agreement to remove a problem from the lives of his summoners, that sort of deal is always going to come with a hefty price-tag attached.  In Sorrow's case, the deal is always the same.  He'll remove the Nighswanders from Arthur's realm, yet he won't let it go at that.  A grand old drake like himself never earned his place or reputation without having something in the way of an appetite, and it wants constant sating, and therefore can never be truly satisfied.  He also likes to play games with those he helps.  It's cold comfort for change, and it's also all he has left.  Therefore, the terms of the King's agreement with the Get-Even-Gang is this.  They will supply him with more victims.  It won't stop with the Nighswanders, unless one the friends at Arthur's Table are willing to offer themselves up as deal sealer.

Since none of this ill-fated Ka-Tet are willing to do this, then it means they'll all have to feed him a new victim every Easter of the year.  Do this, and he'll leave the Get-Even-Gang alone.  Fail to meet these terms, and he'll swallow them whole.  It's clear Arthur and the rest of his Knights are dealing with the sort of monarch who loves nothing more than to be a tyrant to whoever he runs across.  Which makes their deliberate choice to go along with King Sorrow's demands all the more puzzling.  Nonetheless, the bargain is struck, and the deal, along with the fate, or Ka of the Get-Even-Gang, is sealed.  The Nighswanders are removed from the playing field in a fittingly gruesome manner, and Arthur stops being a mere apprentice scribe, and soon becomes the first African-American scholar to sit on a throne once occupied by the author of the Narnia Chronicles.  At the same time, all magic comes with a price, and King Sorrow proves to be a troublingly diligent bill collector.  As the years pass, the Knights of the Wrong Table are forced to meet once a year in order to make the worst sort of decision any human has ever had to make.  Who's next in line to get fed to the sharks.  Except in this case, the shark has something of a fifty foot length from head to tail, along with an impressive twenty foot wingspan.

Also he breathes fire now and then.  If the Get-Even-Gang can be spoken of as knights at all, then they exist so as servants to a venomous beast; a wrym with an insatiable appetite not just for blood, but also human suffering.  It's even possible to claim that King Sorrow doesn't just feed off the fear and misery of his chosen victims, but also those who become his own self-made slaves.  As time goes on, the princes, princesses, and their friends all discover the toll that being accessories to ongoing murder can have on a person's mental health.  Some like Donna and Van turn to drugs to help deal with the problem, while Colin seems to be the only one to get a creepy form of enjoyment out of the ordeal.  Everything in the Get-Even-Gang's personal lives begins to spiral out of control, until at long-last, the noble lord Arthur decides that things have gone on long enough.  While he may have ensconced himself in his Ivory Tower, he hasn't remained idle.  He's used his position as a tenured academic to not only pour through the folklore or dragons, but also to find ways of going out and searching for these sources in the flesh, or wood, or stone as the case may be with the creatures of legend.  With the tenacity of a born leader, Arthur has ventured forth into the world of his own academic studies to search for answers from the beasts and beings who live there, in the hopes of finding a way to slay King Sorrow.  Now, impossible as it may seem, there is a chance, just a fools chance, that he might have- succeeded.

Conclusion: A Perfect Blend of Fantasy and Horror.

I'm no longer sure where I first heard news about this novel.  All I know is that the first info I was ever told about King Sorrow came from Hill himself.  I remember he wrote words to the effect that it was going to be like a demented version of FRIENDS, like the whole thing was going to be this messed-up, very special episode of the TV show, and that there would be a dragon involved.  Hill also threw in the Dark Academia label as a good way to describe the book, and it turns out he was telling the truth.  More than anything else, however, my biggest takeaway from the completed novel itself is the sense that Hill had just accomplished perhaps the most astonishing feat of his career so far.  A great part of this novel's success has to do with two aspects of its composition.  It's told in such a way as to (1) be in dialogue with a number of past texts in order to achieve its effects, and in doing so (2) the book ends up shining a new light on the intersection of Horror and Fantasy.  In particular, Hill's novel helps point the way toward understanding how the Tale of Terror grew and metamorphosed out of old myths and legends of Enchantment.  All of this stems from the story Hill has to tell his readers, and from the way the various elements of the plot all point back to a history made up of previous texts previous texts from the past.

