JOE HILL

The American author on how Friends inspired The One With A Dragon

- Jonathan Wright

SOME INTERVIEWS BEGIN WITH FORMAL introductions. Others simply get going. SFX's meeting with Joe Hill has fallen into the latter category after the writer, full of energy, has bustled into an office at his publishers and just begun talking. This is the point at which there's a fire alarm test. “I am not surprised that at the beginning of our interview we would get a warning about a possible fire breaking out in the building,” says Hill dryly. King Sorrow is “a very flamey book”.

Why is it that? It’s because King Sorrow is a dragon. “You can’t write about dragons without writing about fire,” adds Hill. “I mean, inevitably. They're born in volcanoes. And you know, they do breathe it. Early on in the book, King Sorrow remarks that modern people don’t burn the way people in the Middle Ages did. He thinks they smell different; they smell like bacon and maple syrup now when they cook, and he says, ‘That's processed sugars for you, mate.”

As Hill hints here, King Sorrow is shot through with dark humour. It’s also his most ambitious book to date, an 800-plus-page doorstopper - “Don’t drop it on your foot. I won't be held responsible for any broken toes” - structured almost as a series of linked novellas. Hill is a fan of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, “which is wonderful, because you get one book, but you're actually getting six books”.