Joe Hill discussed his latest book, King Sorrow, on CBS Saturday Morning.
Hill’s 896-page novel, published last week by Morrow/HarperCollins, follows a Maine college student who is roped into stealing rare books from a library. His friends hatch a scheme to summon a dragon and save him from his dilemma, but the dragon requires a new sacrifice every year. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book “at turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.”
Hill talked about the origin of the book with CBS Saturday Morning co-host Dana Jacobson.
“When I was in college, I took a course on Arthurian legend: dragons, Arthur, Lancelot, the Grail quest,” he said. “I always knew that study was going to pay off big for me someday. Fast forward 30 years, and here we go. Everything I learned in Beth Darlington’s King Arthur course I was able to jam into the book.”
Jacobson noted that Hill has called King Sorrow the book of which he’s the most proud.
“I think I extended myself as far as I’ve ever gone, went way outside of my comfort zone,” Hill said. “Probably nine feature characters spread over 25 years of American history. I mean, the job is to make it hard to sleep at night, and then make sure you have terrible dreams when you finally do, just wreck you for work the next day.…That’s what people want. That’s what they’re paying for.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
