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Imagine NBC's Friends had a extra season, but it's horror instead of comedy... and that's Joe Hill's new novel King Sorrow

Horror writer Joe Hill shared stories of his new novel King Sorrow at New York Comic Con

Features by Jim McDermott, Contributing writer

Published on Mon Nov 03 2025

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Joe Hill's new novel King Sorrow is available now - his first new novel in eight years, and coming just as a second movie based on his short story the Black Phone 2 is in your local multiplex. If you still need a reason to check out the new book, boy does Hill have a doozy of an elevator pitch.

“I loved Friends,” Hill explains. “And I was thinking, What if someone did an extra season of Friends, but instead of comedy it was horror? Like midway through episode six, Joey gets bit in two.”

Realizing “that would be fun!”, Hill decided to give it a whirl, and King Sorrow is the result.

“In some ways,” he told the crowd cheerfully, “King Sorrow is my blood-soaked season of Friends.”

King Sorrow is the story of six students at a liberal arts college in Maine who enjoy fooling around with supernatural things. And one weekend, they accidentally summon a dragon, who announces he will help them with a problem they’re having, but expects a human sacrifice every year for the rest of their lives, or he’ll take one of them. The book follows the group for 25 years starting in 1989, when the story begins.

Hill shared with the audience his belief that people like dragon stories because they remind them of cats. “They’re proud and they’re sly and they’re lazy and they adore recreational acts of homicide,” he says of cats.

Hill also freely admitted, the Hobbit’s Smaug is probably his favorite character in all of literature. "My burning hot take is that Smaug is a much more interesting villain than Saruman or Sauron," he says.

Just like yourself, the Popverse staff spends a whole lot of time with our respective noses in respective books. It's why we've come up with stuff like:

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