
Member Reviews

Title - King Sorrow
Author - Joe Hill
Release Date - October 2025
Page Count - 877 pages
Read/Listen Time - 22hrs
Rating - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ /5 stars
What a journey. Picking up this nearly 900 page monster can be somewhat intimidating but don't let it scare you - get ready for a rip roaring journey...you see what I did there 😄
In King Sorrow we follow the journey of a group of 6 friends who summon a dragon to help one of their own. What follows is an annual sacrifice where the group must decide who to kill.
With a book of this length you'd be forgiven for thinking it has large spells of slow spells but Hill does well to keep the pace up with the frequent uplift of the more action based scenes; that, coupled with the short chapters means you won't want to put it down. It's a story of lasting friendship, love, greed, and power. You will love all the characters, even the dragon.
Hill has hit an absolute slam dunk with King Sorrow and he has promised more frequent releases so here's hoping for more in the coming years.
Thank you to Headline again for the gifted copy in return for an honest, independent review.

Superb fantasy horror epic from Joe Hill- having only read some of his short stories this absolute unit of a novel is a bit of a shock, in all the right ways. Following a close-knit group over the decades after they summon a mythical dragon to deal with a problem… and then have to decide who the dragon will kill every year. King Sorrow straddles that difficult line of putting a fantastical element into a realist world and making it entirely believable, reinforced by canny use of real events. The relationships within the group and a small cast of supporting characters drive the story as much as the plot does - this really is character-driven horror in much the way Hill’s father can do in his epics like the Stand or It. I wouldn’t typically reference the father but there are some sly references to the Dead Zone etc that I really enjoyed - this is very much the same universe.
A brilliant holiday read - having the time to read undisturbed over a few days really helped become entirely absorbed. Loved it

King Sorrow by Joe Hill is a masterful blend of psychological horror and emotional depth, with Hill’s signature storytelling firing on all cylinders. The atmosphere is thick with dread, but it’s the aching humanity beneath the terror that truly lingers. Hill crafts characters you care about—even as he puts them through hell.
The pacing is tight, the imagery unforgettable, and the tension builds with expert control. While a few moments flirt with excess, the payoff is powerful and haunting. King Sorrow is bold, chilling, and beautifully written—a 4.5-star triumph that cuts deep and stays with you.

Wow! I've waited ages for a new book from Joe Hill since his last one the fireman and boy did this book not disappoint.
Horror and fantasy collide perfectly in the modern world. This book had me crying laughing and gasping all at the same time. Honestly it was a wild ride. At times you wanted to like king sorrow and were actually rooting for him and the gang but then you start to see the real truth behind everything and not all is it seems.
Who you think is good is bad and who you think is bad is good. People die who you don't think will die and honestly that takes courage from a writer to kill off a seemingly popular character!
By the end of the book you're like wtf and the ending well I won't spoil it but honestly it was superb.
Perfect book and if I could give it 10/10 I would.

Wow. It’s been a long time coming, but this is Joe Hill’s best novel by a long way. It’s a beast of a book - I read an eARC, but I’d guess the print version isn’t going to be far short of a thousand pages - but nothing is bloated or wasted. It’s a genuine epic that spans decades and continents as the story of how a group of friends make a deal with something they really shouldn’t have plays out down the years. It feels lazy to make comparison with Hill’s dad (although to be fair he does kind of invite it with direct references to The Dead Zone and The Dark Tower here, let alone the first word of the title), but this is up there with any of King Sr’s biiiig books, and possibly even better. It has lots to say about class, about friendship, our emergent billionaire class, folklore and mythic archetypes and their relevance to the 21st century, plus there’s a bloody enormous dragon that loves nothing more than smashing up untold amounts of buildings and military hardware. It’s exciting, funny, tense and sad, and it’s the most fun I’ve had with a book for a long time.

4+ ⭐
This took me a while to read. Not just because of its size (it's a beast of a book) but because I had other books that needed finishing.
But the lure of the group was too strong, and I kept getting pulled back in.
The six with their quirks, friendship, problems, and bigger problems. It was just great.
I've never met a Hill I didnt like, but this one ranks highly.
It's a little bit scary, a little bit worrying, a little bit heartbreaking.
Thanks Joe,I enjoyed every minute of it.

