King Sorrow by Joe Hill

King Sorrow

By Joe Hill

William Morrow, October 2025

Joe Hill, son of Stephen King and author of Heart-Shaped Box and N0S4A2, returns after a ten-year hiatus with King Sorrow, a suspense/thriller/horror hardcover that clocks in at a whopping 896 pages.

The story begins with a group of six kids: Arthur, a chivalrous, black college student; Donna and Donovan, a pair of politically opposite, selfish twins; Allison, a lesbian in denial; Colin, a young oligarch in the making; and Gwen, a wiser-than-any-of-them senior at the local high school. When Arthur has a chance encounter with Tana, an abused girl from the shady side of town, Tana's drug-dealer sister blackmails Arthur by threatening his mother's life. And when Arthur can't fork over the goods, his friends come to the rescue. Colin's gay grandfather provides paranormal guidance and the kids summon King Sorrow, a demonic dragon from the Long Dark, and strike a bargain. The King won’t kill them if they agree to provide him with the name of someone else he can kill on Easter Sunday. Of course, they give up Tana's sister. But after the slaughter, the King reveals that the bargain pertains to every Easter, not just the current one. And so the kids must sacrifice a victim every year, or the King will come for one of them instead.

The story then plays out over major chunks of time, from 1989 until 2022. We follow the original six and Tana and eventually Robin, a transgender woman, as they deal with ultimate power and the constant threat of annihilation. It's a mostly well-written journey prose-wise, with a good dose of interest and excitement, but the pacing is erratic and the moments of horror are muted and infrequent. Hill seems to prioritize setting up situations for political commentary rather than telling a tight, story-comes-first tale. While Hill is savvy enough to throw in some contra-agenda red herrings, it's abundantly clear that King Sorrow is meant to be a progressive manifesto. Over the course of the novel there is nary a red-meat topic he doesn't tackle, at length or in passing, explicitly or implicitly. He posits left or far-left takes on (or simply blankets non-left folks with) racism, sexism, misogyny, immigration, homophobia, transphobia, gun culture, abortion, patriarchies, oligarchies, the one percent, tech-bros, internet agitators, marijuana, the military industrial complex, and more. At times he seems to do this reflexively:

It amazed him, the way arrogance multiplied exponentially when men gathered in groups. Arrogance was a kind of stupor, like drunkenness.

In this example his character doesn't think “some men," but rather lumps all men into one misandrous pile without a second thought.

Hill’s propagandic coup de grâce comes at the end of the novel when a troll (a literal and figurative one) writes a review of a book written by one of the key characters, a book that recounts the same events that just took place over the story. The result is a thinly veiled, mocking prediction of what a non-left book review of King Sorrow might look like:

i was up for a good book about finding magical sords and stabbing dragons and rescuing hot babes in chainmail panties but instead i got a lot of WOKE nonsense. a dragon is just a dragon is just a dragon is what I say. it doesnt have to be a dum metaphor for drone strikes or whatever. THERE IS SO MUCH LIBERAL GILT in this book its as bad as watching rachel muddow (who i hate even if she is obvsly super hot). and UGH it just goes on and on, couldve been hundreds of pages shorter, who has the time for this shit, i didn’t, quit before i got halfway. the only good thig here is the author photo of the girl writer, mmm, yummy, like velma in scooby due. anyway if you like me enjoy girls in chainmail follow the link in my bio for some totally unrated nasty medieval sxxxxx hahaha i promise it will be way more fun then this garbige.

Clearly, Hill knows some people are going to respond negatively to King Sorrow and preemptively expresses his contempt for these people, implying that if they don't agree with the ideals expressed in his book, they are obviously uneducated, right-wing, misogynistic trolls. 

The result of all this is a novel that plods on for far too long and is generally predictable once one catches on that nearly every character, plot, and theme point is going to reflect Hill's highly progressive beliefs. Thus there's little doubt far-left fans will consider King Sorrow a masterpiece. There's also little doubt far-right readers will find it anathema. For the vast majority in between, however, reactions are sure to vary widely, depending one’s awareness of, agreement with, and/or tolerance for Hill’s politics and how it impacts his execution of the story.

But whatever the reaction . . . slogging through 896 pages only to find a parting insult at the end is bound to leave many readers with a bad taste of troll in their mouths.

Jim Abbiati is a writer, book reviewer, and IT professional living in Mystic, Connecticut. He's the author of Fell's Hollow, The NORTAV Method for Writers, and has an MFA in Creative Writing from National University