Joe Hill
Posted: November 3, 2025
_
I met Joe at Forbidden Planet in London just before he was about to start a two hour signing for his new book King Sorrow. And even though time was getting close to 5.00PM when the signing was scheduled to start he took the time to answer a few questions from me in a back room in the bookstore. I didn’t want to use the little time I had to speak about the plot of King Sorrow. Joe has talked about that already in many interviews but I was curious, how come it took him nine years to write it?Joe Hill: It didn’t take nine years to write the book. It was nine years between books, but I wasn’t only working on King Sorrow, I don’t think I started King Sorrow until 2019. I had written two very long books back to back NOS4A2 and The Fireman were both big chonkers and after that I thought ‘I needed to get small again’, you know I needed to work on economy once more. So, I wrote a book of novellas, Strange Weather and I wrote some more short stories which ultimately wound up in Full Throttle. I also have a whole second life as a comic book writer and I wanted to throw myself into that in a big way so, I wound up doing a whole string, a whole slew of comic books. There was another book of Locke & Key, there was a crime comic called Dying Is Easy. There where also a whole selection of comics for DC, most notable Basketful of Heads but also Plunge and Sea Dogs and that was a terrific experience, you know a lot of my pears, a lot of my friends are comic book writers like Brian K Vaughan, Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker who all write multiple titles a month so it was terrific to see if I could do that to, it’s very challenging to meet all those deadlines and to keep up the pace. So, when I actually did settle in to work on King Sorrow, I think I started in very late 2018 or early 2019 and finished the first draft in early 2022, so it was three years. Which is about how long it took to write The Fireman and NOS4A2.
Lilja: Yeah, I remember you teased showing pictures of that huge manuscript online.
Joe Hill: Yeah and I started reading bits of it live all the way back in 2022 but you know the publishing pipeline is a strange thing, I needed to revised the book and then revise it again and they wanted to do a big promotional push for it and you know it’s like planning a major military operation, you have to line things up just so with Barnes & Noble a year in advance and give the marketing team time to work on book animations and the whole ad campaign but that was great because I decided when I turned 50 that I wanted to start writing a book every year, that I wanted to become a book a year writer and see what that would be like so the build up to the release of King Sorrow gave me the time to finish the next novel, Hunger which will be out in 2026. Hopefully. I mean there are some things you can’t control so you hope it will be out in 2026. It’s done in first draft and it seems like it’s possible but you don’t really know until the publishing schedule is firmly set.
Lilja: Will it be a challenge for you to do one book a year for ten years? Are you a fast writer?
Joe Hill: I’m off to a pretty good start right now. I’m working on the book that will follow Hunger in 2027 so I feel I’ve got a pretty good head start. I also think it’s a little bit easier to do more if you do less. So you know trying to write screenplays, comic books and a new novel all at once is a recipe to finish a novel every three years but I largely set aside working with comic books so now it’s just trying to get a novel done each year and trying to get a screenplay done every year. The novel so that I can do a book every year. The screenplay so that I can provide healthcare coverage for my wife and children.Lilja: Is books what you prefer to write?
Joe Hill: I just like playing make believe. It’s all fun. You know I love writing short stories, l love writing novels, I love writing screenplays and comic books. I have enjoyed writing poetry but I’m afraid I’m not very good at it. I think I have written something like three poems in thirty years that I thought had some merit to them so I seem not to have much of an ear for poetry but taking a character with whom I feel some affection and who I think is interesting to explore, a character who is a little bit of a mystery to me and then plopping them down in a gripping scenario of peril will always be interesting regardless of what form I happen to be working in a that moment.
Lilja: You have mentioned that you write on typewriter’s…
Joe Hill: So…I have sort of become this 50-year old guy who is shaking his cane against the 21 century from the safety of his front porch. With every passing year I dislike the technology surrounding us more and more. I didn’t know that was going to happen. When I was a younger guy I was looking forward to the future. I thought the future would be exciting but instead its turned out to be this sort of corporate techno fascist state, surveillance state that I can hardly bear and you know when you get a piece of technology that seems appealing, one day they update the software for it and it doesn’t make sense any more. And I despise what AI is doing to the arts, it feels obscene to have software that just produces imitations of music and so on. It’s right that it’s called Artificial Intelligence because it’s like an artificial color. It’s not real intelligence. It’s like an artificial coloring or artificial sugar or any artificial flavoring. It’s phony and it’s not good for you. So yeah, I wound up writing, I mean this goes back a way, I wound up writing all of The Fireman in longhand, the first draft of that very long book spread across something like seven or eight ledger volumes. I don’t know if I’d ever do that again, that was a pretty big commitment of time to write the whole thing longhand but in the last year I’ve wound up with a stack of typewriters that I particularly like. Manual Olivetti and a pair of IBMs electrics. One of those IBMs used to be my dad’s and I think he did quite a bit of work on it and I found it’s terrifically satisfying to work on them, to write first drafts on them and I said to my parents it’s less like playing make believe or writing and more like operating a nail gun, you know. You just pound away on the keys and the story flies onto the page and there is no going back to fixing things, no second thoughts, no doubts you know, you think ‘I’m just going to write it this way’ and then when it's time to do the second draft and copy it into the computer then I can make it pretty but right now let’s have it fast and ugly. I love that.
