Arthur Oakes is a student at Rackham College and works at the library there. He is responsible for the rare collections of books that are there. When he does a good deed while he visits his mother in prison, he is blackmailed by a family of drug dealers to steal books from the library he is working at. With the help of his friends, they try and get out of his mess. They have a séance which during it they summon a dragon called King Sorrow. But all actions have consequences. By King Sorrow helping them each Easter they must sacrifice someone.
King Sorrow by Joe Hill is the first book from the author that I have read and I thank Headline for a copy for an honest review. I can see why the reviews are good for this author. The is a great blend of a fantasy and horror novel. With great likeable characters and full of action expanding over several years. I was engaged throughout this story. The only downside of this I found this to be so long. But that is not going to deter me. I can’t wait to read more from this author. 5 stars from me.

This book is so good you genuinely don't realise how long it is. Loved every second, definitely Hills best work

A big thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for the e-ARC.

A lot of early reviews are calling 'King Sorrow' Joe Hill's finest novel to date - and it is with a heavy heart that I have to say: I agree.

This may overtake NOSFA2 as my favourite thing he has ever written. And that pains me to say because I love NOS4A2 deeply.

I had been sceptical when I heard that it would concern a dragon (the titular King Sorrow) because fantasy isn't really my thing.

However, whilst this book does have strong fantasy elements, they are handled extremely well and integrated incredibly with the horror we have come to expect from a Joe Hill novel.

King Sorrow is a complex, layered, sprawling epic, spanning decades and the lives of numerous characters, who are woven in and out of the story expertly.

One thing I really appreciated was how real the characters we follow in this novel feel. None of them are entirely good. Some are even downright evil, corrupted by the situation they brought upon themselves with King Sorrow. And I love that - not every central character can or should be a hero.

I have just finished this, and I feel a real sense of melancholy I don't normally feel when finishing a book. I just didn't want it to be over.

I absolutely loved it!

It started off slow and took me a while to place all of the characters, but once it was done the journey started..
There were so many plot twists, unexpected developments and stories within stories. I could not put it down. There are mythical creatures, who live between us, as well as some people who moved to the long dark.. Would opening Pandora's box in the shape of a summoned dragon pay off?! There's only one way to find out..

I like how Joe Hill erases the border between fantasy and reality, because why would you doubt the existence of dragons?!

5 stars! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I loved King Sorrow! A dragon book is always a winner for me and I loved the idea of a fantasy-horror for spooky season and this did not disappoint.

This is a big book, around 900 pages but I felt like I flew through it, I must have read most of it on Scatterday. There is a lot of character development and social commentary interspersed between the scary stuff but I really liked that because it kept the characters real and made you think that anyone could be desperate enough to call King Sorrow if they were placed in as helpless a situation as Arthur.

King sorrow himself is terrifying but also kind of charming and funny. I loved this smart horror, I think the weird trippy night where they called King Sorrow the first time was my only “hide the book in the freezer” because it’s too scary moment but I might just be kidding myself on that.

Thank you to Headline and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC.

A horror story with dragons? I’m in!

This story follows a group of college students trying to protect their friend from the drug dealers that live in the shady part of town. When they summon King Sorrow to help them, they don’t realise that they are now indebted to him forever.
From their teens to their 40’s we follow this group through the years of serving King Sorrow. Whilst some battle with the guilt of what they’re doing, others seem to be enjoying it.
This is an amazing horror fantasy with humour, suspense and shock factor. I can’t even count how many times I gasped and held my hand over my mouth until the end of the page.

Joe Hill is an auto-buy author for me and after waiting 10 whole years for this book, I’m glad to say that he didn’t disappoint!

Thank you so much NetGalley for the eARC!

2,5 stars
After a long 10 years since The Fireman, we finally have a new novel from Joe Hill—King Sorrow. Marketed as horror, it promises to unsettle, but does it actually deliver?