One of the most important elements is how Hill's narrative exists in dialogue with the fiction of his own father.  This is an aspect of the writer's art which isn't confined to King Sorrow alone.  It's something that was implicit from the appearance of his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, in 2005.  It's there the attentive reader begins to notice just how self-aware the artist is as the scion of a famous literary name.  It lends Hill's initial writings an air of Anxiety of Influence, at least to start out with.  The artist is unsure of his footing to an extent in his first few literary outings.  One gains the sense that while Hill is confident in his own abilities, he's also left wondering how his own voice fits in with the reputation established by the family name.  It's with the publication of N0S4A2 that we see Hill make a conscious decision to not just acknowledge his own artistic heritage, but also to take his own place within his father's legacy as an artistic King.  Ever since then, Hill has engaged with this personal inheritance in two interlocking ways.  The first is to reference past events and locations from Stephen King's fiction and make them part of his own writings.  The second is to have fun playing around with his dad's old themes, tropes, and motifs, and its this latter practice which very much goes on to determine the ways in which King Sorrow's entire narrative and thematic content unfolds as a recurring thread in Hill's work.

Heart-Shaped Box is a novel in constant dialogue with The Shining.  So is N0S4A2.  This makes sense, because in each case, we're dealing with texts centered around artist protagonists, and their struggles with both literal and metaphorical demons.  So it's possible to speak of Hill as a writer whose are texts full of literary allusions to the writings of his own father.  In N0S4A2, the writer has taken what worked in Heart-Shaped Box, and added in a little dash of Salem's Lot into the mix as well.  This same dialogical practice carries over into his following work, The Fireman, which is carrying on a book-length conversation with The Stand by welding the idea of the Post-Apocalyptic novel with the pyrotechnic abilities and special effects of Firestarter.  With King Sorrow, we find Hill constructing an entire plot that's in dialogue with Stephen King's It.  Much like that epic 80s door-stopper, Hill's story centers around a group of friends, and the encounters they have with an otherworldly entity.

This is the basic premise of the plot, and its one that Hill sticks to from the first to last page.  What makes his iteration of the same setup fascinating is the ways and means Hill finds in playing around with the patterns and ideas established by his dad.  He doesn't repudiate King's work, if anything this novel strengthens Hill's ties to his family's literary legacy for good and all.  Instead, perhaps the best to describe the plot of King Sorrow, is to claim that Hill shows us what a worst-case scenario of It might look like.  While the plot is similar in its most basic statement (a group of friends must confront a monster), the way in which its told acts like a twisted version of those same events.  Hill's scenario asks us to imagine what it would be like for the main cast to actively summon the Pennywise figure up in order to help them with a version of Henry Bowers that they don't feel brave enough to deal with on their own.  Not only does the monster in this version answer their call, he even forces the group to enter into a diabolical pact with him, and thus it's the protagonists themselves who end up agreeing to feed the monster victims on a cyclical basis, all the while allowing the process to slowly eat aware at their moral centers, and thus their very sanity as time goes on.  Hill's novel thus becomes a mirror work.

A good way to sum up the the book is to say that the plot is It turned completely on its head.  Hill has succeeded in taking one of his father's most iconic works, and fashioning an entire story that functions as a negative inverted image of it.  Thus another good way to describe King Sorrow is to claim that this ain't your parent's Loser Club.  The story of the Get-Even-Gang presents us with a series of character portraits that start out in the same familiar territory as that of the Losers, only for us to follow along as we see how deals with devil can serve to warp the human character, sometimes for the worst.  In this regard, Hill's novel tends to be unflinching in the way its handles the ethical costs exacted from his cast list.  It's played out in ways that are easiest to describe in terms of comparison.  The Losers are a tight-knit group to the end.  The Get-Even-Gang starts out just like this, until a dragon out of ancient legend arrives on the scene and starts drive a wedge between them all.  The bond that the Losers share is one that is able to unite them across a wide span of time, and it's strong, enduring, and endearing.  

