Dragonian bargains

Dragons hold a central place in the world's mythologies and modern popular culture. In his introduction to the Penguin Book of Dragons, Scott G. Bruce writes that "our infatuation with these creatures is deeply rooted in the distant past," and that they've endured in all their forms because they are "the test against which we measure the limits of the heroes we venerate... [persisting] in our imagination both as flesh-and-blood monsters and as powerful metaphors for sin and other destructive forces."

That's an apt way to describe Hill's wyrm, King Sorrow, and the epic he constructs around him: an awesome and powerful force of nature that serves both as a literal antagonist for his band of unlikely heroes and as a representation of the rage and problems that we're facing throughout the world.

Hill kicks off this sprawling story in 1989, when a kid named Arthur Oakes visits his mother in prison. Incarcerated after a protest went wrong, she soon runs afoul of one of a fellow inmate, who directs her daughter to make sure things are straightened out. Threatening his mother, they force Arthur to make it up to them: steal some valuable books from his college's special collections, in the hopes that they can make a profit.

Initially reluctant, Arthur ends up taking a handful of rare books from the collection, including one bound in human skin. He quickly realizes that his problems won't end with a paid-off debt: Jayne Nighswander is going to continue to squeeze him for as much as she can manage, because she holds that power over him. Once his friends – Colin Wren, Gwen Underfoot, Donna and Van McBride, and Allie Shiner – realize what's happening and after a night of supernatural speculation, they decide to take some drastic action to solve the problem: summon a dragon to take care of the problem, as one does.

Brought into the world, King Sorrow is a force to be reckoned with, and he's more than happy to help the group eliminate Jayne. King Sorrow isn't just looking for a human to cook and eat; he spends weeks appearing in his selected quarry's mind, ratcheting up the paranoia and fear and dread, seasoning them for when he eventually catches up with them at an abandoned drive-in movie theater and scorching them his fiery breath.

But like the best dragons, King Sorrow isn't just a weapon to be turned out against the people hounding Arthur, and it isn't until long after they've entered into their bargain with him that they fully understand the weight of what they've done. He isn't content to just consume the one drug dealer and her boyfriend who crossed Arthur and his friends; he wants to be fed and long-term. Per their agreement, the group has to come up with a new person for Sorrow to kill, by Easter, or he'll eat one of them.

Arthur's friends are an unlikely bunch: Colin's the nephew of a well-connected government spook who goes on to a lucrative career as a governmental contractor / tech bro, Donna and Van coming from a wealthy political family, and goes on to become a right-wing commentator and whimsical artist (respectively), Gwen is a townie who goes on to become an EMT, while Allie is a nervous, closeted alcoholic. Where a such a group of friends might drift apart with enough time and space, their summoning of King Sorrow keeps them locked together and in touch, forming relationships that none can quite shake, and which Hill's able to utilize when he wants to give the thumbscrews another twist.

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As they settle into a routine – one of them is to select someone to die each year – Hill sends his sprawling story into high gear and we follow the gang as they deal with this heavy task that they've brought upon themselves.

Each of them approaches this burden differently. Gwen, in love with Arthur, finds out the hard way that you can't enter into a bargain with a dragon lightly, and ends up using her turns to spare the people who she's caring for a long and painful death from illness, starting with Colin's AIDS-infected uncle. Others are more willing to utilize Sorrow's powers: Colin approaches their duty with gusto, rising through the ranks of government and business through family connections, happily sends the dragon after terrorist threats to the country and eventually, his own interests, picking them off one by one with dragon fire.

The others pick their own sides, often going along with Colin and his approach, or enduring it while they try and figure a way out: Arthur, the most academically-minded of the group, spends his life researching language and mythology, searching for a way to slay King Sorrow in order to get out of their pact and spare others from their horrifying fates.

This is a big tome of a book, and as Hill jumps forward years and decades from adventure to adventure, he takes the time to really flesh each one of them out. We follow Allie and Van in 1995 when they board a flight to London to try and take out a violent Christian fundamentalist before the story takes on a paranoid spy tale when the government gets wind of something happening the world's worst people and Van and Donna are snatched off a street in 2000 to interrogate them. From there, we're off to England to follow Arthur and Colin in 2006 on a fantastic, tragic quest to try and find a mythical weapon to slay King Sorrow, and the US in 2016 when he brings everyone and their conflicting journeys, motivations, and flaws to a heartbreaking head before bringing everything to a close by 2022. This is no small feat: in a lesser author's hands, King Sorrow could have been a muddled, meandering mess, but despite its girth and indulgence, it's a story that moves quickly.

Throughout this round robin of characters and their exploits, Hill explores a central theme around dragons: bargaining with one is unwise and often exacts a heavy, often unexpected toll from those foolish enough to do so. He's not the first to do so: J.R.R. Tolkien's Smaug from The Hobbit is clearly a huge influence here, known for both his destruction and clever riddle-making under the Lonely Mountain, but I also couldn't help but think of Lev Grossman's The Magician King and his depictions of dragons as being this powerful forces that are so advanced that they're difficult for humans to really comprehend.

If dragons are a test for the heroes who go up against them, King Sorrow proves to be a trial that puts Arthur and his friends through a pressure cooker. As they enter into their bargain as naive young adults, they think that they've stumbled upon a quick and easy solution to take care of the people who're threatening their wellbeing. What they find instead is that they're ill-equipped to handle the responsibility and toll that orchestrating murder year in and year out will take on their souls.

Early on, they hope that they are doing the world a solid by trying to pick off humanity's worst offenders. That's not always the case, even when they do order the assassination of terrorist leaders or criminals: they find that there's no end to their task; there's always people that they'll miss or catch people in the crossfire.

King Sorrow's bargain lays bear our frailties and short-sighted nature, and how susceptible we are to relying on the reality in front of us, even though we're fully capable of understanding the cost in the abstract. Hill plays out the cost of their decisions in particularly heartbreaking and tragic ways: their attempts to get out of the bargain backfire, their activities bring them unwanted attention from all directions, and they're ultimately forced to kill people, over and over again.

But it's not all Faustian bargains all the time: it's what Hill's characters do with their circumstances that ultimately determines whether or not they survive, and it's here that we see their true natures emerge. Arthur – as his name suggests – turns out to have a heroic streak while Colin gives in to the temptation that this power grants him. I'm reminded a bit of a quote from The Lord of the Rings: "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us," as each member of the group has to decide how to deal with the consequences of their bargain: making the best of things for the world, or themselves.

Hill's dragon makes for a good mechanism to think about the state of the world and the decisions that we often find ourselves forced to make. None of them night be as drastic as selecting someone to kill each year on Easter, but there are plenty of destructive forces that we face in the world, some nearly as daunting as a fire-breathing dragon.