The story opens in the late ’80s, where we meet Arthur Oakes, a nerdy young man who finds himself blackmailed by the cruel Jayne Nightswander. While Arthur tries to shoulder his troubles alone, his loyal friends want to help him. Desperate for a way out, they turn—naively and innocently—to occult practice. What was meant to be fun turns out to be a total catastrophe.

The setup is fantastic. Hill captures the bond between friends beautifully, portraying their differences in background and social status with nuance. The prose is cinematic—many scenes feel as though they were written with a screenplay already in mind. Early on, I was completely hooked.

But then the pacing falters. Entire sections drag on unnecessarily, particularly one that sprawls across nearly 30% of the book’s 896 pages. This segment could easily be cut down to 30 pages—or removed altogether—without losing anything essential. The result is a bloated middle that saps momentum and, unfortunately, much of the reader’s enthusiasm.

As the decades roll forward (the novel spans about 30 years), the time jumps are handled in a linear, manageable way. Yet the story still feels overextended. The characters, understandably weighed down by guilt and trauma, become increasingly unpleasant, which only compounds the fatigue of slogging through the slower passages.

In the end, King Sorrow is a novel of contrasts: an excellent beginning with vivid characters and sharp prose, followed by long stretches that could have been trimmed. Despite its supernatural elements, it never quite sustains a chilling, eerie atmosphere. With heavy editing, the book could have been a lean, powerful 350–400 pages. As it stands, it’s an ambitious but overstuffed story—one that begs for adaptation but struggles as a novel.

Joe Hill is an auto-read author for me, so I was really looking forward to this book and happy to see that it was a weighty one!

I must admit that when I first saw the synopsis I wasn’t sure how much I would enjoy a dragon-based story and was worried this would be the first one of JH’s books I didn’t like. I’m pleased to say I was very much wrong to be wary.

We follow a group of college students who summon a dragon, and are then indebted to him for helping them. The debt takes the form of them having to choose someone to die each year, on Easter. The burden of being responsible for this weighs heavily on some of the group, while others enjoy the power a little too much, and cracks begin to show as the years go on. Is there a way out of their deal with King Sorrow?

As I mentioned, this is a BIG book, close to 900 pages. For the most part, it kept me hooked with believable characters, and moments of terror and humour both equally well written. My one grumble is that I felt it lost steam somewhere in the middle, hence not a five star read for me, but still very enjoyable. I could easily imagine this making the transition to a TV series.

Recommend for fans of the authors previous work, and for those who like a blend of fantasy and horror.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an e-ARC.

Thank you to NetGalley for the arc !

This was a book that I absolutely devoured and loved every moment.

The book itself is split into five books within and each one got more interesting than the last.
We follow six friends as they summon the demon of King Sorrow to do harm onto anyone that has threatened them and unknowingly, have thrust themself into a yearly deal with the demon.
This was a book that had the horror elements but also the suspense throughout to find out what happens to the six original members. King Sorrow is also full of witty humour that had me laughing at the worst possible moments.

Definitely a five star read for me and has bumped it’s way up to one of my top five of the year.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC.

I have let reviews on both Waterstones and Amazon for this title.

King Sorrow is a vast epic of unsettling horror. Arthur Oakes is a quiet student working in his college's rare library. A misfortunate encounter finds him being blackmailed by drug dealers to steal rare books. Arthur is distraught that their demands are never ending so he turns to his closest six friends. They begin to delve into the occult to scare away the drug dealers. What do they do? They delve into one of the rare books and find how to summon a dragon named King Sorrow. Not the best of ideas. Unbeknownst to them at the time King Sorrow's demands become one of a yearly sacrifice from them.

What I liked best about this book was the development of the characters. They are well defined, close and loyal in the beginning. But everything unravels, slowly, and heartbreakingly as the weight of their deal with King Sorrow drags them through the years, through the decades. Friendships fracture with silence, betrayal, and impossible sacrifices. Hill's writing captures this with multilayered haunting unforgettable experiences of how sorrow can reshape love and friendships. Beware the bargains that bind.

Thank you to Headline and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

King Sorrow by Joe Hill is his Magnum Opus, an epic good versus evil, fantasy horror that is a rollercoaster of a ride from start to finish.

