Joe Hill‘s ambitious new novel — the 900-page killer dragon epic “King Sorrow” — is inspired by love.
“I knew it was going to be the first book I was going to dedicate to my wife,” Hill says. “I think I wanted to impress her, and you know the trouble a man can get into when he tries to impress his best girl. So I began piling everything into it that I thought Gillian would love, and it would be fun to read.”
While the novel is a present to Hill’s wife, the editor and publisher Gillian Redfearn, his fans are in for a big adventure as well, as “King Sorrow” hits bookstores today from William Morrow. In the novel, six friends must make sacrifices through the years for the titular dragon after they call upon it for protection. From there, Hill dips into several different modes of storytelling.
“You have one part of the story which is a mini-air disaster novel set on a 747 flying from New York to London, and there’s a dragon outside the porthole window off in the thunderclouds,” Hill says. “Another part of the book is an ‘Indiana Jones’-style plunge into a troll’s trap-filled cave. At one point, a couple of people are kidnapped by a for-profit paramilitary organization, and they’re forced to tell everything they know about the dragon, King Sorrow. There’s a desperate attempt to rescue survivors from a collapsed building. There’s a drunken brawl on roller skates. I just kept piling it on because there seemed to be so much story there.”
The book’s release is coming as “Black Phone 2,” the sequel to the film based on Hill’s short story “The Black Phone,” sits at the top of the box office. While that movie is perfect spooky season fodder thanks to Ethan Hawke’s portrayal of the villainous Grabber, Hill was inspired to write his newest book because he loved his scaly antagonist.
“I’m a guy who thinks Smaug from ‘The Hobbit’ is my favorite fictional character,” Hill says. “I think I like Smaug even more than Sherlock Holmes. I also think that a lot of times horror novels are only as good as their antagonist. So having a really great 4,000-ton, 70-foot-dragon with a nasty sense of humor feels like a stable thing to build a book around.”
Along with the plot inspiration, Hill amps up his prose, making for a distinctly cinematic reading experience.
“For something on the scale of ‘King Sorrow,’ the language has to be fairly lean, mean, clean and direct,” he says. “You want elegance, but you also want zip.”
Between the plotting, pace and Hollywood’s love of adapting Hill’s work, it’s easy to imagine a deep-pocketed streamer taking on “King Sorrow” as a limited series. Luckily, he’s been pleased with the other interpretations of his work.
“I’ve been really lucky because no one’s made an out-and-out stinker,” Hill says. “All the adaptations that have been made of my work, I have generally thought they were pretty fun, and I found things to admire in them. I love when someone reads something and says, ‘Oh, this is fun. I want to do this as a TV series,’ or ‘I want to do this as a film or comic book.’ Then you get to see what they found interesting in it, and how they take that and make it their own, make it personal, expand upon what elements of the books they always wanted to explore more.”
Of course, Hill has the unique vantage of seeing decades of his father Stephen King‘s work adapted in ways ranging from brilliant (“Stand By Me”) to noxious (“Thinner”).
“When the adaptations are really successful, it’s because they’ve captured something about his voice and his unique view of an artist in the world we live in,” Hill says. “The relationships between men with other men and women with their society and married couples. When you hear the characters talk, it’s like reading the dialogue in the book. It has that sound, that music which is unique to my dad’s work.”
Despite coming from a legendarily spooky family, leading the box office with a supernatural killer and touting a book with a deadly dragon, Hill says that his home will not be decked out with seasonal Halloween gear — for good reason.
“I wish I could tell you the house is draped in cobwebs, and the ‘Addams Family’ music is echoing through the halls, and kids creep up to the front door to get candy and the door swings open of its own volition and I lurch forward out of the dark in fright makeup, and they run screaming before they can get their candy,” Hill says. “That would be terrific, but it’s not like that at all, and here’s why: Because I’ve been writing horror fiction for 20 years now, and Halloween is when I have to work. I’m like Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, so I’m not doing trick-or-treating or diving into the pleasures of the season. I’m usually out there with a book or a film or a TV show or something, trying to find subtle, clever, charming ways to say, ‘Buy my stuff.’”
