It takes a lot to scare Joe Hill. The veteran novelist has confronted vampires (2013’s NOS4A2), serial killers (2007’s The Black Phone), ghosts (2007’s Heart-Shaped Box), and demons both metaphorical and literal (2010’s Horns). Given that he is also the eldest son of author Stephen King, Hill has a high tolerance for horror. But in King Sorrow, Hill’s latest book – and his first in a decade – the author must confront killers, trolls, curses, and one very real, very ancient, very angry dragon.
Joe Hill said after his last novel, he wrote novellas and short stories for several years before beginning work on King Sorrow.Supplied
Following a group of college friends who summon a fire-breathing beast to snuff out an enemy – only to find out that they are now stuck with the title creature for life, and each year have to offer it a new sacrifice – King Sorrow is a monstrous read, both in scope (it chronicles decades of bloodshed) and size (nearly 900 pages). For those familiar with Hill’s work, though, it is hardly a retread of his father’s territory, but rather something new and impressively ghastly – a folktale with the grandeur of Game of Thrones and the pacing of a poet on speed.
During a visit to Toronto the other week, Hill sat down for an in-depth conversation with The Globe and Mail about his fiery epic.
King Sorrow is a beast, in more ways than one. I feel like my copy could kill a man, wielded in the right way. What was the journey like for you?
It’s been almost 10 years between books, but I didn’t spend 10 years writing King Sorrow. It took about three. I had written two very long books back to back, and I was mentally tired. I needed to get small again, so I wrote a book of novellas, I wrote a bunch of short stories. I have this not-so-secret life as a comic-book writer, and I wrote movie scripts, which was a way of getting health care coverage for my family as a member of the writers guild. But eventually it felt time to get back to the day job. And I wanted this to be the first book that I dedicated to my wife. And you know the trouble a guy can get into when he tries to impress a woman, so the book just sort of exploded. That said, the size of it is somewhat deceptive. There’s a lot of dialogue, and I do this thing where some of the chapters are only a paragraph or two, which takes up a lot of real estate.
It does zip along, though, with a rather relentless momentum. Did you try to replicate that sense of speed while working on it?
I view the job as doing the heavy lifting so that you don’t have to. In the first draft, you’re just trying to capture some energy and block out the big set pieces and the flow of the narrative. So much of what comes after is about sharpening character and moments, making it more aerodynamic. You’re looking to create velocity, and you do that by whittling away at every page. It’s just a day of work. I started writing every day when I was 13, and I didn’t take a day off for 30 years. Christmas, birthdays, vacations – I always got my 1,500 words every single day.
Writing this for your wife, Gillian Redfearn, who also works as an editor, well, is she also your first reader?
Absolutely, and I take about 95 per cent of her edits. I also work with my American editor, Jennifer Brehl, who I’ve worked with since my first novel. I listen to both of them very closely. As you know, my mom is the novelist Tabitha King, and she gets talked about a lot less than my dad, but she’s sort of the family secret sauce. She’s always been my dad’s first reader, and her feedback can be pretty salty, pretty unsparing. But powerful and useful. She always writes the bad reviews before anyone else can. My third novel NOS4A2 had a bleak, bitter, ugly ending, and I wasn’t going to change a word because, you know, I’m an artist. I was just going to rub the reader’s face in the hopelessness of existence. My mom read it, and she called me up and said, “Joe, the book is magnificent, but that ending just won’t do.” I said okay. My artistic integrity didn’t even last one reader.
When you were trying to impress your wife with King Sorrow, what exactly were the elements you thought would appeal to her most? The dragon?
Well, she does not love horror fiction, because that scares her. Even back on NOS4A2, she would wake up from a nightmare at 1 in the morning because of something she had read in the book. But she does love big epic fantasy, the fiction of Joe Abercrombie, Robin Hobb. And of course Tolkien and Lewis. So I think that by planting a dragon smack in the middle of the story, it was taking a step toward the kind of thing that she loves most in fiction.
She doesn’t love horror fiction? She did realize what family she was marrying into, right?
She did! But I think when I took her to see It: Chapter One, I think that was the moment that she realized, oh wow, this stuff that I find genuinely scary is actually going to be a part of my life now. I’m going to have to ride the roller-coaster that scares me.
There are a few Easter eggs planted here that refer to other books by your dad. I spotted references to The Dead Zone, Pet Sematary, and The Dark Tower. Is this just you getting a kick out of it, or a larger stitching together of the King family literary universe?
I’ve had some questions about whether my dad and I are fooling around with a shared universe. Because my dad has also stuck a couple things from my stories in some of his. It’s maybe like a kid and his dad playing catch in the backyard – there’s no reason to make too much of it, we’re just having fun. But in the case of The Dead Zone reference, that’s a little bit more than an Easter egg. That’s one of my dad’s favourite books, and I’ve turned to it again and again. And in King Sorrow, there’s a conversation about the John Smith character and what he does in that book, and it involves looking at a broad section of political life. So that’s more of a way of looking at characters across the political spectrum.
King Sorrow by Joe Hill is available now via William Morrow.
This interview has been condensed and edited.