The Get-Even-Gang has a similar setup, yet it doesn't serve any meaningful purpose.  The Losers come together just once to help defeat a great, supernatural evil.  The Knights of the Wrong Table have to meet up together once a year to make sure none of them get eaten by the monster.  Despite meeting only for one summer, the bond of friendship uniting the Losers is stronger even than memory.  The Get-Even-Gang has to live with a slew of memories of the people they have sacrificed to a dragon, year after year, and sometimes even when they play their part, King Sorrow likes to toy with them every now and again for his own amusement.  Such as the time he almost succeeds in maneuvering Allie into becoming acceptable collateral damage on a plane full of passengers, which also happens to be carrying the Gang's chosen target of the year.  In contrast, the Losers are always having to keep an eye out for Pennywise trying to stalk and kill them.  Perhaps the most glaring contrast comes from how Hill delineates the nature of the relationships between his group of ill-fated Knights.  The bonds between the Losers is such that you know you're in the middle of an unshakeable friendship.  Everyone in that older Ka-tet is never in any danger of having their loyalty and devotion to one another tested, even when they're in the midst of very real physical and mental dangers.  Now compare that to Hill own group.

The Get-Even-Gang is a portrait study of how to drive a wedge between the exact same sort of bonds that gave King's fellowship their very strength.  Perhaps the best irony underlying the entire narrative is that this same bond is used to tear the group apart.  From the moment they summon the dragon into our world, it doesn't take long for most of the Rackham Knights realize they've just made the biggest mistake of their lives.  In the case of Arthur and Gwen, this horror is the one that is realized the hardest, as it comes after Arthur lets a temper he never even knew he had get the better of him, and causes him to violate his own code of ethics against someone else, and that summoning the dragon was as much the result of not feeling done yet with the need to take out his anger on others.  It's what helps him set in motion the situation that will help ruin his relationship with Gwen, forcing them both into a series of lonely lives, and forever trying to make up for it.  Van and Allie, meanwhile, end up in the worst sort of loveless marriage, where she turns out to be unable to give Van the kind of relationship he always desired from her.  The only two holdouts who see this bargain as an advantage are Donna and Colin, both of whom to become a version of Morgan Le Fay, and Mordred to this Gothic Arthurian court.

I have described Hill's novel as a negative mirror image of King's It, and in these and multiple other ways, the book is able to do just that.  It reaches its zenith at a point where even I was left to conclude that I was dealing with characters who could be rightly described more as villains than heroes.  Yet it's clear these were very penitent bad guys, or at least some of them were.  At the very least by the time the final act rolls around, most of the Get-Even-Gang has achieved a visceral understanding of the word Penitent to the point where they're willing to see if they can become real Knights, the kind of who are supposed to slay dragons for the good of others.  The journey to that point is both devastating, exciting as hell, and just plain fun all around.  What few criticisms I have for the story are minor for the most part.  There are moments near the end where it's clear you can see the writer struggling with how to turn the thumbscrews on the reader without having to straight-up kill everybody off.  It's not because he's a sadist, but because Hill wants to find some way to give his audience their money's worth.  He wants to keep his readers on the edge of their seats right to the end, and so he's throwing what he can at the wall in the hope that it will stick.  Its nothing excessive, yet he does just edge up close to making things a bit too over-the-top by trying to stack the deck for his cast in a way that seems a bit artificially contrived.

There are moments where I could just catch a glimpse of the author in the background pulling levers and flipping switches left and right in a desperate sweat, hoping that he was getting the crucial denouement as close to perfection as possible.  It's clear that Hill was suffering from creative insecurity in these moments, and it might have led him to overplay his hand by just a tad with a few minor details of the final battle between the Get-Even-Gang here and there.  The good news is these missteps are just that: minor.  They're the sort of thing that can be corrected with just the merest bit of rewrites in the the upcoming streaming show adaptation that we all know is going to be inevitable now.  The best part is that none of these missteps are able to spoil the ending.  The excitement holds, and the basics of the action remain true to what has gone before up this point, and the final end of King Sorrow comes off as a perfect fit for a dangerous lizard such as himself.  What makes it all the better is that Hill foreshadowed this ending at an earlier point in the book, which means the villain's downfall comes with a pitch-perfect sense of recognition to it.  The only other criticism I could have was to wish we got to see more of the material that's spoken of or hinted at in the background.  For instance, we learn that Arthur spent a great deal of his time traveling around the English countryside in search of legends.

