Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.
Trigger warning: The way it’s described it sounds like coercion which to my mind is still rape, but wanted to put a rape trigger warning here for readers due to a plot point with one of the characters.
I don’t even know what to say. This is definitely a slog of a book (it’s over 800 pages) and there’s not a lot to say about it even though it’s 800 pages. Hill takes too long to get to the heart of the story honestly (the very end) and everything that comes before it just feels overstuffed. I only even liked two characters in this whole mess, Robin and Tana. Everyone else in the friend group (Arthur, Gwen, Colin, Donovan (Van), Donna, and Allie) is barely developed, and when you delve into them a bit more, there’s not a lot to like there sadly outside of Van, Allie, and Gwen. I just wish that the plot had been a little more focused, the flow improved, and the book cut by about 400 pages. I read this via my e-reader and man, every time I thought I was getting somewhere, I would check the percentage and it would just be the same. It was just disheartening to see that. Honestly, I think that’s what ultimately ruined this book for me. It felt like a chore throughout. I honestly loved “Heart-Shaped Box” and “The Fireman” and this one was just a straight miss for me.
“King Sorrow” follows Arthur Oakes. Arthur is a student at Rackham College in Maine. Arthur finds himself in trouble (it takes a while to get going btw) after he intervenes in the prison visiting room while seeing his mother. This intervention causes Jayne Nightswander and her boyfriend to threaten Arthur’s mother and his life if he doesn’t do what they say, which is steal rate books from the college library. Arthur’s friends (who barely have a brain between them honestly) think of ways to get Arthur and his mother safe from Jayne. They came up with summoning a dragon (and yes you read that right). There’s a lot of hocus pocus that makes zero sense and then this group of friends calls up a dragon called King Sorrow who is going to kill Jayne and her boyfriend by Easter. I honestly don’t recall why Easter was important and I refuse to back to read it. There’s a catch though. Arthur and his friend’s just can’t get rid of King Sorrow and he’s hell-bent on getting someone to feast upon every year. The book follows this arrangement through I think at least 40 years with each of the characters getting a chapter to focus on them when they called upon King Sorrow.
I am so tired. I don’t even know what to say. I think that the overall plot could have worked, but when Hill started working in real world events it was when my brain took off. I also got turned off by the rants in this book against so many things since it felt like the characters were giving lip service to why they didn’t call upon King Sorrow. I think I legit cringed when the Rwanda genocide was brought up, and you are going to shake your head every time Osama Bin Laden is brought up too. I think what is laughable is any of the characters thinking they are doing something “good” here, they all seem to loathe King Sorrow until he kills someone they hate. I honestly thought all of the character moments went on way too damn long and I think in a few places, you can see where Hill kind of gives up even just trying to make any of these people likeable.
I loathed the whole story-line between Arthur and Tana. I hated it. Every time it was mentioned I hated Arthur all over again. And I found it laughable he pretty much disappears the entire book on his “quest”. I think at times Hill should have just written his own version of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and heck even Lord of the Rings since you can see some echoes of that in this book whenever Arthur comes up.
Gwen was just okay. I just didn’t really find her interesting at all. I think because she seemed to just be there to move plot A to plot B, to plot C, etc. Things kept happening to her and that was about it.
Allie….she was somewhat interesting, but it got bogged down with Hill dealing with her being ashamed of being gay and her family and somehow they know the Rumsfields. I kid you not, my brain at this point started to get mad at me. I just couldn’t with Allie because she was a mess and the plot with the plane was so wholly unrealistic I just gave up.
Van. He was sweet. But again, the whole book gets so bogged down and then when it gets meshed with his sister Donna, it just did not work. I think because Donna is written as one-note and oh yeah, racist as hell.
Colin again, nothing there, I think he was supposed to be a tech bro stand-in and shrug to that.
There are other characters such as Tana, Robin, and even Arthur’s mother who had semblances of a good story there when you read about things that wen on with them through the years. I rather would have read that, instead of following the crew of Sorrow.
The flow was awful. I just got bored reading about how King Sorrow mentally tortured and then killed people. And then the people that the crew thought up to put on their “list” to keep Sorrow from taking one of them.
The setting of the book moves a bit, we have Maine, somewhere down South, England, etc.
The ending was foreshadowed earlier on and that’s all I can say about that. It wasn’t satisfying at all and the whole “twist” at the end just caused me to grimace.
I read this for Halloween Bingo 2025, “Genre: Horror.”