King Sorrow is a haunting triumph. Joe Hill once again proves he’s a master of modern horror and emotional storytelling, weaving together dread and beauty in equal measure. This isn’t just a story that scares — it aches.
The prose is razor-sharp yet poetic, laced with melancholy and mystery. The atmosphere is thick and immersive, filled with Hill’s signature blend of supernatural unease and painfully human emotion. King Sorrow is less about jump scares and more about the quiet kind of horror — grief, isolation, the weight of memory — the kind that lingers long after the last page.
What sets this apart is the emotional depth. The characters feel worn and real, flawed in ways that make their choices hit harder. Hill crafts relationships with brutal honesty and subtle grace, and when the horror elements strike, they feel not only terrifying, but deeply personal.
This is a story that crawls under your skin and into your heart. It’s ambitious, darkly elegant, and unshakably moving — easily one of Hill’s best works to date.

The King Sorrow of the title is a cruel and devilish master and making a pact with him is never going to end well. I’ve read a few Joe Hill books and storytelling is clearly in his DNA. Each time I’m blown away by the scale of his imagination and how he makes the implausible believable. This is a brick of a book. Be prepared to clear the decks and remain immersed because it grips from the start and you won’t want to stop. It’s not only a complex tale of scheming, bargaining and double dealing, it’s also very much character driven. Arthur Oakes is a bookish student at a prestigious college and gets mixed up with a bad drug dealing crowd who want some rare books. He calls upon friends to help him out of the pickle and even though this taps in to occultism and dragon summoning, I was swept along at a pace as the predicament developed. I was literally breathless more than once and enjoyed this in every way. Simply outstanding storytelling from a master.
My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for an early review copy.

I felt confident to presume that anything Joe Hill writes is going to be a winner with me. But, to be honest, the mention of a summoning of a Dragon, did make feel slightly wary.
However, summoning a dragon while super-stoned on very strong weed (the summoners, not me!), made for an intensely dark and nightmarishly trippy read.
Let me skip back a bit. Arthur is a student and a Librarian at the prestigious Rackham College.
His mother (a Pacifist Priest) is currently in prison for manslaughter. A gesture of kindness to fellow visitors at the prison (the terrifying Jane Nighswander, her odious boyfriend Ronnie and her little sister, who Jane pimps out to people she owes money to) gets Arthur into a horrible situation where he has to steal valuable books from the library to stop the Nighswanders from ordering a prison attack on his mother.
It seems like Jane Nighswander is never going to let him off his ‘debt’, so Arthur and his friends (Colin from the big house, twins Van and Donna, Allie and Gwen) try and help him out with more drastic ways to get Nighswander off his back for good.
Hence the summoning of King Sorrow.
Trouble is, King Sorrow is insatiable and one ‘sacrifice’ is not enough. Those tricksy dragon demons are like contracts - you’ve got to read the very small print when you enter into a pact with them.
This is a looong book. But it certainly didn’t drag. Our six summoners and their encounters with King Sorrow over the years was jam-packed with horror, terror, misery and all that other stuff that comes with the inevitable “what did you think would happen when you made a pact with the Devil (Dragon)?”
Joe Hill combines real-life horrific events with his own equally shocking creations of destruction and terror with very effective results. I wonder if his plane scenario had a nod to that terrifying plane/understandably nervous passenger/turbulence episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’?
King Sorrow has loads of references to different Occult practises, so if you’re into your Occultism, this book will really wet your whistle. I spent a lot of time Googling several terms that I’d not heard of before, which was informative AND entertaining.
The ending stretched out for just a little too long, but I’m still giving this a solid 5 stars.

