King Sorrow

by Joe Hill ★★★★★

887 pages is a serious commitment. I shied away from King Sorrow initially because of that, but as I saw review after review coming in praising this mountain of a novel—many calling it their favorite read of 2025—I decided it was too promising to pass up.

The novel opens in 1989 and focuses on six friends who attend Rackham College in Maine. Arthur Oakes is our primary protagonist at the novel's start, although all of the six get fairly equal treatment as the story progresses. Arthur's mother is imprisoned, and a series of events leads to Arthur being blackmailed by some highly unsavory folks if he wants his mother to stay safe in prison. At a loss for what to do, he finally shares his unfortunate circumstances with his friends. The group put their heads together, determined to help Arthur out from the pickle he is in.

Four of the five attend fictional Rackham College with Arthur: the McBride twins, acerbic and perpetually angry Donna, and laid-back and perpetually stoned Van; Allie Shiner, the beautiful daughter of a politician and Van's crush; and the always-plotting Colin Wren, the primary decision-maker of the group. The sixth and final member of the friend group is Gwen Underfoot, the daughter of the Wren's housekeeper. After cycling through a number of potential ideas to help Arthur, Colin suggests one that's even more outlandish: he knows of a book stored in the Special Collections section of the Rackham Library called the Crane Journal. Bound in human skin, it allegedly possesses secrets of the occult and may have the ability to call down creatures from other realms.

Out of ideas, the group decides to give it a try, and they manage to contact a millennia-old dragon named King Sorrow from "The Long Dark" where he resides. Out of options, they enter into a Faustian bargain with the beast: in exchange for his help relieving Arthur of his problem with his blackmailers and King Sorrow's protection throughout the rest of the year, they must identify a person to die every Easter from that point forward.

The novel extends from this inflection point, with King Sorrow true to his word in every respect. The burden of the annual decision weighs on each of the characters differently, and the impact of their choices rarely is as straightforward as they wish it to be. King Sorrow loves riddles, and he is a master of semantics. There is fine print within the bargain they struck, and the dragon takes great glee in frustrating the humans with the precision of exactly had been agreed to.

The book is long, but it doesn't suffer from unnecessary details, and it's consistently engaging from start to finish. Each of the six characters is fully explored, and each has additional internal demons they deal with. That baggage—be it childhood trauma, addiction, identity issues, and more—drives their decision-making as well as the magnitude of the burden they feel for the outcome of their bargain.

Years ago when he was breaking onto the literary scene, Joe Hill intentionally eschewed any association with his famous parents to avoid any accusations of nepotism, but now that he's well established, he openly admits that they are among his early readers and editors. He thanks them in the acknowledgements, saying, "My parents, Tabitha and Stephen King, came in to provide their usual edits, and yeah, okay, holy shit, it's pretty insane to think I have two such gifted writers tuning up my prose." King Sorrow sparked a fascinating internal debate for me on literary nature vs. nurture, even more than Hill's other books. Not knowing otherwise, one could easily be convinced that this is a Stephen King novel (which I mean entirely as a compliment). The book has many of the hallmarks of one of the elder King's books along with plenty of stylistic similarities. That had me wondering if it was due to Stephen King the editor or Stephen King the father.

Regardless, the end result is a well-constructed novel, perfectly paced, and chunked into books and interludes that allow each character to shine. It balances the central morality question with the evolution of the initial predicament (Arthur being blackmailed) into one far harder to crack (how to put the genie back in the bottle, or in this case, the dragon back in The Long Dark). There are some surprises along the way, and while I didn't love every plot choice Hill made, I have to acknowledge the completeness and quality of this giant of a book. Solid, entertaining, and worth all of the extra pages needed to add just one notch to your books read count for the year.

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Quick Facts

• Title: King Sorrow

• Author: Joe Hill

• Publisher: William Morrow

• Release Date: October 21, 2025

• Format: Audiobook

• ISBN-13 / ASIN: 978-0062200624 / B0DSCGDY6Z

• Pages: 887