To be more accurate, there's a point where Arthur shares news of his exploits with Gwen, and are told about encounters he's had with monsters and various other creatures out of the myths and folklore of Great Britain, and how these interactions have each brought Art closer to learning the proper ways to slay a dragon.  We are given the conclusion to these exploits further on in the novel, and it might just be my favorite part of the whole book.  It's made all the more fun because in my mind, at least, one of the villains in that segment has Warwick Davis's voice.  For some reason, it just makes sense that a troll under the bridge would have the same vocal mannerisms as wicked version of Willow Ufgood.  At the same time, it did what all good writing is supposed to do, and I'll have to admit I was left wanting more.  I wish we as readers had gotten a chance to see more of Arthur's travels into the implied Wood Beyond the World which now exists in the Stephen King universe alongside such locales as Derry, Castle Rock, and the vampire infested ruins of Salem's Lot.  The idea that the forests and hills surrounding these iconic fictional small towns might now be home to creatures that exist in a kind of demented version of C.S. Lewis's Narnia denizens as seen through the lens of Tales from the Crypt and Arthur Machen is just one of those great artistic strokes of genius, and I'm left wanting more of it. 

A lot of that is down to not just his skill's as a storyteller, but also from the wealth of background material Hill draws upon to flesh out both the story, and the shared family secondary world of which it's a part.  In reading through his latter-day tale of dragon slaying, the audience discovers Hill for the first time engaging not just with authors outside of the King family's regular American Gothic setting, but also with the wider world of ancient folklore that served as the Inspiration for writers like Tolkien.  It means that what we're dealing with here is best described as a highly allusive text.  In other words, it's a story that doesn't just reference other words of fiction in its pages, but also draws on them in order to achieve its overall dramatic effect.  To be clear, this probably isn't the first time this has happened in King book.  Hill's father has made plenty of references to the other artists and works of literature that have Inspired almost every novel or short story he's ever written.  This is a practice that extends from poets like Wallace Stevens and Edward Arlington Robinson in Salem's Lot way back in 1975, all the way to the writings of Thomas Wolfe throughout The Dark Tower saga, and Hill is no different here.

What makes the allusive strategy of King Sorrow such an accomplishment is the way he is able to take the various strands of old world folklore and mythology (the kind of tropes you normally associate with the type of Fantasy fiction that's most often associated with writers like Tolkien, in other words), and somehow managing to blend it all into the same universe and mythos that he now shares with his father, and he's able to do all of this without missing a beat, or letting his own narrative voice get lost among the sea of echoes his book is wading through.  A great deal of this achievement is down to the way the author is able to seamlessly blend two genres together in a way that most fans of either type of story might not have thought they could have worked well together.  In proving just how wrong this sort of short-sighted way of thinking is, I think that in the last resort, what makes King Sorrow such an impressive literary feat for me is not just how the writer was able to make Horror and Enchantment blend into a seamless whole, but also the way in which that seems to have re-opened a long lost door into the nature of the Horror story's past, and what discoveries lie in wait behind that door, and what it tells us about the ways in which one genre can give birth to another over the slow passage of centuries.  Here is where some insights of the writer's own father can be of help.

Stephen King once referred to Peter Straub's Shadowland as a novel that is “excavating at the very roots of the supernatural tale (137)”, and I can't help thinking that's also a very apt description of what's going on here with this book.  I'd argue that what Hill has given his readers is a very clever excavation into the very roots of the Horror story itself, in a way.  Or at least this seems to be a happy side effect of the story he was trying to tell.  What I mean by that is that this is one of those books that is able to pull off two extra feats in addition to telling a great yarn.  First, it can be a rewarding experience for those readers who know a good deal of their Horror history, and where the genre came from.  For those don't know all this stuff, Sorrow can prove to be an enriching experience for those who are curious about where one of their favorite modes of storytelling comes from.  Everything about Hill's novel points to the Horror genre's roots as an outgrowth not of fear, but rather of Fantasy.  In other words, Horror is what you get when you focus the camera lens less on the Elves singing merry songs in an enchanted glen, and more on the Troll that lives under the bridge, the one that always lies in wait to lead unary travelers to their doom.  The fact that Hill takes this very trope and makes an entire sequence out of it places King Sorrow as a novel that is very much in dialogue with the legacy of the Horror genre through its allusions.  These tropes hint not just at the legacy bequeathed to the American Gothic from the vast well of British Fantasy, but also how that legacy was utilized to construct the Horror genre in America.