No Spoiler review.

The story centres around a group of friends who get together to help when one of them is in trouble, however, no good deed goes unpunished…

They have awakened a supernatural force, a dragon, but dragon’s cannot be trusted and some promises should never be made.

This story spans decades and I loved being transported back to the late 80’s and 90’s, I also enjoyed the obscure UK references that he has no doubt picked up on his many travels to our shores. I adored the Easter eggs scattered around, one actually gave me goosebumps and I think a lot of readers will enjoy them too.

Joe is such a great storyteller and this will take you through the full range of emotions, it is not for the faint of heart but there are heartwarming and even funny moments expertly executed, Fantasy lovers are in for a treat with all of the mythology elements included, but be warned, this is no fairy tale.

The character set-up and development is what moves this novel to the next level, the friends are very amiable at first but as events occur and their layers are peeled back one by one, you realise that they are all fighting their own inner demons too. The horrors in this book are far from restricted to the supernatural and that is what makes the story so powerful.

The book is over 900 pages but it is fast paced, has great characters, is ominous throughout, with many twists and turns that will keep you enthralled to the very end.

This is a must-read book that I highly recommend. I have pre-ordered both the UK and USA hardback editions and cannot wait to add them to my collection.

#kingsorrow

You have to wonder at that title, used by an author who has but does not write under the name King, even if he's lovely about his celebrated clan in the acknowledgements. Within the fiction, though, or at least its surface level, King Sorrow is maybe an egregore (though that seems to mostly go by the wayside before long) and definitely a dragon, summoned by six kids in a bind, only for it to rapidly become apparent that they've jumped from the frying pan into something notoriously associated with dragons. A pairing that also hung over Hill's last full-length novel, The Fireman, nearly a decade ago. That was a pandemic apocalypse, about which I complained at the time that it was too claustrophobic and limited in setting and perspective, something which in retrospect turns out to have been a horribly good call. Still, this goes the other way, starting out with six leads and gradually adding more, centred in the family territory of Maine but taking trips in various directions, and every so often feeling like it's gone most of the way to a wholesale change of genre too. No-good-deed-goes-unpunished thriller, prison drama, dark academia, urban fantasy, and in particular one extensive section on a 'plane which could almost work as a high concept horror film in its own right, and is one of several times when I wondered whether Hill was trying to make up for the disappointment of a generation who saw the Reign Of Fire poster and then discovered the film was nothing like what it promised. That section is also, alas, the main thing stopping this brick of a book from being a perfect summer holiday read just like his dad's classics (from a detail of one of which, incidentally, King Sorrow's backstory unfolds).

This spectacular unsuitability for in-flight reading is not my only complaint, which leaves me a little snookered given Hill has armoured himself by at one point including an unflattering Goodreads review from a character one wouldn't wish to emulate (though, I say that; many apparently do). The various narrative switchbacks keep things moving, but equally, it's almost inevitable that a reader will end up much preferring some phases to others, and for all the time and drafts King Sorrow has apparently been through, there were still elements and directions I didn't feel were fully integrated with each other, and a few late twists or at least twistlets I found a bit pat, especially once we got into the venerable question But Who Is The Real Monster?, and some thoughts on screens which came across a little ungracious when I was reading the book on one. There's also a wider moral hindsight at work whereby 'Black' is capped-up even in the 1980s sections, and in 1995, the child of a Republican politician and his evangelical wife, who has herself survived conversion therapy and is massively conflicted about her own queerness, nevertheless knows best modern practice the instant she meets a trans character. It's undoubtedly done with the best intentions, but nevertheless jars in a book which can otherwise verge on the Wonder Years in its determination to give us the appropriate signposts for each era through which it follows events.

