I read some really great political theory this week.
And unlike Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Politics, this book had a dragon.
Joe Hill’s most recent novel, King Sorrow, takes its main characters and its readers on a scary and suspenseful exploration of the dubious wisdom of the claim that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” That old political saw gets hauled out from the back corner of the basement whenever it seems expedient to make a morally dubious alliance with a stronger power. Hill’s novel, a deliciously gory and smart bit of horror in its own right, exposes the ethical void at the center of such alliances.
[Editor’s Note: There are spoilers ahead.]
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When Arthur Oakes’s mother, a pastor and social justice activist, is convicted for an accidental death that occurred while she was protesting on federal property, she and her son run afoul of the Nighswander clan. Jayne Nighswander, whose mother is an inmate in the same prison, is a violent thief and drug dealer who also prostitutes her youngest sister, Tana. On prison visiting day, when Arthur lends Tana his sweatshirt, Jayne immediately perceives his kindness as weakness and decides to push him around.
When she later discovers that he attends the elite Rackham College and works in its rare book room, she targets him for more than bullying. Unless Arthur steals $60,000 worth of material from the rare book room and hands it to Jayne for resale, her mother will make his mother a target for violence while she is in prison. It’s a tidy little trap, and seeing no way out of it, Arthur complies. His compliance only opens the door for further problems, though, as Jayne can now blackmail him for his previous thefts.
Desperate and guilt ridden, Arthur turns to his friends for help. Allie is the beautiful one—cheery and kind and closeted to appease her very religious parents. Donna and Donavan are twins—one’s driven by anger, and the other by addiction. There’s Colin, the privileged scion of a dissolving family, living with his grandfather who is dying of AIDS. And there’s Gwen, the “townie” friend of these college students: brilliant, in love with Arthur, and the bridge between the ivory tower of Rackham College and the world the Nighswanders inhabit.
When Arthur’s wealthier friends offer their allowances and trust funds to get him off the hook, only Gwen can understand why that won’t work.
“I thought you had to be smart to get into Rackham,” Gwen said. “Don’t you see? They’ll take your money…and still tell Arthur to steal books for them.”
“Why would they do that?” Colin asked. It was, Arthur thought, the first time he had ever seen him perplexed.
“Because it’s fun,” Gwen said. “Because they’re getting off on it! Do you think they’ll be done when they have sixty thousand dollars? They won’t be done until Arthur’s mother is out and they can’t touch her. Don’t give them a single thing they haven’t asked for. You can't horse-trade with these people.”
Gwen is right. Jayne Nighswander has no intention of letting Arthur pay his way out from under her control. The power she has over him is more enticing than the money she can make.
Like college students since the university was first invented, Arthur and his friends respond to his predicament in the only sensible way. They get absolutely obliterated on scotch and weed and—accidentally or not—summon a demon/dragon named King Sorrow from a hellish world called the Long Dark.
As with many decisions made by chemically altered college students, this seems like a great idea at the time. King Sorrow agrees that on Easter he will obliterate the person the group names and that until then he will protect them by giving them magic tattoos they can use to call him over to this world if they are in danger.
He’s terrifying and powerful and incredibly violent. But after all, the enemy of their enemy is their friend. And they have a clear contract. One name. One murder. And protection until then.
But dragon demons are trickier than that, and Arthur and his friends are, it must be said, remarkably dim. It turns out that like a massive, scaly, fire-breathing cat, King Sorrow likes to play with his food before he eats it. The scenes where he tortures Jayne by invading her nightmares and fracturing reality are unforgettable. When Arthur and the others hear about and see the effects of her torment, they begin to regret their connection with King Sorrow and to realize the gravity of what they’ve contracted him to do. They begin to look for ways to worm out of their bargain.
Can they call the dragon off? Not without sacrificing one of themselves, and that’s surely a bad trade. After all, they’re good, and Jayne Nighswander is bad.
What about telling Jayne and her boyfriend to run? Maybe they can get far enough away to be out of the dragon’s range? Could that work? Could it backfire?
‘’We have an agreement, and it binds him as surely as it binds us. We gave him Jayne and Ronnie. If they escape him, escape his wrath—well, then, we didn’t disappoint him, he disappointed us. We aren’t to blame for what he can’t do.“
“Are you sure of that?” Arthur asked.
“Which part?”
“If he can’t reach them, he won’t turn around and chow down on one of us?”