What I mean to say is that if you go back through the historical records long enough, then any die-hard Horror fanatic is going to have one hell of a surprise lying in wait for them when they discover which crucial piece of old world source material that used to, among other things, help in the construction of American literature's first famous haunted house.  It turns out that writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville weren't just fans of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, they also found ways of utilizing Spenser's Renaissance artistry for their own works.  In other words, you'd be surprised at the number of authors who drew on Spenser to help fashion the Horror genre as we now know it.  For example, in The Spenser Encyclopedia, Pamela Schirmeister details just much of a fanboy Hawthorne was for Spenser's fiction.  

"Among the Hawthornes, there was a family story that The Faerie Queene was the first book that the young Nathaniel bought with his own money. We cannot know if the story is true, nor even just when Hawthorne first read the poem, but in early letters to his wife, both dated in June of 1840, he mentions that he has the poem at hand. Shortly after, in 1842-3, during his first winter at the Old Manse, he and his wife passed the evenings reading it to each other, and later, in England, they would reread it again to their children. In the meantime, several of the poem’s figures had become household terms: the Hawthornes drew upon Spenser’s fiction for the name of a daughter, Una, called her dog ‘Una’s lion (348)".  It didn't end there, however.  In addition to geeking out over a piece of early modern Fantasy fiction, Hawthorne also transfigured Spenser's Perilous Realm into a landscape for the American idiom:

"If The Faerie Queene formed part of the fabric of Hawthorne’s everyday life, it still more pervasively influenced his literary imagination. From the earliest of his tales through the manuscripts of his late, unfinished romances, the Spenserian undersong is profound and varied. Hawthorne doubtless knew Spenser’s shorter poems as well, but it was The Faerie Queene that remained central. It provided not only a model for moral allegory and psychological romance, but also a kind of handbook of emblematic technique and rhetorical gesture.

"An examination of Spenser’s general in- fluence may profitably begin with The American Notebooks. Covering the period 1835-53, the entries in these notebooks can usefully be divided into two categories. They are part lengthy, rambling passages about whom Hawthorne has seen and what he has done, and part shorter, epigrammatic entries which include but are not comprised exclusively’ of ideas for stories. This latter group belongs to an imagination that began and remained highly susceptible to the allegorical significance of nearly everything it lit upon.

"How much this tendency owes to Spenser and how much to inherited modes of typology is difficult to determine, but, frequently enough, the story suggestions are markedly Spenserian. In the early 1840s, for example, Hawthorne writes: ‘To allegorize life with a masquerade, and represent mankind generally as masquers. Here and there, a natural face may appear’; ‘Visits to Castles in the Air — Chateaus en Espagne etc. — with remarks on that sort of architecture’; ‘To personify If — But —- And — though - etc.’; ‘An eating-house, where all the dishes served out, even to the bread and salt, shall be poisoned with the adulterations that are said to be practiced. Perhaps Death himself might be the cook’...The interest in pageantry, procession, and personification, in the architecture of dreams, in the potentially moral aspect of situations and objects, these are literary concerns that Hawthorne would return to throughout his career and that he surely associated with Spenser (348-49)."  It's also worth pausing here to observe that the idea of a story about life as a masquerade, or people who present as "masquers" carries an uncanny level of resemblance to an idea King would utilize when he wrote The Shining.

Schirmeister continues: "It is worth noting, however, that these concerns extend well beyond Hawthorne’s jottings for future tales and characterize the majority of his re- marks, such that it is often difficult to distinguish what is meant as material for a story and what is more randomly observed. What the journals then make clear above all else is Hawthorne’s habit of reading his daily existence as if it, too, were a canto in The Faerie Queene (349)."  What makes these observations pertinent to King Sorrow (aside from the use of Fantasy tropes for the purposes of the Horror genre in general) is to note that both Spenser and Hill center their narratives around tropes and typology drawn from Arthurian myths.  While it's true that writers like Tolkien exert a sizeable influence on the plot, a lot of the novel's themes and trajectory are also drawn from the writing of Sir Thomas Malory.  In fact, one of the remarkable things about Sorrow is just how well the arc of many of the characters end up adhering to their Arthurian originals.  Then again, Tolkien also tried his hand at Camelot as well, so perhaps it makes sense to describe the content of Hill's book as a seamless blend of Malory and Middle Earth.

