King Sorrow

At Rackham College in Maine in the late 1980s, six brilliant friends form the kind of bond that only exists in college: intense, all-consuming, and convinced of its own invincibility. When one of them gets tangled up with drug dealers, the group decides to steal rare books from the college library to pay his debt. Among the stolen volumes is a grimoire bound in human skin, and before handing it over, they use it to summon something ancient and terrible. The bargain they make to save their friend will cost them a human sacrifice every year for the rest of their lives.

Why Read This

King Sorrow takes the core dark academia setup, a tight group of gifted students at an elite institution making a catastrophic moral choice, and pushes it further than any book in the genre. Where The Secret History ends with a murder, King Sorrow begins with one and then asks: what happens when the group has to keep making that choice, year after year, for decades?

Joe Hill writes the college sections with real warmth and specificity. The late-night study sessions, the professors who shape you, the feeling that your friends are the most extraordinary people alive. He makes you fall in love with these characters before he makes you watch them destroy each other. The dark academia atmosphere is pitch-perfect, and the supernatural element gives the genre’s usual themes of guilt and complicity a literal, monstrous form.

What to Expect

A 896-page novel that alternates between the charged atmosphere of 1980s college life and the present-day reckoning. The first half reads like a literary campus novel with occult undertones. The second half is full-blown horror. If you loved the group dynamics and moral deterioration in The Secret History but wished the consequences were more visceral and the stakes more extreme, this is the dark academia novel you have been waiting for.