Sweet Lords. What a book. An absolute pleasure to read: immersive, engrossing and completely and utterly credible, even when about a dragon.
It’s around 900 pages long, but what I enjoyed so much about the book was how it made me make time to read rather than the normal snatches of reading before bed. In fact, I forewent watching things and chose curling up with this tome instead.
Joe Hill’s bloodline is clearly one of storytelling to an almost alchemic degree. The character depth and the resulting investment we have in them is second to none.
We meet an unlikely group of friends who through standing up for what is right end up creating a dragon through a shared chemistry and esoteric objects. It’s hard to explain.
The story spans decades and multiple changes in the world and the group of friends’ worlds. The one thing they must do, however, is pick a victim once a year – at Easter – for King Sorrow to kill.
Moral acrobatics and ethical conundrums abounds as the friends take turns choosing, but as with anything; there is more afoot.
We grow to love characters, we lose characters and we mourn and rage and whoop accordingly as the cohort dwindles and faces increasing danger that culminates in apocalyptic face offs and battles.
I simply cannot do it justice, but if you enjoy large, expansive and immersive fiction that is entrenched in fantasy AND horror, then this is the book for you.
I finished this a few days ago and have felt bereft since, missing the people and the bookscape I existing within whilst reading it.
Thank you to Headline for allowing me to read an ARC version. I feel very privileged and cannot wait to see what King Sorrow does when unleashed fully on the world. Film or series? Hell yes!

Back when NOS4A2 was published I seem to recall Joe Hill mentioning that it had started out as an exercise to see if he could write a 'Stephen King' novel. The simple answer was yes, and it ended up working almost as a companion piece to King's Doctor Sleep which was published the same year. Reading King Sorrow you can't help wondering if it also started in a similar fashion. It's packed with King references, some obvious, others more subtle & none that I'm going to spoil here, and shares DNA with one of King's finest: IT. Comparisons are inevitable: Both take place over decades and feature unlikely groups who find themselves tormented by an entity. In IT it's the Losers Club and Pennywise while in King Sorrow it's the Get Even Club and the titular, plummily voiced, dragon King Sorrow. While IT's narrative was split in two taking place thirty years apart, King Sorrow's is more episodic and takes in several encounters with King Sorrow over a forty year or so period. Charting the highs, lows and dissolution of the Get Even Club it never quite hits the highs of King's IT, and the ending's almost as problematic as IT's, but the journey more than makes up for that.
Thanks to NetGalley, Headline and the author for an advance copy.

The horror fantasy-epic mash-up that I’ve been waiting for! Dragons but make it horror? Yes, please!
Basic overview: we follow a group of friends who make a deal with a dark entity called King Sorrow and unwittingly end up in a bargain with him for life.
This is a chunky book and I could not be happier about that! The character development and sections that felt like they could’ve been a novella all on their own were perfection and needed that length. Admittedly there were a few times when I enjoyed some sections more than others but that’s just personal preference based on which character we were with and the setting, etc. but each had its merits and worked in a non-linear, slightly chaotic way (but in the absolute best way).
Some characters I enjoyed more than others, some I loved to hate, but all of them were very well developed and had very distinct personalities and I was able to vividly picture them and know them. I rooted for them, booed at them and cried for them. An emotional connection to characters is a sure sign of a great book for me and this one definitely did that.
I think what worked most for me was the mash-up of horror and fantasy. One chapter we could be reading about seances and curiosity cabinets full of dark items and the next we could be whisked away to a troll cave, then back to another chapter all about the real horrors of alcohol and drug abuse. It’s hard hitting and pulls no punches but it works so well.
A definite favourite of the year!
4.5 stars

When six friends experiment with the occult to aid a friend and carry out a ritual that summons King Sorrow, they end up themselves way over their heads (and then some). He is a cruel, devilish, and frightening dragon who is willing to offer provided he receives something in return. His desire is straightforward: a human sacrifice. However, nothing is easy, and everything has a high cost. The 900 pages went very quickly, and it is almost flawless. Don't let its enormity scare you. Once you begin reading, you won't be able to stop.

It's great to have Joe Hill back after an extended absence. So is King Sorrow worth the wait?
Well, I don't think this is Hill on top form, as other reviewers have stated (see Horns, NOS4A2 for that), but it's still a fun ride and it's to the writer's credit that it really didn't feel like a 900-pager!
The early parts are the weakest for me. I found the transition from college kids larking about to full on supernatural craziness a bit abrupt and implausible. They all seemed happy to accept that dragon-summoning was a thing. Some of the character decisions also seemed to make sense only as a way to bring about certain plot points. And I hated Donna from minute one, but maybe I was meant to.
So, yeah, I was a little underwhelmed. But then things picked up. A section of the book set on a transatlantic flight was an absolute blast! I mean this was nerve-shreddingly fucking great. It felt like a fantastic novella on its own. Another section, dealing with an extended containment, was also tense, heart-rending and powerful. Both sections reminded me of what a great writer Joe Hill is and made me think of his great novella collection, Strange Weather. Maybe he *really* excels when the stories are a little tighter and less epic/rambling?
The Nighswanders were also great antagonists. To be honest, I found this loathsome family a lot more terrifying than King Sorrow, who seemed to vacillate between an Aldi Smaug and a barman from Eastenders.
The ending was OK, although I found some of the inferred crossover to real-world events a little cringe.
All in all, there were several flaws on show in King Sorrow, but it was a hell of a lot of fun.