Still, if nobody could call King Sorrow precision engineered, it gets the job done, much like its gleefully devastating title character, who each year is set upon a new target, starting with jump scares and psychological torment before escalating to fiery carnage, talking all the while like what's supposed to be Robert Shaw, but mainly made me think of John Constantine as written by an American. Tied together by their ineluctable compact with him, we watch those six kids as, through the decades, they experience the usual sorrows of ageing, only more so: physical and moral decay, social fractures, the good ones eating themselves up with guilt while the bad ones get worse and prosper by it. There's an appalled fascination here with the traps and seductions of narrative, how often villains think they're the hero of the story, but also with the reverse, all those self-lacerating sweethearts denying themselves happiness as if that helps anyone. Also a lot more than I expected about addiction and sobriety, for which I guess a dragon demanding to be fed, always sounding terribly plausible but never with your best interests at heart, is a pretty solid incarnation. As badly as it all goes, there's still a part of me insisting that if only you'd had better people directing King Sorrow with clearer motives, it could all have worked out fine – but then that lunatic optimism is probably why humanity keeps making such a ridiculous mess of everything, isn't it? And even if I'm not entirely sure the moral holds, Hill still sticks the landing a lot better than his dad often manages.

(Netgalley ARC)

King Sorrow starts brilliantly, blending dark humour, horror-tinged moments, and fantasy into a story that feels both unsettling and entertaining. Beginning in the 1980s, it quickly carves out a niche, with well-drawn characters whose desperation becomes increasingly clear as each new situation forces them into more difficult and reckless choices.
The narrative builds as we follow the group into adulthood, seeing how every decision haunts them and shapes the rest of their lives. Even after putting the book down, it lingers, you can’t help but wonder what you would have done in their place, and how you might have coped with the impossible choices they face.
Shifting through the decades keeps the story moving at a strong pace for much of the book. However, it falters when it reaches the present day. Hill leans too heavily on cultural markers to signal the modern era, which ends up feeling forced and distracting. Earlier decades, like the 80s and early 2000s, were conveyed seamlessly, but the contemporary sections feel choppy and pull you out of the story.
The final stretch also drags. Very little actually happens towards the end, and despite the strong momentum of the first three-quarters, the conclusion feels underwhelming and flat. While Hill is no stranger to sprawling novels, here the length feels unnecessary, stretching the story without delivering enough payoff.
The repeated references to 9/11 throughout the book also stand out as oddly frequent and, at times, heavy-handed.
In the end, King Sorrow offers an imaginative, gripping setup and compelling characters, but stumbles in its execution towards the finish.

Alright Joe, this was worth the almost decade wait for a new novel 🙂‍↕️

King Sorrow proves once again that Hill is a masterful storyteller. This beast clocks in at almost 900 pages and to be honest I could have read another 900 pages.

This epic tome follows a group of friends who make a deadly bargain with a fabled dragon called King Sorrow - as part of their deal they must choose a new sacrifice each year or one of the group will become his next victim.

The book is primarily set in Maine (love), although it does move around a bit, spanning from 1989, when our protagonists are in their late teens, up until 2022. I love epic novels like this that follow events and characters over such a wide expanse of time, Hill also incorporates real-world events into the story in a really interesting way.

King Sorrow is definitely more of a fantasy novel than horror, but there are horrific elements. It’s a wild adventure with twists and turns. What really makes this novel sing though is the characters - there are characters that you will initially love then hate and vice versa. They’re all very real and flawed, and have such complex relationships with each other. I loved them all in their own ways (but Gwen was my favourite 🥰)

As always I loved Hill’s little shout-outs to his father’s work, and a number of other fantasy stories as well, such as Lord of the Rings. I love how pop culture heavy his books are.

Most definitely one of my stand-out books of 2025. Don’t leave us waiting too long for the next one!! Thank you so much to @headline for this chunky ARC!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5.

I went into this one not really knowing what to expect, and I didn’t think I’d end up loving it quite as much as I did.

The pacing really impressed me, I expected it to dip somewhere in the middle, but it never did. It kept me invested right through.

What made it for me was the characters. They weren’t perfect, they felt human, complicated, and easy to care about. By the end I was completely invested in their lives.

