King Sorrow

Bestseller Hill (The Fireman) masterfully sustains tension throughout this immersive doorstopper of a horror novel. On one of college student Arthur Oakes’s visits to his mother, Erin, in the Vermont prison where she is incarcerated, he recognizes Tana Nighswander, a pizza delivery person and campus drug dealer, in the waiting room. Tana and her older sister, Jayne, are also there visiting family, but Tana is denied admittance for wearing inappropriate clothing. Arthur offers her his hoodie—but that good deed is punished severely when Jayne threatens to have her prison associates blind Erin unless Arthur steals valuable books from his college library that she’ll then sell to pay off a debt. While Arthur initially accedes to that extortion, once he comes across an arcane ritual in a rare book, he decides to use it to summon a dragon, King Sorrow, from the realm known as the Long Dark, and sic it on Jayne. Arthur gets more than he bargains for, however, finding his life, and the lives of those dear to him, endangered by the beast. Hill makes accepting the supernatural easy through his pitch-perfect characterizations and doses of black humor. This reinforces Hill’s reputation as a titan of the genre. (Oct.)