Bookish dreamer Arthur Oakes is a student at Rackham College, Maine, renowned for its frosty winters and beautiful buildings.
But his idyll – and burgeoning romance with Gwen Underfoot – is shattered when local drug dealers force him into a terrible crime: stealing rare and valuable books from the exceptional college library.
Trapped and desperate, Arthur turns to his closest friends for help: the wealthy, irrepressible Colin Wren; brave, beautiful Allison Shiner; the battling twins Donna and Donovan McBride; and brainy, bold Gwen. Together they dream up an impossible, fantastical scheme that they scarcely imagine will work: to summon the fabled dragon King Sorrow to kill those tormenting Arthur.
But the six stumble backwards into a deadly bargain – they soon learn they must choose a new sacrifice for King Sorrow each year or one of them will become his next victim. Unleashing consequences they can neither predict nor control, this promise will, over the course of four decades, shape and endanger their lives in ways they could never expect.
Dark bleatings, and Happy New Year, my lovely tribe! I read this book in December, but with all the Christmas excitement and distractions, decided to save this review until now. This is Joe Hill’s first book in almost a decade, and I have to tell you, it was worth the wait.
It’s been a while since I delved into a story of this size (both in book length and narrative time span), and I just flew through the pages. It took me less than a week to read it, and that was on a slow reading week. I simply could not put it down.
Arthur’s (very kind) mother is in prison, and when he crosses paths with someone that leads to his mum’s life being threatened, desperate measures are taken. A dragon is summoned, but unfortunately for Arthur and his friends, this particular dragon is…well…he’s kind of a dick. He’d probably be friends with a leprechaun. You know, cuts you a deal but is good with the wordplay so you don’t realise quite what you’ve agreed to until it’s too late.
What follows is a perspective-hopping, real-world adventure plagued by the forces of supernatural darkness. Relationships within our group morph in believable but still surprising ways. There’s a lot of British (and specifically Welsh) folklore and legend tied into all of this, which was a delightful surprise, because I’m Welsh, and I never expected to see this from an American author. Wales is the kind of place that the wilder world tends not to even know exists.
There is so much to love in this novel that it’s hard for me to pinpoint specifics without writing a review that equals the length of the book, but what it mostly came down to for me was the characters and their dynamics, and King Sorrow, that horrible, snakey bastard.
How can anyone write a dragon into the real world of today without the story being ridiculous, you might ask? Well, you’ll have to read the novel to find out, because I won’t spoil that element for you. What I will tell you is that King Sorrow served as both a physically enormous, monstrous threat with “oh god, he’s going to torch the entire planet” potential, while also appearing in tiny enclosed spaces just to surprise and scare the characters and creep me the hell out. That feeling that he was always watching, observing, listening, and looming – much like a god – was permanently present. The characters were never safe.
I loved all of the dragons interactions because unlike the dragons in every other story I’ve ever read containing them, he could speak for himself. In fact, he seemed to delight in this. I typically don’t get excited about dragons because, while I acknowledge that they’re extremely cool, they’re normally depicted as just a dangerous, rogue beast, or they’re under the control of a person but have no real personalities of their own. Joe Hill did something very different here. This dragon talks, has a very strong personality, and quite often, I wanted to punch him in his scaly face.
The characters and their dynamics were wonderful. They were all complex, layered, and flawed – even the nicest of them – so at no point did I suspect any of them of not being all in with each other. I thought of them as any average group of mixed but compatible personalities with no obvious baddies among them. And the less said about that, the better.
Overall, this is a fantastic read and I can’t recommend it enough. If you’re already a Joe Hill fan, I think you’ll appreciate the little Locke & Key flair to it, and if you’re a Stephen King fan, I think you’ll love the many references to the Kingverse. If you’re brand new to Joe, I think this would actually make a fantastic first read.
If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you. All hail the king!
Bleeeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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