The One with the Dragon: Joe Hill Returns to Traverse City with His Latest Novel

The bestselling horror writer talks dragons, cats, and existential questions

By Jillian Manning | Oct. 25, 2025

The last time #1 New York Times bestselling author Joe Hill came to the National Writers Series, the year was 2018. A lot has changed in those seven years, but a lot has stayed the same.

“Like a dragon eating its tail,” Hill quips.

And speaking of dragons, this time around, the son of Stephen King—and a renowned horror writer in his own right—will be talking about legends, Faustian bargains, and giant scaly monsters with his new novel, King Sorrow.

Riding a Creative High

King Sorrow is Hill’s first novel in nearly a decade, perhaps because it’s nearly 900 pages long, or perhaps because Hill had other stories to tell in the meantime. Screenplays, novellas, short stories, comic books—these all kept him plenty busy since The Fireman came out in 2016. But long-form writing came calling again.

“When I turned 50, I started to think about what I wanted my 50s to look like, and I decided I wanted to try being a book-a-year writer,” Hill says, pointing to authors he admires like Harlan Coben. He tells us he’s already at work on a new novel due out in 2026 and another for 2027.

As any author will tell you, putting out a book each year is no small feat. And Hill and his wife, Gillian, are plenty busy at home with three-year-old twins. (“Everyone talks about how exhausting it is to have twins, but no one talks about how much fun it is,” he says.) Despite the juggling act, Hill says his personal life is filled with “a lot of happiness” and that this season of his writing career has been “a creative high.”

“The work has felt rewarding and enjoyable, and I’ve been able to explore new literary avenues that I’ve never given myself permission to explore before,” he says.

From Camelot to Central Perk

In King Sorrow, those new avenues are on display. You’ll immediately get King Arthur vibes—with main characters Arthur and Gwen, how could you not?—and the dragon, King Sorrow, is reminiscent of Tolkien’s quick-witted Smaug. Hill even jokes that he could have titled the book The One with the Dragon, thanks to some of the Friends inspiration woven into the book.

As Hill sums it up, “There’s six friends who meet 1989, and one of them is in a desperate position where he’s being threatened by local scumbags and has to commit crimes for them. These six friends are really into the occult, and they wind up summoning a dragon into our world … to protect them. And the dragon solves their initial problems, but creates worse problems for them, because they have to find a new sacrifice for King Sorrow every year—or he’ll take one of them.”

This is horror, yes, but also fantasy and some ripped-from-the-headlines allegory. And though Hill didn’t know it when he started drafting years ago, he also hits on several of today’s bookish hot topics, from dark academia to dragons to retellings.

Hill does warn that Fourth Wing romantasy readers won’t find the same kind of dragons (or spicy scenes) in his book, but adds that “the dragon himself is a lot of fun. He was one of my favorite characters to write.”

“The thing to remember about dragons is we love them for the same reason we love cats,” he explains. “Dragons and cats are both proud, lazy, sly, and enjoy recreational acts of homicide. They’ll take a little mouse head and set it on your pillow, just like the mint at a hotel, for you to discover. And that’s kind of the spirit you have to write a dragon in.”

Mouse heads aside, perhaps the two biggest questions that King Sorrow poses are: Would you make a deal with the devil? And how far would you go to protect the people you love?

“I think that’s why I wrote the book, right?” Hill says. “Because I don’t know the answer to that.”

Modern-Day Devils

Throughout our conversation, we keep circling a few of the other “devils” plaguing the modern world: social media, cell phones, and artificial intelligence. And on those topics, Hill has plenty of answers.

“I’m in my 50s, and … I’m sitting on the front porch and I’m shaking my cane at the 21st century,” Hill says.

“America has sort of gone through such a troubled and troubling moment. It feels like no one is living in the same reality anymore. People have never seemed so stressed out and exhausted and angry and unsure about what’s true.”

Hill attributes part of the reason that this last decade has been one of his best to the fact that “I don’t spend a lot of time with the phone in my hand. If I had to pick the one thing that has probably contributed more to a sense of national malaise, it’s not any one political figure, and it’s not any one incident. It’s that people now spend so much time living in the world in the sort of alternate reality on their phone where everything is bad.”

As for AI, Hill declares, “I think it’s pretty awful. I don’t want it. I don’t have a use for it. And I hate that it’s being crammed down our throats,” adding that it “is built on a tower of theft of human labor” and will either drive mass unemployment if it succeeds or “catastrophic results for the American economy” if it fails.

His prescription for these woes? (Don’t try to summon a dragon.) Hill points back to his children. “On the microscopic level of individual lives, it’s still possible to find a happy moment with your family and just enjoy ordinary things like fresh air and a sunny afternoon outside,” he says.

“I think if we’re going to get through the next decade, we need those moments to charge back up. … If you can inhabit that actual reality where you’re connected to your community and your family and your friends, and you know, spend some time on the front steps with a beer in the evening and a friend just playing cribbage or something like that, I do think that can be extremely restorative and make you feel like, ‘Oh, maybe it isn’t all that bad after all. Maybe people are still good.’”

Because “there will always be more dragons,” Hill concludes, and we’ll need each other to fight them.

About the Event

An Evening with Joe Hill takes place on Saturday, Nov. 15, at 7pm at the City Opera House in Traverse City and via livestream. Tickets range from $14-$65 (dependent on format and books purchased). In-person tickets can be purchased through the City Opera House, and livestream tickets can be found on the National Writers Series website. For more information, visit nationalwritersseries.org.