King Sorrow
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Joe Hill on King Sorrow
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Three decades, one dragon, one dedicationThe most direct trigger was the novel he had just finished. ‘The Fireman’ (2016) centers on a pathogen called Dragonscale that causes people to spontaneously combust, and Hill found that the logic of that premise left exactly one destination.
Each book flows naturally to the next. My last novel was about a deadly pathogen called Dragonscale that causes people to spontaneously combust. At some point while I was working on ‘The Fireman’ it became clear to me I was going to be writing about dragons sooner or later.
The deeper pull went back to childhood. Hill’s favorite fictional character is Tolkien’s Smaug, first encountered when his parents read him ‘The Hobbit’ aloud, and the image of Bilbo trapped in the dragon’s cave held its charge across every subsequent re-reading. The moment ‘The Fireman’ opened that door, a much older appetite was already waiting on the other side.
After ‘The Hobbit,’ it was inevitable that someday I was going to want to write about my own dragon. [paraphrased from audio]
The Arthurian skeleton of the novel, with its echoes of Arthur, Gwen, the sword, and the quest, came from coursework Hill completed as a student, material he had carried for thirty years without a use for it. The half-joking defensiveness in his description of liberal arts education masks something genuine: he had been waiting for the right book.
It’s fashionable to make fun of the stuff that’s taught at liberal arts college — who needs to know anything about Arthurian legends when they could be learning to code? But I always kind of thought someday I’d put all that reading to good use and I was right. It only took 30 years.
There was also a private obligation driving the scale of the ambition. Hill remarried in 2018 and knew before he wrote a word that ‘King Sorrow’ would be the first novel he dedicated to his wife.
I remarried in 2018 and I knew this was going to be the first novel I dedicated to my wife and I think I wanted to impress her. You know the trouble a man can get into when he decides to impress his best girl.
How he wrote it
Two hundred cut pages and a borrowed structureHill began writing around 2019, finished the manuscript in 2022, and didn’t see the book published until October 2025, partly because his publishers wanted time to build a significant campaign around it. The gap between completion and publication meant he had already lived with the finished text for three years before readers touched it. What he handed over was still too long.
I had to cut 200 pages out of it. It was too long. But that’s normal. Most of the things that I had turned in were longer than they needed to be.
The book is nearly 900 pages, and Hill designed every structural element of it to fight against that weight. Short chapters, heavy dialogue, and action sequences distributed across the length were all in service of a single concern: the reader’s willingness to keep going.
The longer the book is, the more important it is to keep the gas pedal mashed to the floor. You really want the thing to move, because when a book is that long, there’s too much risk that the reader will get like 150 pages in, and if it feels like homework, their heart is going to wilt, they’ll just lose the energy to finish.
Much of what was cut was dialogue. Hill writes extended conversations not to fill pages but to locate his characters: the scenes that don’t survive into the finished book are the research. The method is less about plotting than about excavation.
I want to know how my characters feel about everything. I want to know what cars they like. I want to know who they vote for, what their political views are. I want to know what their turn-ons are, I want to know what scares them. I want to find out about their regret; what have they done that they wish they could take back? The real pleasure of writing fiction is finding a character that excites and engages you and then investigating them like a mystery.
The time-skipping structure, which drops in on six friends at intervals across 25 years, was borrowed from Francis Spufford’s novel ‘Light Perpetual.’ Hill found the form compelling enough that he did not disguise his debt to it.
I thought that was a really compelling structure, so I helped myself to it. [paraphrased from audio]
The Stephen King references were placed with intention, not nostalgia. The most precise borrowing was the opening rhythm of ‘The Dark Tower,’ whose famous first sentence Hill had studied as a piece of music as much as a piece of prose.
I think the rhythms of the original line... is the great opening line of any genre story. And there’s some kind of music in it... I wouldn’t be surprised if you studied it and it turned out to be iambic pentameter... So I think it was just, oh, I like the music of that. I’m going to use that here. I’m going to borrow the music of that.
The borrowing was part of a larger argument the book makes about how fiction works. Hill was not simply paying tribute; he was building ‘King Sorrow’ into an explicit response to his father’s catalog, treating influence as a form of conversation rather than a debt to hide.
The personal thread
His father’s son, finally on purposeHill spent his first decade under a pseudonym specifically to prove to himself that he could sell work on its own merits. ‘King Sorrow’ is the novel where that compartmentalization ends. He placed deliberate echoes of his father’s work throughout the book, and his explanation for why only he could do it carries the logic of someone who spent years creating distance before deciding to close it.
King Sorrow, even more than any of my other books, is in conversation with the work of Stephen King. I love my dad’s work, and I kind of love celebrating my dad. I’m a huge Stephen King fan, too... I write horror fiction, and me and every other person who writes horror fiction, in a way, are all the children of Stephen King. We’re all Stephen King’s kids. But I might be the only one who can get away with actually sticking some of his stuff into my book.
The same interview produced a statement that places ‘King Sorrow’ in a tradition Hill sees as defining for the whole form, not just for his own career. The claim is not modest, but its frame is literary rather than personal: every book he has written, he says, was answering something he read.
One of the great things about literature, as I understand it, is the way stories can respond to other stories. One of the powerful things stories can do is have conversations with other stories. And I feel like everything I’ve ever written has, in one way or another, been continuing a conversation that I had with some other writer when I was reading their book.
On what the book is wrestling with
The stain that doesn’t wash offUnderneath the fantasy architecture, ‘King Sorrow’ is a book about what a monstrous bargain does to the people who made it. The six friends at the center of the novel are protected across 25 years by a dragon who commits atrocities on their behalf, and Hill does not let them stand apart from those acts. The moral weight of that is the engine of the long time span.
Our heroes have made an agreement with a monstrous force that will protect them but at a high cost. King Sorrow commits a variety of atrocities, and they are not removed from those. That stain is on them, too. Some people rise to the challenge of that moral peril that they face in the story, and some don’t.
The structural choice to revisit the same six characters at intervals, rather than following them continuously, exists to make that divergence legible. The question is not what the dragon does but what each person does with the same terrible set of facts.
One of the great pleasures of fiction is seeing how different personalities respond to different pressures in a sort of imaginary world.
Hill also acknowledged, when pressed about the book’s ending, that several of its largest structural choices arrived without premeditation. The characters left standing at the close were not planned. The moral shape of the book emerged from following the logic of the characters rather than from a designed argument.
I did not plan on that or know that was going to happen. But when you arrive there, it actually seems that it was inevitable. Of course, that was who was going to be left at the end. It almost seems like I was out to make a point. I wasn’t. It just happened. But it sure looks that way.
What he wants us to sit with
Ruined for work the next dayThe 1963 Disney film ‘Pete’s Dragon’ turns out to be the honest answer to the question of where ‘King Sorrow’ came from. Hill eventually named it as the book’s deepest structural source, then immediately spelled out the gap between that film’s warmth and what his version does to the same premise. The contrast is the point.
King Sorrow is basically the horror movie version of Pete’s Dragon. You know, it is about six friends and their pet dragon and the care and feeding of their pet dragon for 25 years. And, you know, it looks pretty fun in Pete’s Dragon, but actually it would maybe not be very... not much of a good time. [paraphrased from audio]
At the CBS Mornings interview, Hill was asked to describe what horror fiction is actually for. His answer strips away every justification about catharsis, social commentary, and the examination of fear, and goes straight to the transaction between writer and reader.
The job is to make it hard to sleep at night and then to make sure you have terrible dreams when you finally do. Just wreck you for work the next day. That’s what people want. That’s what they’re paying for. [paraphrased from audio]