What makes King Sorrow such a rich novel from my own perspective is in the way it manages to link up with writings by scholars like Schirmeister, and others.  It's a case where a simple novel written for the fun of it still somehow manages to dovetail with other things I've been looking up when it comes to the history of the American Gothic story.  It helps to solidify the idea of the modern Horror genre as a landscape whose history is vaster and more rich than I think a lot of even the so-called aficionados of this type of storytelling are aware of.  It's something that goes beyond the simple trivia of who designed the gore effects for a favorite splatter fest.  Like King said of Straub's Shadowland, Hill's novel is one that acts as an excavation into the root soil that the Tale of Terror grew out of.  In doing so, I think he's done a real favor for a lot of us bookish fans of the Fright genre.  It may not have been intentional, yet the final product of Hill's labors amounts to something like the best possible challenge a book can give to its readers.  It offers us the chance to arrive at a greater understanding of the Horror story, and the ways in which its connected to the myths of ages past.  A careful glance back in the genre's history also shock us with how a lot of the material that fuel's format's engine can come from the most unexpected of literary places.  That's how it was for me learning about Spenser, Hawthorne, and the Horror story.

To realize that a lot of your favorite Fear Fic draws upon the same storehouse of Elvish folklore that guys like Tolkien, Malory, and Spenser all drew from, and that Hill isn't even the first Horror artist to use this material is one of those unique eureka moments.  There's just something amazing in learning that not only did Hawthorne draw from that same Well of Myth in crafting what Horror fiction would look and sound like going forward in America, but also that these same elements would be utilized by none other than artists like Shirley Jackson in a simple, overlooked short story later on.  Perhaps the biggest takeaway from Hill helping to uncover the Elvish craft that lies in back of the Terror Tale is that it helps explain those subtle moments of the Sublime that even a story about Things that Go Bump in the Night can have on occasion.  It might help to explain why even little kids sometimes gravitate toward a genre of the gratuitous if you consider that there might also be Enchantment as well as a Troll lurking around the corner.  It suggests that the terrain of Horror fiction contains a landscape that is more vast and surprising than most of us have hitherto realized.  That what Ray Bradbury referred to as the October Country contains more than just the familiar locales we've come to associate with it.

It means that the prototypical small town with a creepy or haunted secret, along with the old, dark house at the center of it are also bordered by forests which contain the sort of horrors that owe just as much to the beings and creatures that lurk in the corners of Olympus or Valhalla, as much as they owe the inhabitants of your local B-Movie Drive-In.  If anything, it might be that the Drive-In Schlock film is the very place where Spenser's monsters and hybrid abominations go to be reborn, with a new lease on life.  Such an analogy is even more apt considering that the first kill made by Hill's own dragon takes place in an old abandoned Drive-In cinema, and part of the villain's build-up to the kill involves him projecting his shadowing image onto the movie screen that dwarfs above the characters.  That might just be the best image that Hill is able to conjure up for his readers, as it amounts to a neat summation not just for the contents of his book, but also for what it represents as a meeting and melding of old horrors with the new.  Looked at from this perspective, letting your supernatural villain have his first big action scene take place in an avatar for the pop culture of Stephen King's own 1950s youth makes sense.

Hill's imaginary Drive-In Theater of the Mind serves as the perfect meeting ground for a mediating encounter between Tolkien and Spenser's world of myth, and the modern face of Horror as we know it today.  It's a brilliant conceit that paves the road to allowing the audience to buy into the idea of terrors from old world folklore emerging whole and intact into a world of iPhones and wi-fi.  It also kind of allows old school Schlock like I was a Teenage Werewolf to have a bit of after-the-fact dignity considering the myth of Lycanthropy also stems as far back as the Middle Ages, right alongside the legends of dragons.  It all returns to the idea that the great unrecognized feat of King Sorrow is that it allows the author to expand the horizons of his chosen genre.  In making readers aware that the work of Horror partakes of a rich pageantry of myths from the past, Hill seems to have found a way to elevate the artistry which is always inherent in the genre, and yet which so few artists and audiences realize is there, just waiting to be picked up again.  This is the kind of book that points toward new horizons.  So of course the perfect irony is that it draws upon works of the past in order to carve out a future.