Lilja: You mentioned your father and I don’t if you are comfortable talk about that you are Stephen King’s son.
Joe Hill: Sure.
Lilja: I know when you started writing you wanted to make a name for yourself but I noticed that in King Sorrow there are a lot of…
Joe Hill: Stephen King references, a few connections?
Lilja: Yeah.
Joe Hill: Yeah, well you know when I was younger of course I started to write as Joe Hill and I kept it secret about my dad for a few years because I had a lot of insecurities and I felt…I really needed to know that when I sold a story I sold it for the right reasons, because someone liked what I had done and felt they had to publish it not because I had a famous dad and might do something for him some day and even after it came out about my dad I would say for some time I would sort of push aside questions about my dad and the conversation about him. I would try to limit or minimize that a bit because I wanted to create my own artistic space you know but I’ve been writing for 25 years now and I’ve had some stories that I think people like and I feel pretty good about the work I have done and the truth is that I love my dad and I’m a huge Stephen King fan and you know I want to have some room to celebrate his work and celebrate my moms work you know. I think they are both extraordinary writers so I’m a little bit more comfortable talking about it than I used to and I don’t worry so much about it.
Lilja: It was interesting to see all those connections in there.Joe Hill: Yeah, I had some fun with it.
Lilja: As a Stephen King fan…
Joe Hill: Yeah, I also think that in a way my books are in conversation with my father’s books, certainly The Fireman and King Sorrow where in conversation with the stuff that my dad had done and in Full Throttle we wrote some stories together. You know there are no writers that can come close to the influence my dad and my mother had on my work. The whole question of influence…the standard question when you meet a writer is what books inspired you? But for me it’s almost a silly conversation. There are books that I love like True Grit by Charles Portis or The Once and Future King by T.H. White. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien was very much an influence on King Sorrow but these are in terms of shining an influence on my life you know. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are like candles and my mom and dad are like spotlights; you know the difference between the power of influence is fairly large.
Lilja: To round of the interview, can you tell me something about the next book, Hunger?
Joe Hill: Yeah, so Hunger is in one sense the kind of story I feel very comfortable writing. It’s a ghost story and it’s very much a horror novel. In some way the last third of the book is THE most horror novel I have ever written, you know the most, goes the deepest into the sort of horror genre. In another sense though it’s way outside my comfort zone. It’s a historical novel set in the 18th century during the siege of Boston 1776 and the heroes of the story are all English soldiers and in some why the scariest thing in the book are the Americans. I have tried, I think of my od numbered books and straight down the middle horror novels, entertainment in the mode of the stuff my dad writes, very much in the mode of the Stephen King novel. My even numbered novels tend to be where I step outside that comfortable zone and do something different, try to challenge myself in some fresh way or experiment with genres in some way I haven’t before. So, with Horns you had horror but it was also, it also played with comedy and satire to some degree. The Fireman, all though it owes something to The Stand is very much a kind of science fictional work, sort of an apocalyptical thriller as opposed to a straight horror novel and then Hunger which will be my sixth book is a historical fiction which I have never done before all though when King Sorrow begins it’s 1989 so at this point that’s 35 years ago so we’re almost getting into historical fiction there. Yeah, yeah, I got old.
Lilja: Yeah, we all did.
Joe Hill: It might seem it’s historical to some people but to me it’s just my life LAUGH
Lilja: OK, thank you! LAUGH
Joe Hill: Thank you, I enjoyed it. Good Questions!
How about that? I’m very pleased with my interview with Joe and it seems he was too. And as you can see we have a lot to look forward to from Joe in the future. Personally, I’m very eager to see what he’ll come up with for the next 10 years starting with Hunger in 2026.
