It’s been nearly a decade since Joe Hill’s last novel, the #1 New York Times Bestseller, The Fireman. This past October saw the release of King Sorrow, his massive new novel about six friends who do a very bad thing.
Here’s the log line: Arthur Oakes is a reader, a dreamer, and a student at Rackham College, Maine, renowned for its frosty winters, exceptional library, and beautiful buildings. But his idyll—and burgeoning romance with Gwen Underfoot—is shattered when a local drug dealer and her partner corner him into one of the worst crimes he can imagine: stealing rare books from the college library.
Trapped and desperate, Arthur turns to his closest friends for comfort and help. Together they dream up a wild, fantastical scheme to free Arthur from the cruel trap in which he finds himself. Wealthy, irrepressible Colin Wren suggests using the unnerving Crane journal (bound in the skin of its author) to summon a dragon to do their bidding. The others—brave, beautiful Alison Shiner; the battling twins Donna and Donovan McBride; and brainy, bold Gwen—don’t hesitate to join Colin in an effort to smash reality and bring a creature of the impossible into our world.
But there’s nothing simple about dealing with dragons, and their pact to save Arthur becomes a terrifying bargain in which the six must choose a new sacrifice for King Sorrow every year—or become his next meal.
I was lucky enough to speak with Joe Hill on the phone in advance of his book tour in support of King Sorrow, which brings him to Southern Ontario this week. Right off the top, I had a confession to make to the author.
Andy Burns: I want to be totally up front with you. I feel this is really important. I have not finished all of King Sorrow.
Joe Hill: Let me tell you, it really goes to shit in the last hundred pages. (laughs) It’s pretty good. You know, I was pretty proud of the first two or three hundred pages, but by the time I got to the last hundred pages, I just didn’t give a fuck anymore. I was like, I’m just going to throw any old trash at the page and be done with it. (laughs) No, hopefully you enjoy it. Hopefully, when you get to the end, you’ll know you’ll feel like the whole ride was worth it.
Andy Burns: It is a BIG book.
Joe Hill: It’s interesting, now that it’s out in the world, you see people who read the book in a weekend, and that’s awesome, and I did design it for speed. Even though it’s 700, 800 pages, something like that in print, there are chapters that are only two paragraphs long, there’s a lot of dialogue, there are a lot of big action set pieces. 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. (The book has) got to be paced well. You want to keep the narrative taking sudden, shocking left-hand turns, doing things that the reader didn’t see coming; that’s important to have.
Andy Burns: Since we’re talking about the length of the book, let me ask you, in the editorial process, were there any significant cuts that you had to make or did you really get the book that you wanted, and the length was the length, as it were?
Joe Hill: 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. I work with a great editor, Jennifer Brehl. She’s at William Morrow. She’s worked on the books since the very beginning, since Heart Shaped Box, and she’s just a wizard with a red pen. She’s really good at getting in there and saying, “No, don’t need this. No, don’t need this. We need to move. This chapter can go.” I think some writers struggle with editorial, but I’m not really built that way. I have a strong sense of what I want to do with a book, and Jen shares that sense. So we’re right on the same page. And she can spot things that I can’t because I’m too close to it. You know, you get too wrapped up and you can’t tell anymore what you wrote for the reader and what you just wrote for you. Certainly, in something like King’s Sorrow, you have these six friends who meet in 1989 and bond over a shared love of the occult, and we follow them through the next 25 years of their lives in American history. And I sometimes joke that one of the influences, I’m kind of not really joking, on the book is the TV show Friends, that the whole thing, King’s Sorrow, is kind of like a bonus season of Friends, reimagined as horror instead of comedy.
Andy Burns: Oh, that’s great.
Joe Hill: I wrote a lot of banter getting to know the characters. I love to write banter. I love banter in a good TV show; I love the zip and crackle of the kind of hot-house jazz music that you see when you read Elmore Leonard, and the dialogue between his characters. I always wanted my dialogue to feel that way, and so I write pages and pages of my characters talking. But most of that doesn’t need to go in the book. Most of that was stuff that I wrote, getting to know them, letting them introduce themselves to me and share their views about things. Because 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.
Andy Burns: When you’re writing these characters and you’re getting to know them, how much of that is in your head or maybe written down in some way, shape or form prior to actually sitting in front of your keyboard and getting it down? Is it thought out, or is it coming as you’re writing, being purposeful in writing the novel itself?
Joe Hill: The writer, Christopher Isherwood, once, when he was talking about his own approach to writing, said, “I am a camera.” And I’ve always taken a basically cinematic approach to my writing. I’m describing the movie that I see in my head as it unfolds before me. There’s no outline or note, really. What there is is a situation and some ideas about some characters. And then I’m plopping these characters into an intriguing and usually somewhat surreal situation and seeing how they respond. Every book is a thought experiment, a “what if.” What if this happened to this particular individual? There’s not a plan, really, for those characters. And I don’t necessarily know how things are going to unfold. But if I have a strong sense of who they are, then I know enough to go forward. And you do sometimes hear writers talk about, “Oh, all my characters are versions of me.” Whenever I hear that, I always think, How boring. What boring fiction that must be to read. You know, it’s just a hall of mirrors, you know, reflecting this one writer’s ego. It leaves no room for observation. I feel like I’ve written about all kinds of people who are very different from me. And that’s one of the big pleasures.
I talk a lot about Heart-Shaped Box, my first novel, because it’s such a good example of this. Heart-Shaped Box is about a heavy metal musician in his 60s who’s been fabulously successful. He’s had platinum albums and videos on MTV, and he’s had a dozen world tours. But when we meet him, he’s on the downslope of his career, and he’s an angry and resentful man living in a mansion in upstate New York with his much younger groupie girlfriend. And one of the only pleasures in his life is buying stuff to stock up his cabinet of curiosities. He has this cabinet of weird artifacts. He’s got a witch’s confession from the 17th century. He’s got a tree-panned human skull. He hears about a woman selling a suit online that she says is haunted because there’s a ghost attached to it, and he decides he’s got to have it for his collection. If you’ve seen even one horror film in your life, you know what a bad idea that is. But he buys it, and it turns out there is a ghost attached to it. The ghost is very real and very dangerous. And I always assumed, because the character we need is sort of a prick, I always assumed that the ghost would eat him for breakfast. He’d realized too late he’d made this terrible mistake. And the ghost would eat him for breakfast by page 30. But that’s not what happened. Because every time I stepped on him, I’d lift my shoe and he’d scuttle away again like a cockroach. And he kept doing things, making choices that I would never make. And he always found a way to fight his way out of the corner. And it became kind of fascinating to see how long it would take to step on him for good, to see how long he would last. And it turned out he could last 300 pages. I was talking about this in front of a crowd in Edinburgh a few nights ago, and I was saying, he kept making choices that I never would have expected. that I never would have made. And I could see sort of this look of people getting ready to laugh at that. And I agree, it’s sort of crazy to say, because obviously I thought of those choices. I’m the one who wrote them. But I wouldn’t have thought of them if I hadn’t thought of the character first. You know, in some weird, almost supernatural way, it’s like this invented person, this person who doesn’t really exist, nevertheless insisted on certain choices that came to him, not to me.
Andy Burns: I want to ask you about language, because a great writer that you and I both love has previously voiced displeasure that nobody ever asks him about the language. And I think about that when I talk to writers and when I’m writing stuff myself. And in reading King Sorrow so far, one of the things that I appreciate about your use of language is that it finds this balance of description, that you set a scene, like Arthur’s trip to the prison that we kick off with, or Colin’s grandfather’s very sort of majestic home. But your writing doesn’t overwhelm me with description, and speaking for myself as a reader, it lets me picture things, rather than giving me everything. And I’m wondering, how inherent or organic is that approach to you versus something maybe that you’re conscious of?
Joe Hill: That’s a tough one to answer. I mentioned Elmore Leonard earlier, and the pleasure I take in reading Elmore Leonard’s dialogue, which to me is a form of hot-house jazz. Elmore Leonard also said he had his famous 10 rules for writing. And one of those rules was, if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. And I love that. I think that’s a beautiful thing to say, and I totally get that, but that’s not really how I work. I do want a sentence to have some music in it, to have an internal rhythm, to feel nice in the mind, to sort of be pleasurable, to say aloud. When I was starting out in my earliest short stories, I was very much under the influence of the American mid-century Jewish novelists. So Bernard Malamud, Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was more of a short story writer than a novelist, Philip Roth, and even William Goldman, who isn’t usually lumped in with those guys, because he was so commercial. But I feel like he is sort of a part of the group. He’s sort of the commercial face of that group. But especially Bernard Malamud. Malamud had a style that was almost aphoristic. Every couple pages, you’d read something, and it would feel like one of these aphorisms that goes back centuries, even though he had written it, even though he had just come up with it. And so there’s a little bit of that. I want a good sentence to sometimes clang like a bell.
It’s also fun when you can write a joke, you know? At one point, when Arthur first sees the estate that his friend Colin Wren lives on, we’re in his perspective, and he thinks something like, “It was actually a fairly modest place, you know, barely big enough for a family of five and their 12 servants.”
Andy Burns: That was a great line. That stood out.
Joe Hill: That’s also a little bit like Raymond Chandler. You don’t want to lean too far into that kind of thing, because then you become someone who’s too easy to parody. The sad thing about Chandler is that he was such a great prose stylist, but that style was so strong and so broad. Now, when we think of it, we think of the parodies. We think of the private eye saying, “Her legs were so long that you had to ask directions when you got to her kneecap.”
I was talking about this the other day on Instagram. I had this other life writing comic books. And when I was starting out, I studied the comics of Brian K. Vaughan, specifically Y: The Last Man. I loved Y. I thought that was such a great comic book. And I broke it down, I worked out Brian K. Vaughan math. So I figured out how many panels did he put on a page? And how many words did he stick in each word balloon? And how many full-page spreads did he have in each book? I was really trying to figure out what were the underlying equations that made a Brian K. Vaughan comic hum. And then when I wrote the first couple issues of Locke & Key, I did it with my sheet of BKV math, next to the computer keyboard, so I tried to make sure that every issue conformed to his math. That’s how I learned to write comics, and in some ways that carried over a little bit to the novels and the short stories. I have a deep distrust of paragraphs that are longer than three sentences, and I like a sentence that feels like an assault with a blunt instrument, when a sentence falls like a swift stroke from a lead pipe. I just think that stories have… there’s a quality beneath the surface that’s very equation-like, and you can see that on the page-by-page level, and you can see that in the overall structure. But that’s not quite the same as saying that I work from an outline or something, which I don’t. That mathematical structure tends to reveal itself to me after the fact.
Andy Burns: So it’s a surprise to you as it goes.
Joe Hill: There’s a thing about which characters are left standing in the final scene as King Sorrow. I know you haven’t finished, so I’m trying to avoid ruining it for you, but there’s a thing about which characters happen to be left standing. 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.
Andy Burns: That’s the beauty of writing, though, right? Of not knowing where you’re going.
Joe Hill: Those discoveries.
Andy Burns: I was talking to a friend of mine, who thinks King Sorrow is the best horror novel of the last 20 years. He suggested that it works in the horror sub-genre of a bunch of friends, in this case, college friends, getting together and, in my words, doing something stupid.
Joe Hill: Well, in some ways, that’s the part of the book that worries me the most, because it’s the creakiest, right? It’s the part of the book that’s like treading a little bit close to that line of cliche. You’ve got six friends who meet in college, and then they use an ancient book that is wrapped in human skin to summon a dragon into our world. And that had to be handled very carefully. Because when you say it like that, it’s about execution. It works in the execution, but when you say it like that, it sounds a little bit like, hmm, have we been there before? Is this one a little bit familiar? So that was actually the part of the book that I worried about the most. I knew once I got the dragon through into our world that we’d be off and running. But the bit about the book and the summoning, I thought, if I don’t do this right, it’s not going to look too good.
Andy Burns: To your point, there’s “this” sort of story or “that” sort of story, but then you do it how you do it, and it becomes something unique.
Joe Hill: It’s like, how could there be one more interesting vampire novel? Aren’t vampires completely played out? But then along comes a guy like Keith Rosson, who writes a book called Coffin Moon. That’s one of the best horror novels of the year. It’s absolutely electrifying. It’s great in every possible way.
Andy Burns: Are there any stories of this sort of sub-genre in terms of friends committing a bad idea that inspired you or that you could recommend to folks?
Joe Hill: The Secret History by Donna Tartt, which came out in 1990, and its reputation has grown with every passing year. And I sometimes think that if you were to make a list of the five or six books that matter most to readers of my generation, that would have to be on it. That is a story about six friends who meet in a liberal arts college in the 1980s and do something terrible, and then have to deal with some moral and emotional fallout. Sound familiar? I mean, it’s exactly the same underlying structure. That was certainly an influence, certainly something I thought of, although people often talk about King Sorrow as dark academia. I think that’s true for the first 200 pages, but I also really love the novels of David Mitchell, who wrote Cloud Atlas, and one of the things that I love about Cloud Atlas is it’s really six genre novels that all connect into one overarching story. So you have an 18th-century story of nautical adventure. You have a sleazy 1970s crime novel. You have a Blade Runner-type science fiction novel, and then you have an apocalyptic science fiction novel that’s written in almost a different language, you know, its own future language, like A Clockwork Orange or Riddley Walker.
I’m neither Donna Tartt or David Mitchell. I can’t write at their level, but I can learn from them. And King Sorrow, that first story, part one, is firmly set in the genre of dark academia. Part two is an air disaster thriller. And in part three, a paramilitary organization kidnaps two of our heroes and tries to force them to hand over the power of the dragon. And that’s a morally ambiguous story of espionage in a way. Espionage genre adjacent. Part four gives us an Indiana Jones-style plunge into a troll’s trap-filled cave. And that’s almost like straight fantasy adventure. So King’s Sorrow also shifts from genre to genre to genre. But, for sure, The Secret History by Donna Tartt was a major starting point. The other major starting point was Pete’s Dragon.
When you come down to it, King’s Sorrow was sort of like a reimagining of Pete’s Dragon, in the most goriest, most R-rated possible way.
Joe Hill’s King Sorrow is available now. You can see him on tour in Southern Ontario with Linwood Barclay this Monday in Hamilton, Tuesday in Toronto, and Wednesday in Uxbridge. Ticket information is here. Find Joe Hill online at his official website and on Instagram @joe_hill.
