Review: King Sorrow

King Sorrow by Joe Hill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Joe Hill's always been his father's son, but never does it feel more apparent than in this latest epic novel, his first in a decade, almost 900 pages of sprawling dark academia fueled by CIA-grade weed and other pharmaceuticals. Think Death Note meets Ninth House, but instead of a sole sociopath who happens to come across Death's book, or a troubled young woman swept into a secret society in the Ivies, we have a ragtag band of misfits in 1980s New England and beyond who find a certain book bound in the necromantic skin of its own author and use it to summon a mythomagical dragon to get one of them out of a really truly shitty deal. And the dragon, like so many of his ilk, is ever hungry and curses them to a lifetime of obedience, which - fueled, again, by the CIA-grade weed given to Colin's grandfather, ostensibly as treatment for AIDS but truly to keep him placated since he knows all this country's dirty little 20th century secrets - comes off like an allegory for the misguided "justice" of America as the world police. Let's just say this book would always have been scarily timed, but finishing it right before Trump went and started an illegal, immoral incursion into Venezuela? Neither Joe Hill nor Stephen King could've predicted how creepy that was.

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