This was a wild ride like Joe Hill is always capable of. Highly recommended for new and veteran fans.

King Sorrow by Joe Hill
It’s a epic fantasy story 900 pages long, so plenty of cups of coffee is needed that being said it’s one of the best fantasy novels i have ever read, plot: Bookworm Arthur Oakes is an outsider. His mother is in prison, his father is long gone, so he spends his time lost in the legends of English mythology. Then one unintended incident - one moment of standing up for another underdog - leaves his mother in danger and him with orders from the local drug dealers is forced to steal rare books from the college library. And the events that will unfold from that single act of bravery will lead to slaughter. i was kindly given advance ARC copy of this novel by the nice people at NetGalley
#joehill #kingsorrow #epic #fantasy #gripping #gottareadbooks #mustreadbooks #netgalley

DNF at 17% on chapter 30. I tried this from 19/05/25 to 31/05/25.
King Sorrow just wasn’t for me. I wanted to like this mainly because I’ve never read a book by this author before but he seems quite popular. Unfortunately I just wasn’t feeling this. There is something compelling me to read on with this but since I’m not loving it I’ve decided to DNF so I don’t end up giving this a low rating. So many people will love this but I’m just not interested in it.

King Sorrow- Joe Hill ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Can you will something into existence? Joe Hill certainly seems to manage it in this (just under) 1000 page epic novel.
This is a horror tale teetering on fantasy and legend. In true Joe Hill style it’s long and weaves a complicated but easy to follow tale. It’s packed with action, feelings and characters who feel real. Talking of real, real life events and real people appear every now and again which really draw you into the story and make you question life itself.
I absolutely consumed this book, eager to follow the journey of our six protagonists as they make a deal with a dragon, King Sorrow.
It’s beautifully written, strong, powerful but also fun, a few Easter eggs relating back to his dads books (always love to see these) and just a new and modern take on legends and internet trolls.
I was beyond ecstatic to receive this early, as I genuinely was so excited to read it. I’ve already pre-ordered my signed and dedicated copy and I can’t wait to see it in the “flesh” in October.
Characters- 10
Atmosphere- 10
Writing Style- 10
Plot- 10
Intrigue-10
Readability -10
Enjoyment- 10
10

I was very grateful to receive an e-ARC of King Sorrow and thank you so much to Headine for granting my NetGalley ‘wish’. I felt very blessed to be given this advance copy due to the amazing writer that is Joe Hill.
I loved that this book was initially set in the 80s, it was very nostalgic with telephones on the walls and IBM computers. It felt like from a few comments that Joe Hill also likes his cars as there are a few good mentions. There are some really great witty moments in this book that I really enjoyed, the whole thing was really clever and gripping.
This good isn’t my usual genre, I am usually a romance or fun fantasy reader, so the reason for this score is because of how intense this book was, with a thriller vibe which wasn’t my cuppa tea, but this is only because this isn’t my kind of book, however I can really see the merits to it and how people would be obsessed with this if this is the genre that they enjoy.

Wow.
I feel like a book this size needs a well thought out review to match.. but I don't think I have words to justify it.
Two things really shocked me with one:
1. The depth of the characters, and the worlds they all existed in. Somehow they all had their own, but together they were the universe that gave King Sorrow life.. and well a lot more apparently!
2. The unpredictable twists. Whenever I thought "oh here we go, back to a bland narrative where blah blah happens".. NOPE! Driven mostly by each character's flaws/wishes, he managed to write some really complex scenes that blew me away.
I've been meaning to work up to a Joe Hill book for a while now, and being lucky enough to get an ARC of King Sorrow has me dying to read more!