I have known of author Joe Hill, adult son of Stephen King, for several years but have never read any of his works. I didn’t really have a good reason, except that I probably was a little fearful that he would not be as good as his dad. And that probably would have been a bit disappointing.

But recently Goodreads (yes I’m still there and on Storygraph) had a challenge for me and “King Sorrow” was one of the books listed to fulfill that challenge. So I thought I’d knock off, as the old phrase goes, two birds with one stone; read my first Joe Hill book and complete the Goodreads challenge.

I will say that when I started reading “King Sorrow” I did not realize that the book was a doorstop in size, because I was reading the Kindle version and didn’t look at the stats. If I had, I would have seen that it was 896 pages in length and about 250,000 words. That puts it on par with his dad’s “The Dark Tower” or “11/22/63” in length.

Yet Hill showed that he is as good as his dad at keeping a behemoth of a story like that interesting and engaging. The plot was one which held up and the characters were multi-faceted.

In “King Sorrow” one good deed sets off a string of events, both good and bad, that last years for a group of college-aged friends who make a pact with a demon and misunderstand the details and length of that pact. We follow them through their lives as they try to escape the pact and then, at least some of them, try to make peace with what they have done and must do to fulfill their parts in that agreement.

The story is a character-driven tale of friendship, love, loyalty and consequences that takes place in a supernatural and dark horror world. Despite its length, as I mentioned earlier, the book holds your interest; or at least it held mine.

As a first-time reader of Joe Hill, I can highly recommend “King Sorrow” to those who enjoy this kind of novel.