King Sorrow - Joe Hill - ★★

AUTHOR: Joe Hill

GENRE: Fantasy-Horror.

PUBLICATION DATE: October 21, 2025

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A fantasy-horror about a bargain that goes wrong and the consequences of the same. Epic plotline covering many decades, multiple flawed characters. Decent horror. Political content. Overload of themes. Many vulgarities in the writing; I hate such a writing style. This is an outlier review. (Like… a really, really, outlier review! 😬)

Plot Preview:

1980, Maine. Arthur Oakes is a young student at Rackham College, working as a senior student librarian at its exceptional library. His life goes awry when a local drug dealer and her partner force him to steal rare books from the library. When his close friends discover the trap Arthur is caught in, they all step in to help, concocting a wild scheme that involves using the disquieting Crane journal (bound in the skin of its author) to summon a dragon to do their bidding. Unfortunately for them, they end up calling not just any dragon, but King Sorrow, a manipulative ancient beast who makes a Faustian bargain with the group. Now they need to provide him a new sacrifice at Easter every year – or be ready to become his next sacrifice.

The story comes to us in the third-person perspectives of various characters.

I am not a passionate reader of the horror genre. I enjoy atmospheric horror and psychological horror, but body horror and paranormal horror are a relative no for me. But my curiosity to try at least one of Joe Hill’s works ensured that this book landed in my TBR without resistance. If only it had clicked better!

That said, I respect this author for one reason: he chose to make a career for himself without piggybacking on his father’s famous surname. (In case you are unaware, his father is the legendary King of Horror, Stephen King.) It takes guts not to capitalise on nepotistic opportunities. I have read only one Stephen King book, so I can't make any generalised comparisons between their writing styles. But based on this novel, I can say: Joe Hill’s style seems similar to his father’s, which isn't necessarily a good thing in 2026. Also, while Joe Hill definitely knows how to write, his writing isn't for me.

Bookish Yays:

🐉 The passage of time - Intricate! The story goes from 1980 to near-present day, and the timeline comes across well through the characters and the pop culture references.

🐉 King Sorrow. Even creepier as I expected him to be! (I am intrigued by the author’s choice of name for the fearsome dragon. Is ‘King’ a loving ode to the Horror Maestro aka Papa King?) I have always been fond of dragons, but I hadn’t ever read a dragon in a horror story until now. Though a caricature at times, King Sorrow’s presence, minimal as it was, saved my experience to a great extent. I wish there had been more of him.

🐉 The horror – not overdone, not half-baked. This book has a mix of most horror substyles: supernatural, folk, atmospheric, psychological, action, and occult, in addition to fantasy and dark academia. But it doesn’t go into splatterpunk, much to my relief. It’s said that the worst horror is the kind that humans perpetrate on other humans, and the book proves this convincingly.

🐉 The initial few chapters, until Jayne Nighswander’s encounter with you-can-guess-who. Except for one unwarranted scene in this section (Looking at you, Arthur-with-Tana!), the rest was perfect in stirring interest.

Bookish Okays:

📺 The length-tempo ratio. For a book that’s nearly 900 pages long, I was apprehensive about how much extraneous padding there would be. The writing is mostly fast-paced. (Well, as quick as an 800-pager can be.) However, several subplots are needlessly wordy and could easily have been trimmed without impacting the overall plotline.

📺 The integration of political and other real-life developments into the narrative – mostly mindboggling, but sometimes too farfetched. The attribution of one specific climate-change-related event to draconic interference was a dealbreaker for me. I know this is just fiction. But I wish even fiction would treat climate change as a sacrosanct topic. It is real-life horror, after all.

📺 Too many timeline and narrative jumps. Needed at times as this is set over a long time period, but feels repetitive and disjointed more often.

Bookish Nays:

✈ The basic plot concept. Arthur is a privileged rich young man with several privileged friends. And yet the first thing he does when he is threatened by a drug dealer is to comply with her demands, and later, summon a being from the dark world without ever calling the police or informing a trusted adult. 😒

✈ The dialogues. The book contains several discussions among the friends. While a few of the lines are clever, the conversations, with their bombastic tone and artificial banter, would better suit a movie than a book. There’s also no individuality to the dialogues; almost everyone in the friend group sounds the same.

✈ The vulgarities. So distracting! Some words always make me cringe, and this book seemed to contain all of them. I might have forgiven this if the plot needed such language, but it didn’t. The offensive comments about physical attributes such as weight and looks increased my annoyance.

✈ The characters. Hill creates a complicated, mostly annoying personality for each of his leads, making me wonder if it would be better if King Sorrow finished them off in their first encounter itself. I didn’t like any of the characters, so I couldn’t root for them. I don’t mind unlikeable characters but I need them to be believable. I didn’t find that in this novel. They are mostly cookie-cutter characters.

✈ The lewd portrayal of the female characters: taken straight from B-grade horror movies and pulpy horror. I had expected a certain class from this mainstream horror novel, so this cliched objectification of women was disappointing. It was probably acceptable in this genre in the previous century, but needs to be retired as a trope now.

✈ The token inclusivity. I say this for the first (and hopefully, the last) time ever: it felt too woke. All the diverse rep felt like a checklist was being ticked. At no point was any of this used well in the storyline.

✈ The fourth section of this five-section novel. What the heck was that? When we already have a powerful antagonist, is there any point to introducing another fantastical negative character and giving them extended page space and a surprisingly active role in the modern IT era?

✈ The ending. For the second time within two months, I say: I read all those pages for this ending?! 🤦🏻‍♀️ The epilogue is even worse!

Overall, while I can see this book working for certain horror fans, I also see why I will never be one of them. I can handle most things fiction throws my way, but the one thing that always turns me off is vulgar writing, either in terms of word choices or in the depiction of the female characters and their behaviour.

Mine is an outlier review by far. The other reviews are mostly positive, so do read them to take a more informed call on this work. This is Hill’s first novel in almost a decade, so I am sure his fans would be excited to read this tome. I hope the book goes better for them.

The author has recently revealed that a TV series based on this novel is in development. Given the characters and the conversations, the TV series might actually work well, not that I will watch it.

Recommended to those who enjoy doorstopper-sized horror novels with unlikeable characters and don’t mind political content and sleazy writing.