Thank you NetGalley and Headline for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was a huge book compared to most I've read recently but it was a fab read!! Should have known really given that this was written by Stephen and Tabitha King's son. He holds his own exceptionally well and I resented having to put this down for breaks!

The dragon and Arthur with references to a sword and trips to Cornwall were great. I'd been to Tintagel quite recently and there's a lot of history there around King Arthur. Always nice to read about familiar places or things.

King Sorrow is summoned in this to do the bidding of a group of friends. What could possibly go wrong???? It seemed to serve them well to begin with but the lure of vengeance is nothing when you consider the price you have to pay.

The characters were diverse but seemed close...to begin with. It was nice to see their friendship and support for each other, particularly at the beginning when Arthur needed help. Unfortunately, King Sorrow gets in the way and we see things shift.

The story is so well written that it flows and you don't realise just how big the book is. If pulls you in and it's easy to lose yourself in the story.

Ten years after the publication of the, for me, boring "Fireman," comes a new behemoth of a novel by Joe Hill.

No less than nine hundred pages of relatively small print that will delight his fans and bore his detractors to death. Everyone? Well, I'm one of those who never really got the hang of Hill, and with this novel he at least kept me entertained for part of the reading, which is saying something.

A group of kids who, during the 1980s, perform a dragon summoning that forces them to name one person each year who must die. If they don't, one of the group members will die in their place. From then on, every 365 days, the dragon appears and demands a name from anyone in the world. A serial killer, a business rival. Anyone.

Under this story, Hill weaves together what I could almost call short novels that move forward in time to the present day, and we see how this tense decision alters and disrupts the group's dynamics. There are kidnappings, action, investigations, crash landings, magical battles, and so on. Nine hundred pages are a lot of work. Even for the deaths of supposed protagonists.

As expected, the text is full of cultural references from each era. It's also full of long descriptions and unnecessary chapters that add nothing to my story. But this is what we're here for, isn't it?

On the other hand, and although it may seem unbelievable given the length of the book, I appreciate that Hill launches the plot almost from the first chapter. Already in the first 10 or 15% of the book, we have the main lines of the plot, which will then inevitably unravel.

If it weren't for a couple of scenes that dragged on (for example, the one on the plane. You'll understand) and almost made me quit reading, I'd have been interested in reading it and would recommend it to fans (of course). For non-fans, you might feel like I did and find yourself somewhat reconciled with good old Joe Hill.

Is it horror? Yes. Is it fantasy? Yes. Is it just fiction? Yes, too.

After Arthur Oakes performs a good deed while visiting his mother in prison he finds himself being blackmailed by a family to steal rare books in the library that he works at.

He enlists his college friends to try and help him find a way out of the situation as it will be never ending with this family.
They end up having a light hearted seance and somehow conjure up a huge evil dragon called King Sorrow.

Boy or boy this was fantastic. Hard to pin the genre down. Fantasy horror? Fantasy thriller? I think fantasy horror sits best but it’s so much more than that. It’s one big book at 900 pages and I wasn’t really in the mood for such a big book when I started it but I found it hard to put down. I’ve honestly read books with less than half that page count that felt longer.

The characterisation, the plotting, the monster, all bloody fantastic. Yes this is Stephen Kings son and it’s the first book I’ve read by Mr Hill but if you told me his father wrote it I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean that as a huge compliment and not a dis as I’m a huge King fan.

I’m just on a roll of fantastic books at the moment and honestly King Sorrow is up there with the best of them. Certainly the best horror book I’ve read in many a year.

If you are intimidated by bigger books, don’t be here. It will fly by. You will be engrossed in the world created by Joe Hill and be rooting for our protagonists throughout.

A stunning piece of work and an easy five stars for me.

Many thanks to the purer the ARC through Netgalley.

The size of the book was very intimidating to start, but once I started reading it didn't feel like a slog at all. It was constantly gripping, with so many "what will happen next?!?" moments. Hill created some really rich characters - some you love, some you hate, but you can empathise with them (mostly). Making everyone I know read this when it comes out!