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Synopsis:

Arthur Oakes is a reader, a dreamer, and a student at Rackham College, Maine, renowned for its frosty winters, exceptional library, and beautiful buildings. But his idyll—and burgeoning romance with Gwen Underfoot—is shattered when a local drug dealer and her partner corner him into one of the worst crimes he can imagine: stealing rare books from the college library.

Trapped and desperate, Arthur turns to his closest friends for comfort and help. Together they dream up a wild, fantastical scheme to free Arthur from the cruel trap in which he finds himself. Wealthy, irrepressible Colin Wren suggests using the unnerving Crane journal (bound in the skin of its author) to summon a dragon to do their bidding. The others—brave, beautiful Alison Shiner; the battling twins Donna and Donovan McBride; and brainy, bold Gwen—don’t hesitate to join Colin in an effort to smash reality and bring a creature of the impossible into our world.

But there’s nothing simple about dealing with dragons, and their pact to save Arthur becomes a terrifying bargain in which the six must choose a new sacrifice for King Sorrow every year—or become his next meal.

Review:

It has been almost a decade since Joe Hill’s last novel The Fireman, so the anticipation was very high for the release of King Shadow. When I brought the book home, I stared at it for awhile. At almost nine hundred pages, I had a lot of anxiety in committing to such a big novel and a lot of curiosity into if King Sorrow is going to be worth the wait. The final verdict is that Joe Hill has written a huge novel that feels like a short novel, and this is the best compliment any large tome can be given.

The story starts with five college age kids hanging out and being friends. They all represent a group, Arthur is the nerd, Colin is the rich kid, Donna and Donovan are the party twins, Allie is the quiet and more repressed kid, and Gwen is the person who comes into the circle as the granddaughter of the help on the estate where Colin lives. Arthur starts to get picked on by a family of lowlifes, two drug selling daughters of an inmate who is in prison for killing her mailman. Colin has figured out that they can solve Arthur’s problems by summoning a dragon from an old journal in his grandfather’s study. What they unleash is King Sorrow, a dragon that needs to kill someone every Easter for the rest of their lives. 

The book takes twists and turns, but mostly it is the journey of a group of people through a forty year span of dealing with a dragon. As the characters grow, so do their personalities and motives. Hill does not let any of the characters stay in the same place they were in when they were still in their teens, and while the years and decades pass, the group cannot help but stay connected over this yearly tradition. The killings by King Sorrow affects everyone differently as well. Some of them deal with their emotional trauma better than others, but the book feels like it takes its time to have all five (and a few new ones along the way) characters naturally progress in their lives and with their growing frustration at having to feed a dragon forty years after they summoned it as kids. 

I also find it beneficial that the novel skips years, and instead of going year by year and turning it into a kill list, Hill takes a few stories, fleshes them out, and makes these the most pivotal moments in the lives of the group. I like that there are many years that are not even mentioned, unless it is in passing as something that they thought about as a mistake, like considering Osama Bin Laden a few years before 2001 but choosing someone else. By structuring the novel this way, with gaps between the narrative, he also gets the opportunity to reintroduce the characters and what they are doing in their lives. This allows an inconsistency that keeps the novel interesting over a large page count because we are given a modified set of characters with each new part. It allows the characters to develop in ways that might have been contradictory to the same character from two decades before. Because people grow and change. I like the story, the construction of the scenes and the enjoyment of the book, but also find the structure of the novel fascinating because there is no way that a book this long should feel this short. Maybe these are tricks that he learned from writing comic books, but there is definitely some kind of magic involved.

I do not know if this is Joe Hill’s best novel, but I do know that it is compelling and every page brings new surprises and challenges to the story. I also know that it really has some great instructions on how to structure a very long book and not allow the story to grow stale. Hill promises at the end of the book that his next novel will not take as long to write, and I hope that he is correct. I don’t want to wait this long for another Joe Hill novel.  

Bonus: I love this very funny interview with Joe Hill on Last Podcast on the Left: