It is very rare that I find a book I am ready to rave about. King Sorrow, however, is a book I will rave about. I loved Stephen King from my pre-teen years, and I have to say that his son Joe Hill has crafted a book that matches anything King wrote early on in his career. I didn’t know when I started the book that I was in for a wild ride that would make me feel like that pre-teen all over again.

King Sorrow begins with Arthur Oakes, a college student at Rackham College in Maine who finds himself caught in a dangerous situation after trying to help someone else. Arthur is pressured by criminals into stealing valuable rare books from the college library, putting both himself and his imprisoned mother at risk. Arthur turns to his close group of friends, Colin Wren, Gwen Underfoot, Alison Shiner, and twins Donna and Donovan McBride, for help. Their desperate solution is wildly beyond anything they understand: they use a mysterious occult book, the Crane Journal, to summon an ancient dragon-like supernatural being known as King Sorrow.

Their plan seems simple: summon the creature and have it eliminate their enemies. Of course, nothing involving an ancient supernatural dragon is ever that simple. King Sorrow agrees to help them, but his bargain comes with a horrifying condition. The friends must provide him with a human sacrifice every Easter. If they fail to choose someone, King Sorrow will choose one of them. What begins as an act of desperation becomes a decades-long nightmare.

The novel follows the friends as they grow older and their lives take radically different directions. Each year forces them to confront the moral consequences of the bargain they’ve made. Their attempts to manipulate the rules and find people they believe “deserve” to die gradually become more complicated—and increasingly horrifying.

The story eventually expands far beyond the original group. Government agencies, investigators, criminals, supernatural forces, and ordinary people become entangled in the consequences of King Sorrow’s existence. The narrative moves through different genres and time periods, becoming part horror story, part dark fantasy, part thriller, and ultimately an epic story about friendship, guilt, sacrifice, and redemption.

At its heart, King Sorrow asks a simple question: If you could make an evil disappear by sacrificing someone you considered worse than yourself, how long would it be before you became part of the evil? That’s where the novel becomes much more interesting than simply “people summon an evil dragon.” The supernatural bargain essentially becomes a test of the characters’ morality. Every Easter forces them to decide who deserves to live and who deserves to die, and those decisions follow them for decades.

King Sorrow is the kind of audiobook that is difficult to describe without making it sound completely insane. It begins as a dark-academia story involving a college student, rare books, criminals, and an occult ritual. Then it becomes a supernatural horror story about an ancient dragon. Then a decades-spanning character drama. Then a thriller. Then something resembling an epic dark fantasy adventure.

And somehow, Joe Hill manages to make most of it work.

The basic premise is fantastic: six friends summon King Sorrow, a terrifying supernatural creature, to solve a problem. The creature agrees—but demands a sacrifice every Easter. What follows is the increasingly horrifying realization that solving one problem has created a much larger one. What I enjoyed most was the way the story explores consequences. The characters don’t simply summon a monster and spend the rest of the book trying to kill it. Instead, they have to live with what they have done. Their decisions follow them through adulthood and into later life, and the passage of time allows Hill to show how guilt, fear, loyalty, resentment, and regret change people.

The characters are also complicated. These aren’t spotless heroes. They make selfish decisions, hurt one another, rationalize terrible behavior, and sometimes surprise you by showing genuine courage or compassion. That moral ambiguity makes the story considerably more interesting than a simple battle between good and evil.

And then there is King Sorrow himself.

He is an excellent horror creation because he isn’t simply a giant monster waiting to destroy everything. He operates according to rules, bargains, loopholes, and his own strange sense of logic. The characters think they understand what they’ve agreed to, but they repeatedly discover that supernatural bargains have consequences they didn’t anticipate.

Rather than presenting the entire story through a single voice, the production uses a large ensemble cast, including Ari Fliakos, Kate Mulgrew, Marin Ireland, Virginia Kull, and numerous other performers. The changing voices work especially well because the novel contains multiple viewpoints and jumps across different periods of the characters’ lives. There are also sections where the production becomes particularly theatrical, making the audiobook feel closer to a radio drama or audio production than simply someone reading a book aloud.

At more than 26 hours, this is a serious commitment. The opening portion can feel slower than the rest of the novel, and Hill throws an enormous number of ideas, characters, historical events, supernatural concepts, and changes in tone at the listener. My feeling is that the enormous scope is both the book’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. It works, and King Sorrow feels enormous and unforgettable.

I also enjoyed the numerous references to characters from Stephen King’s work. Set in Maine, it’s like there’s a universe where Joe Hill’s characters exist alongside some names that are very familiar. He references The Dead Zone with an alternate perspectinve on perspective on Johnny Smith and Greg Stiltson. Chapter 24 begins with “The Dark Man fled across the cold desert and Arthur Oakes followed,” which is a nod to The Gunslinger.

King Sorrow is ultimately less about a dragon than it is about the price of getting what you want. The supernatural horror gives Hill the framework, but the real horror comes from watching ordinary people make compromises and then having to live with those compromises. The story is interested in friendship, guilt, revenge, sacrifice, aging, and whether redemption is possible after you’ve done something terrible. The audiobook makes the experience even better. The ensemble cast gives the sprawling story a cinematic quality, and the different voices help keep the numerous characters and timelines distinguishable.

Note: Thank you to NetGalley, William Morrow, and author Joe Hill for the advance reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.