Colin thought it over. “Yess-s-s. That part of the contract seems clear enough.”
Already that contract is looking a lot less desirable than it did the night they agreed to it. Maybe, though, all this guilt they’re feeling isn’t necessary. As Donna points out to Arthur, “you aren’t going to be the reason she dies…King Sorrow is.”
Arthur’s response, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” is a reference to an outburst by Henry II that persuaded several of his knights to murder Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. Arthur is studying to become a medievalist, so the reference is appropriate for him. It is also apposite because the question of how much responsibility Henry II bears for the murder has been a matter of much debate over the centuries. Donna is suggesting that ordering a murder isn’t really the same thing as being a murderer. Arthur is expressing his doubts.
This reference to Henry II and Becket suggests that Hill is aware that his book about a dragon is an extended metaphor about political choices. King Sorrow is a powerful ally, but a dangerous one. Machiavelli warns against such allies in chapter 21 of The Prince, pointing out that, “a prince ought to take care never to make an alliance with one more powerful than himself for the purposes of attacking others, unless necessity compels him, as is said above; because if he conquers you are at his discretion, and princes ought to avoid as much as possible being at the discretion of any one.”
Similarly, Phaedrus’s Fable V warns that “An alliance with the powerful is never to be relied upon…” presenting the story of a cow, goat, and sheep who make an alliance with a lion, only to find that he takes all the shares of the food they catch. “Because my name is Lion, I take the first; the second you will yield to me because I am courageous; then, because I am the strongest, the third will fall to my lot; if anyone touches the fourth, woe betide him.”
The enemy of your enemy is likely to turn against you.
But King Sorrow isn’t just dangerous because of the violence he commits and the way that violence might be turned against anyone at any time. He’s dangerous because of the way that an alliance with him and with his strategies of murder and mayhem changes the people who ally with him.
When Jayne and her boyfriend are slaughtered by King Sorrow in an impressively gory scene in an abandoned drive-in, it briefly seems as if, aside from their crushing guilt, the six friends will be all right. The threat to Arthur is ended and they can get back to living their lives. But King Sorrow reappears a few months later to explain that their bargain is a bargain for life, and that he will require them to select a new victim every Easter for the rest of their lives.
As the years pass and the friends continue to select victims for King Sorrow, Colin persuades them into developing a system for the selection of targets.
“What we need is an Enemies List,” Colin said. “A list of people who are absolutely irredeemable and whose continued existence is toxic.… We want to deal with the tinpot dictators and serial murderers who have evaded retribution and accountability. People who get away with it. I’ll make a spreadsheet.”
It all sounds so reasonable, so plausible. It’s just a continuation of the original reason for calling on King Sorrow—the punishment of the wicked and the protection of the good. But when Gwen protests, Colin’s defense of his plan begins to ring hollow, for her and for the reader.
“You have to decide who’s worth more to the world, Gwen. Us, or some sick serial murderer somewhere.”
“But Colin,” Gwen said, “we’re serial murderers too.”
The enemy of your enemy is likely to turn you into something terrible.
If his fondness for spreadsheets isn’t enough of a clue, I will spoil the twist for you now. Colin may be as evil a being as King Sorrow. His spreadsheet, it turns out, begins as a list of the irredeemable and morphs, in time, into a list of those who are politically inconvenient or who stand in the way of Colin’s growing tech empire. As he puts it, “If there has to be evil in the world then I’d at least like to be in charge of it.”
When the others decide to try to find a way to banish King Sorrow back to the Long Dark and end his increasingly destructive rampages, Colin refuses to give up his access to King Sorrow’s power. Instead, he murders Arthur and names Gwen to King Sorrow as the next victim.
It is not quite clear, and I’m not sure Hill means it to be clear, whether Colin is evil from the beginning, or whether his association with King Sorrow makes him become so. While the other friends seem to stumble haplessly into evil and to remain sickened by it even as it threatens to overtake them, Colin ends the book by welcoming evil with open arms, even seeking another ally—stronger than King Sorrow—to give him more protection and more fire power.
It takes the united efforts of the surviving members of the group, some impressive emergency medicine, and a few magical medieval relics to prevent Colin’s rise to further power and to finally break the hold King Sorrow has over the group. Most of them do not survive. None of them escape unscathed.
Matt Zwolinski recently reminded visitors to this site that “The shared enemy is concentrated, unchecked power, wherever it lives.” King Sorrow reminds us that this is always true, even when we think the power is at our command.
