Fuck. Stephen King’s son is a beast. He’s writing mega novels every 6-7 years or so and they are all brilliant. No need to churn one every year or so like daddy dearest where you complain about Covid and Trump and rake in the dollars.
We long for dragons—if only everything we hate could be made to wear scales and be pierced through the
heart with a silver sword.
This was pure storytelling and .. I don’t know.. I couldn’t put it down. I started the book 3 days ago and I read it through the night, finishing this morning at 2:30am. I didn’t even want to write the review until the story “settled” in my mind and I don’t think it ever will.
Thank you, Joe Hill. Thank you.
When you choose a course of action, you accept the consequences—those you intended and those you didn’t.
I think in short, the book is about choice. Ethical choice. The trolley conundrum. Kill a killer or let him live and sacrifice yourself instead. I think the answer is obvious at first glance, but what if, when killing a killer you also take out innocents. What if you kill 400 people in a prison collapse when your target was only one person. Is it still justifiable? Is another person’s life worth less than your own?
Set across 4 decades, King Sorrow tells the story of Scooby Doo and the Gang, 5 teens attending the same college who happen to pull a beast from another dimension called The Long Dark and let it loose on a couple of scumbags who were blackmailing one of them. Unfortunately the beast they pulled through from what they think is their imagination won’t go away and requires a kill every Easter.
There’s no such thing as an ethical murder. Might as well believe in unicorns.
It’s all due to the Philip Experiments done by the military. A team of researchers in Toronto in the 1970s got together to invent a ghost. They made up a character, Philip Aylesford, invented a whole made-up history for him, full of intentional errors and rubbish. Then they tried to contact him with a séance.
Only it worked. Philip could make the table levitate. He could dim the lights, slam the shutters on the windows, drop the
temperature by ten, twenty degrees.
“Moscow was quite a bit ahead of us, I’m afraid,” Llewellyn said, returning to the room with a fresh lightbulb for the sconce.
“They had been inventing ghosts since the fifties. They called it the Goblin Scheme, and they gave it up in 1965, after Andreev, their lead researcher, stuck a screwdriver into his ear and lobotomized himself. His wife said he was trying to stop ‘the little whisperer.’ The problem with inviting the unnatural into your life is it might decide to stay.
And so it does. And this beast is not to be reckoned with. Breathing fire, sharp talons, yellow eyes, growing each day before Easter until it’s big enough to be able to attack a plane, to hurl fighter jets out of the sky, to resist against ground fire and ballistic missiles. It cannot be killed by anything human.
And while it arrives for its kill, horror unfolds, and I must say the horror is exquisite.
The TV screen has become a glass window looking into a dry aquarium, and there’s a fucking snake stuffed in there, a snake as thick as a firehose, knotted and tangled on itself. It shifts and twists, slowly, hardly enough room inside the boxy old TV for it. That’s an anaconda, she thinks, there is a fucking South American anaconda in the TV, and then she sees it has arms. Scaly arms, and black talons, and one of those claws draws three white scratches across the inside of the glass with a faint, almost musical whine. Its face presses to the glass, staring out at her with one golden eye, the pupil a vertical black slit.
Between kills, the gang gets together to muse. Is it right? Is it wrong? Morality has its own arithmetic. Two lives for ten is a good exchange. Arthur, the book-nerd of the group (and I can call him that as I am one myself) puts it into perspective. They can never take too much blame.
Because most of the good things in our lives were purchased in blood. We don’t think about it, but any number of things we enjoy and take for granted—starting, first and foremost, with each other—are held at the cost of other lives. If you unfocus your eyes, Gwen, it’s possible to see Jayne Nighswander’s death in that context . . . the red backdrop of American life. The slave labor in Indonesia that made Donovan’s sneakers. The miner dying of black lung so we can turn on the lights. The construction worker who fell off a high girder so the World Trade towers could kiss the sky. Because we care about each other, we make peace with a certain level of horror.
The book is beautifully written, filled with vivid descriptions which make the story come alive.
A night sky waited on the other side, a vast darkness filled with cold, ancient stars. The butterflies in the shadow boxes began to twitch and shiver, and then one by one they lifted free, sliding off their pins and flying in a bright, whispering storm to escape into the Long Dark.
What a thing, to fall and be caught by love at the end.
They shared a bottle of pinot grigio that night, the wine so bright and clear, it was as if someone had distilled the afternoon sunlight instead of grapes. They drank a little too much and laughed a little too hard and ate a homemade macaroni and cheese that Gwen had brought from Maine. When Gwen’s hand stole into Arthur’s, Erin noticed, and she narrowed her eyes with pleasure and gentle approval. Gwen and Arthur made love that night in the guest room with the curtains pushed back and the sky still faintly glowing a pale shade of peach, the color of her prom dress—even at 10:00 p.m., the sun refused to entirely quit the earth. [..]
“I hate that it’s going to get dark and we have to go to sleep and tomorrow there’ll be one day less,” Arthur said.
“But tomorrow,” Gwen said, her lips close to his ear, “we also get one day more.”
It was just beginning to snow—white flower petals, thrown at a wedding.
But she hardly noticed the 747 taking off, was not aware they were in the sky until the plane banked and she glimpsed Manhattan off the starboard wing.Towers bristled from the island, blades of glass and steel, and the surrounding mist glowed with their lights.
The story briefly moves to England, more specifically Tintagel castle (which I’ve visited just last year)
A tower of rock rose on the far side of a dizzying chasm, and the ruins of Tintagel were scattered across the top of it. It looked like a green chessboard for giants, with great crude blocks of stone for pieces. There was no way to get over there, to reach those barbaric ruins, except by descending to the beach below and then climbing a jagged and precarious staircase cut into the side of the granite. One half expected to see a band of shivering, desperate hobbits making their way up those steps.
The British were so in love with their own past, they were apparently happy to let the future slip away. Some people couldn’t be helped.
Arthur didn’t mind the new stillness, though, and when the phone rang he was taking advantage of the quiet to solve some riddles in Old English. He loved it, had always loved it, the way an ancient word felt in the brain, in the mouth. Heartache was an okay word but bitre breostcaere—bitter breast-care—caught at something else, something more deeply felt, from a time when people lived in their bodies, not in their heads. Sometimes, when he had been reading Old English for a while, he found himself thinking in it. He might’ve been a Dorset monk copying out a manuscript before vespers.
I had to laugh when they met the troll under the bridge and they slip him a £20.
“Her maj!” he cried. “Her glorious maj! Long live her cobwerbbed quim!”Stephen King References
- The dark man fled across the snow and Arthur Oakes followed.
- She heard the first distant burst of fully automatic fire while she was searching Valentine’s pockets. It didn’t sound like much: a flat and steely banging that brought to mind that wind-up toy that looked like a pair of chattering teeth
- It was full dark, no stars, when she drove back to Gogan, although it was barely after 5:00 p.m.
- Colin played his light along one ledge, then the other. There was more of that frescoing above the ledges, at eye level, a series of Gothic skeletons holding hands, boogieing in a line with people in shrouds. The danse macabre, Colin thought
- VisitorFromPlanetGor claimed that in fact the McBrides had burned Cherokee Island with their MINDS, that they had the power of pyrokinesis. (Firestarter)
- Ask any novelist—an unstable, violent personality is a wonderful thing for advancing the plot (The Shining)?
The Dragon’s riddle
“Sometimes I taste bitter, sometimes I taste sweet,” he said gleefully.
“I hate to be held but I loved mother’s teat.”Solution: tongue
One Book a Week (Julia Reads Books) 