Wait this is Stephen King’s son?!?! What a flex to note that you asked for some editing help from your parents, Tabitha and Stephen King (“ma and da,” if you’re curious) and saying they’ve made everything you’ve written better.
Another quick thought before I forget: how cheeky to note, in-story, three celebrity authors at the book launch of [redacted as spoiler], one of which is Donna Tartt, whose The Secret History this book owes an ENORMOUS debt to.
So perhaps I will start there, which is to say this book is a combination of The Secret History and Arthurian mythology (it took me entirely too long to piece together that Gwen is obviously a take on Guinevere) (right?), which inevitably means that it absolutely hit a very specific venn diagram center in which I definitely live. A team of precocious college students + one townie end up summoning a dragon to deal with (read: kill) a sticky situation, except none of them are Emily Wilde and realize a year later that they’ve actually been tricked into a forever pact–each year, they have to pick a victim for King Sorrow the Dragon or their own lives are forfeit. We then follow them for some thirty- or forty-odd years, as they spiral and/or academia and/or do-gooder to deal with the consequences of being an ethical murderer.
In a book with a giant honking dragon bereft of morality and ravenous for grief and fear, who would have thought that the real villain would be our Elon Musk/Bryan Johnson/Palantir CEO stand-in, and the MAGA podcaster Karen? Each of the original six go through long, emotionally wrenching arcs, but some of them just cause you wrenching. When you commit to a book this long, you’ve basically agreeing to live in a world and sink into its ups and downs, attached to characters but aware that not all of them will live and knowing that it’s not their deaths, it’s having to persevere in spite of their absence that is the most heartbreaking.
Is the book as good as the reviews suggest? No, definitely not. I gave this a four star review because it’s disingenuous to do otherwise–I was engrossed, and basically spent all of Sunday (when I wasn’t joyscrolling through Heated Rivalry content on Threads) (or napping) reading this book on my sofa. But there’s all sorts of quicksand that you have to wade through to get there, and this definitely isn’t for everyone. Arthur’s early-twenties dudebrain around hooking up with Tana and then wanting to hook up with Gwen (in HIGH SCHOOL) is such an unfortunate thing for the book to start with, because I have about -zero- empathy for the plot line of “oh, he just couldn’t help himself he was angry and she wasn’t unwilling and then he felt bad afterwards for the sex and scared of perfectly normal consequences.” That Gwen is forced to be both celibate and live an entirely unimpeachable life as atonement for getting wrapped up in the antics of a bunch of priviledged Ivy League types who hang out with the guy whose house her mother cleans…not my fave either.
But I enjoyed how you think this book is going to be an Arthur-focused tale (both from the perspective of Arthur the character and King Arthur) and it ends up being about Gwen, and her quiet strength, and her ability to realize right from wrong even if she sometimes doesn’t do anything about it. Sunday well spent!
