King Sorrow by Joe Hill

 

Weekend Reading Project: Completed. I didn't realize Joe Hill had gone a decade without any other novels--there've been other projects, and he's apparently taken to writing books with the approximate dimensions of bricks. This is a superb novel, well worth the wait. It's nearly 900 pages, but it's not bloated, it doesn't feel badly-paced, even a little. The narrative voice (and the ear for dialogue) are both nicely wickedly funny, sometimes while being gleefully gruesome--turns out, he is his father's son. Don't worry about that blurb on the front: It's not a fable, that author's a bit of a hack but she's popular. There probably are some thematic things going on in the subtext, things about power and corruption and what exactly heroism is, and about what sacrifices might be worth making, but they're well-contained and the story runs rampant over them all, complete with at least three references to Stephen King's books (possibly more, but I'm much less familiar with his 21st-Century books). If this novel's size doesn't intimidate you, I highly recommend it.