In drawing his reader's attention to richness of Horror's history, Hill doesn't so much redefine the genre as remind us where it came from, and how those older tropes, ideas, and images can still be of service in helping to revitalize the way Things Go Bump in the Night.  To borrow a few words from Spenser critics Andrew Hadfield and Michael Jonik, Hill's book helps us to see how the Tale of Terror "could be approached in terms of a series of shared imaginative conceits or philosophical concepts."  In addition to the usual trappings of the format, going back into the ancient well of the Gothic Tale's past for Inspiration reveals it as a chilling yet intriguing place of "of surfaces and veils, metamorphoses and masquerades."  It offers a more diverse "pageantry of darkness and light, a phantasmagoria of obscured faces and marked and hybrid bodies, dim objects and shining emblems, mirror- and snow-images and fleeting dream-like figures. They transport historical personages and events into estranged terrains and draw on a shared catalogue of mythological" and sometimes even iconological figures (18).  In doing so, Hill becomes one of those rare artists that challenge practitioners of the genre to raise the game a bit.  To get out of the usual comfort zones and see just how far the genuine Art and Sublime qualities of the Scary Story can go.

With all this said, none of this heavy theorizing and diving back into the archives of history should give readers any worry that the Hill's story is too dense for its own good.  Trust me when I say that's far from the case.  We're not dealing a book like Moby Dick, or The Road to Xanadu here.  Instead, this is the kind of tome where the writer is always aware that the book is the boss, which means the story and its entertainment value come first last and always.  On that score, Hill never manages to leave his readers disappointed.  It starts out on a solid Gothic build-up which introduces readers to our protagonists, and the troubled Round Table which they create in the very act of playing with fire.  In keeping with the theme of finding just the right creative riffs to play off of from his father's works, the Get-Even Gang don't truly become a fellowship until the night that the titular King is summoned.  The ritual is dramatized in an appropriately surreal and trippy fashion, including a man in black who fled across a desert of snow, and how Arthur Oakes followed, complete with a bloody rendition of Puff the Magic Dragon.  It's a scene the novel keeps flashing back to as more story revelations come to the fore.

By the time the novel reaches its conclusion, the full scope and cost of that night of summoning becomes clear, it drives the story's tragic Arthurian themes home in ways that were cleverly foreshadowed all along if your paying attention.  In these moments, Hill seems to be taking a critical examination of one of the recurrent tropes in his father's books.  This would be the notion of Ka-Tet, or the idea of a fellowship forged by destiny.  There are moments where the story seems to be outright asking whether such occurrences are always a good thing, or whether they can be for a fundamentally bad cause?  In doing so, Hill seems to offer a fascinating challenge to readers.  He seems to be saying that sometimes it might be necessary to question the morals of certain fellowships, and whether the so-called will of destiny is really just a matter of malign influences exerting their ill-will on weak and fragile minds.  Before we get to that though, Hill's Inspiration finds plenty of time to take his readers on a harrowing plain ride which acts as nothing less than an amped up version of Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, except instead of Captain Kirk having to fight off a mere gremlin on a wing, one of the Get-Even Knights must find a way to keep a dragon straight out of Tolkien from incinerating the whole plane.

It's one of the many tour-de-force sequences, complete with an aerial battle between a squadron of army fighter jets and a giant flying lizard.  That's got to be the first time anyone's ever tried that in the King Family Universe, and its one that many fans have praised.  The good news is that Hill isn't done after that.  Every chapter in the book acts as a self-contained drama with its own story, while at the same time furthering the larger narrative.  Each segment focuses in on a member of the Get-Even-Gang, and acts as a story told in differing genres, yet with each of them bearing the same over-arching sense of Terror and approaching menace, and all of it climaxed by either the appearance of King Sorrow, or else by a dramatic plot reversal, one of which carries a heavy gut-punch.  Allie's story bears the hallmarks of an airplane disaster narrative, while Donna and Van's exploits follow up in the style of a political conspiracy thriller reminiscent of novels like Firestarter.  Colin and Arthur then take up the slack with a genuine bit of Tolkienesque Folk Horror set near the shores of Camelot's Tintagel Castle, and the echoes between the Once and Future King of England and his adversary Mordred couldn't be made more clear.

