Joe Hill breaks down the Stephen King references in his new novel

Seeing Stephen King references pop up in Joe Hill’s latest horror novel, King Sorrow, is a fun surprise for the reader — but in another sense it’s not that surprising at all.

Hill, a successful horror writer and King’s son, started out his career under a different surname from his father in order to remain anonymous.

“I didn’t want to get published because I had a famous parent, and I was very insecure,” he told Mashable. “I needed to know for my self worth, that when I sold something, I sold for the right reasons.”

Hill’s identity became public knowledge after the publication of his first book, and in the decades since he’s become increasingly comfortable with the association. He’s spoken about his father in author’s notes and co-wrote two stories with him for his 2019 collection Full Throttle. Now, in his latest novel, there are references to at least three of his dad’s most famous works.

“In a way, we are all the children of Stephen King.”

“King Sorrow, even more than any of my other books, is in conversation with the work of Stephen King,” Hill explained. “I love my dad’s work, and I kind of love celebrating my dad. I’m a huge Stephen King fan, too. The other thing though that I realized, you know, I had a thought a while back, which is, I write horror fiction, and me and every other person who writes horror fiction, in a way, are all the children of Stephen King. We’re all Stephen King’s kids. But I might be the only one who can get away with actually sticking some of his stuff into my book.”

We asked Hill to break down the different Stephen King references in King Sorrow, and why he decided to include them.

The Dead Zone

Early on in the novel, the six main friends have a conversation that directly references Johnny Smith and Greg Stillson, two of the main characters in King’s 1979 novel The Dead Zone — an exchange Hill described as “amusing but also highly functional.”

“It’s more than an Easter egg,” said Hill, explaining that he wanted his novel to be about a cross-section of America and was looking for a way to position each of his characters on a different point on the political spectrum. A reference to Greg Stillson — a populist right wing politician in King’s The Dead Zone who has been compared to Donald Trump — was the perfect vehicle for this.

“I saw in talking about the acts of John Smith from The Dead Zone an amusing opportunity to position them each very clearly for the reader about what are their views,” Hill said. “And I feel like in a page, by the time that page is over, you’re like, oh, I get where every single one of these characters is coming from.”

The Dark Tower

During the chapter of King Sorrow where the main characters first summon the novel’s titular dragon, they each take part in their own ritual that forms part of a larger ceremony. Arthur Oakes, the driving character in this part of the book, pursues a ghost through the snow outside, and Hill’s description — “The dark man fled across the snow and Arthur Oakes followed” — is a subtle altering of one of King’s most famous lines of fiction from The Dark Tower series.

“I think the rhythms of the original line, ‘The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed,’ is the great opening line of any genre story,” Hill said. “And there’s some kind of music in it. There’s some kind of thumpity-thumpity-thumpity-thumpity. I wouldn’t be surprised if you studied it and it turned out to be iambic pentameter. […] So I think it was just, oh, I like the music of that. I’m going to use that here. I’m going to borrow the music of that.”

Pet Sematary

Hill went on to say that later on in King Sorrow, during a section where two of the main characters are led into the lair of a troll, there’s a callback to King’s 1983 novel Pet Sematary that some readers don’t catch — a line that echoes something Jud Crandall says to Louis Creed as he’s leading him to the infamous cemetery.

“When Stuart Finger, the troll, leads Colin and Arthur down to Arthur’s cave, he says something very similar,” said Hill.

Ultimately, Hill views all of these references less as Easter eggs, and more as a conversation between stories.

“One of the great things about literature, as I understand it, is the way stories can respond to other stories,” he said. “One of the powerful things stories can do is have conversations with other stories. And I feel like everything I’ve ever written has, in one way or another, been continuing a conversation that I had with some other writer when I was reading their book.”

King Sorrow is available now in bookstores and online retailers.

​Mashable