All of it circles back to the prototypical King Family setting of Maine, and a narrative resolution which plays out as an action-packed form of Dark Academia that plays to the storytelling strengths shared by both King and Hill.  In these final moments, despite a few minor complaints, it's clear that Hill is riding high in the same element as that of his dad, and even the few complaints I have about how the ending plays out are tempered by an awareness that all of it is down to a level of professional perfectionism on the author's part.  It's the same kind of drive for creative excellence that made Tolkien pour out his heart and soul in an effort to make sure that every detail of Lord of the Rings went toward making sure the final narrative worked as well as possible.  The major difference here is that I never got the sense that Hill needed to labor as hard as Tolkien obviously had to in order get his point across.  At precisely the one moment when he should have taken things easy, he lets the same type of perfectionism get the best of him.  The good news is that this perfectionism doesn't get in the way of the ending's final quality.

What we've got here is about as solid and entertaining a read from any member of the King family that I've encountered in a long time.  I've even heard some wonder if this might just be Hill's magnum opus?  For what it's worth, it is just possible to see the logic behind such discussions.  A lot of it probably comes from those who are aware that Hill's draws on his dad's books for Inspiration here, with It being the major text that King Sorrow is in constant conversation with.  Since that text is one of a handful of contenders for the best story King ever wrote, it's easy to see how Hill's book would soon find itself talked about in similar terms.  What I can say for certain is that the one thing the author's major works have in common is the sense that we're always watching Hill improve upon his craft on a conceptual-narrative level.  Each novel (the short stories are mostly a case of the writer allowing himself to just kick back and have fun) sees Hill making honest and more or less successful efforts to improve his own creativity.  What can be said for sure is that this is no different with King Sorrow, and if behind-the scenes leaks are anything to go by, that's still the case with his upcoming Hunger, which will be a period Folk Horror story set during the years of the American Revolution.  It points to Hill taking the best possible hint from this book, and diving further back into the history of the genre's roots.

For my own part, I know this much.  This book is the best amount of fun I've had yet with this author, and the good part is that it has nothing to do with the fact that Hill is part of the King family, and more with how he's using his own talents to stretch the legacy that gave us books like The Stand, and then see how far he can go in new yet fundamentally complimentary directions.  It's great fun to both read and witness, so what I'm going to do is take a split the difference approach.  Right now, I'm going to say "Wait and see" in terms of whether or not this proves to be the magnum opus of the author's career.  Now with that said, and if nothing else that comes along does much to shake the impact this story has left on me, then there may come a time when I am able to call King Sorrow Joe Hill's masterpiece.  There's a line in Peter Straub's Ghost Story which acts as a fitting final verdict for this book.  Straub was describing the method that Hawthorne used for writing his own Chillers, yet the fact that it also describes the ultimate effect of Joseph King's latest efforts perhaps makes it fitting on several levels.

What Hill has managed to produce is "a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spiritual mechanism of the faery legend should be combined with the characters and manners of everyday life (193)."  It's the same effect that Straub aimed for and succeeded in capturing on paper way back in 1979, when Hill was still just learning to read with the help of his famous literary dad.  Stephen King in turn once nominated Ghost Story as perhaps the best Horror novel anyone has ever written.  What makes Straub's citation of Hawthorne all the more interesting after having read King Sorrow is that it's possible to see how you draw a line of descent from the King family and one of their closest friends, all the way back the the original architects of the Horror genre, and the mythic realm of Old Night from which it was birthed.

In being able to achieve and craft the same type of artistic effect that an old master like Hawthorne once described as the high watermark of a good work of Terror, it's almost as if a book like King Sorrow acts as something of a long overdue acknowledgement of the various giants, both known and unsung, that the American Gothic stands on.  In being able to combine the mechanism of faery legend with the characters and manners of everyday life, Hill has more or less crafted a definite candidate for a future classic of modern Supernatural fiction.  Perhaps part of what will help make it a standout in later years is the way it allows the Horror to both recall those mythical sources of Inspiration, and to then dialogue with those ancient roots in ways that helps shine a clearer light on what Straub once referred to as the genre's "impulse...for nightmare - by what is almost" our collective desire "for nightmare (ibid.)"  King Sorrow helps further Straub's initial insight by going back to ideas in Hawthorne which hints that one of the great paradoxes of our enjoyment of the Macabre is the buried, yet constant awareness that somewhere underneath all the terror lies that original sense of Enchantment which gave us the troll under the bridge.  That the reason we trawl for horrors is because of the ever-present hope that we can use the monsters and ghosts as a route to Wonder.  Perhaps that the highest function of literature.  It seems to be present in this book, and that's why it's easy to give King Sorrow a good recommendation.