March 2026

Hello! Here was March:

King Sorrow by Joe Hill

In 1988, Arthur Oakes is a senior at Rackham College in Maine when he forms two important relationships: one with a group of friends who meet at the home of one member’s wealthy elderly grandfather to perform semi-whimsical experiments in the occult; the other with a family of crooks whose matriarch happens to be staying at the same nearby women’s prison as Arthur’s mother, a pastor who is in prison after her act of peaceful civil disobedience resulted in an accidental death. When the crooks threaten to harm Arthur’s mother to coerce him into stealing university artifacts for them, Arthur and his friends eventually find the only logical way out of the situation: using an occult artifact from the university’s special collections to summon a dragon into the world to eat their tormentors. It works, but they get more than they bargained for, as the dragon, named King Sorrow, informs them that this is an ongoing relationship, and they will need to designate a new sacrifice for King Sorrow each year, or else one of them will be his next meal. Over the next few decades, the friends grow up and branch out, but are forever held together by their annual obligation to cause someone’s death. Some of the group are traumatized by it, others take satisfaction and benefit from it, but King Sorrow always gets what he’s owed.

This nearly 900-page cat-squasher of a book was a very fun and surprisingly quick read, despite its length, a fantasy/horror/thriller with mostly well-developed and interesting characters. It takes a little while to get going — when your cover and synopsis make clear this is about friends who summon a dragon, it’s hard not to feel a little impatient as you work through the first 150 or so dragonless pages — but the story, told in roughly 5 different episodes scattered over about 30 years, is full of dark mischief as King Sorrow manipulates the friends into maximum discomfort and conflict, putting them in awful situations they have to work their way out of, often cleverly, occasionally tragically. It’s a book with real momentum, a propulsive dread, as the friends try to figure out how to nominate people for death in a way that won’t lead to worse consequences than they’re trying to solve.

There is a moment about 2/3 of the way through this book where it shifted from “great” to just “very good,” where there’s a sort of second antagonist and the book expands its scope. I understand why the author steered it in the direction he did, but I wish he had chosen to tell a slightly different story. Some of the scope change involves the friends becoming very prominent figures influencing world events, and leading our fictional dragon fun to be used as explanation for real world tragedies in a way that did not sit well with me for a couple of reasons. First, the stakes for these characters were already high enough for me to care about what happened, expanding their role in the world to make them prominent national figures who might be interviewed on TV feels over-the-top and makes the characters a little less relatable, a little less real. Second, invoking specific world events and major political figures in this kind of fiction is always a dicey proposition for me, both because it can feel disrespectful to real victims of real events and also because if you tell me that the cause of some disaster I know about in real life was actually a dragon, my immediate reaction was “no it wasn’t.” In theory I respect the choice of an author to make things bigger, but if all our core team stayed relatively normal, if somewhat haunted and troubled, people as they aged and if the final conflict was not set up by some mustache-twirling villainy but rather a natural progression of conflicts that were visible throughout, it all would’ve landed a bit better for me.

Funny as it is to say about a 900 page book, I think this might have benefited from being longer. Checking in with these characters every 4 or 5 years means that a lot of the relationships develop in the background, in the spaces between the pages. Some of those relationships are still meaningful and legible despite those jumps, but a few of them didn’t scan to me. The most egregious example of this is a character who becomes entangled with the crew maybe halfway through the book, appears for maybe 30 pages as a background character in some events that take place over just a couple of hours, pops up again in a later chapter for like 10 pages to play a minor role in another event, and then near the end of the book meets up with the main crew while saying stuff like “obviously you are all my very best friends and I would die for you” and everyone else is like “and obviously we all feel the same way about you” and I was like “who are you again???” I suppose this is somewhat tied to my previous complaint — if most of the cast had stayed in the orbit of Rackham College, which would not be that difficult to justify, rather than having many of them achieve levels of fame and significance, it would be easier to accept an overflowing web of interactions over the years deepening their bond.

I suppose if I am a bit fixated on where the book had some missteps, it’s because I otherwise thought it was excellent. The occult horror angle of the story was very well done, striking the right balance between giving some explanation of how things were happening without belaboring the point and trying to convince you magic is real. And, perhaps it’s the lawyer in me, but I enjoy a story where the crux of the conflict relies on coming up with the most devious interpretation and application of the specific terms of an agreement. This parsing of unintended consequences of seemingly simple commitments can easily be done badly or obviously, and it felt like neither here. As with the horror elements of the book, Hill has thought things through and explained them well enough to work without going too far.

I had heard some strong praise of this book, but was a little reluctant to get into this book due to its giant size. Then my book club made it the pick for our March meeting, which was enough to prompt me to bite the bullet and dig into it. And I’m really glad I did. It’s not as long as the page length suggests, and it’s very well paced.

Johannes Cabal: The Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard

Johannes Cabal: The Necromancer opens with Johannes talking his way into Hell, despite being alive, because he wants to make a deal with The Devil. Cabal had previously sold his soul to the devil to gain magical powers over the dead. He now wants an audience with the Devil to negotiate a deal to get his soul back. After some banter, they work out a deal: if Cabal can get 100 people to sign their souls away to the devil, Cabal can have his soul back. To help Cabal on his way, he receives control of a haunted carnival that he can bring from town to town as a means of luring in unsuspecting visitors to entrap. Johannes enlists his brother, Horst, who is something of a victim of Johannes’ earlier experiments in necromancy, along with some other undead companions to run the carnival and seek out people who can be persuaded to sell their soul. Each town brings a new challenge and often other mystical complications that Cabal’s necromancy might assist with. But as the year runs on and as the devil doesn’t play fair, Cabal has to ask himself how much he’s willing to do to save his soul.

First, it literally did not occur to me until the moment I sat down to write this that, between King Sorrow and Johannes Cabal, I spent March reading two different books about Faustian bargains. Honestly I have no idea how I managed to do that without it ever even occurring to me. Weird!

In any case, this book represented to me a rare failure of a favored technique: judging a book by its cover. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I have often found really great books because I liked their covers. This isn’t even especially counter-intuitive: a good cover is coming up with an intriguing image to represent what’s on the inside of the book, so as long as what they’re trying to sell is reasonably related to what’s actually in the book, covers are a perfectly reasonable way to find a book you might like. Unfortunately in this case, the book just wasn’t as good as I’d hoped. I didn’t hate it, it was just okay, but really, I confess that, on hearing some praise for the book and seeing a picture of the cover, I thought “oh, it’s about a dapper skeleton man who has adventures, that sounds fun!” Readers, I am sorry to report that Johannes Cabal is not a dapper skeleton man, he is just a regular man, and IMO, that is just not as fun as the story I had imagined in my head on looking at the cover. I was hoping for something like Manfred, one of the brightspots of the somewhat disappointing recent Dragon Age game, but I did not get any of that. I don’t know, I just wanted a silly skeleton man, is that so much to ask?

The tone of the story is going for dark comedy, something like a Terry Pratchett, but it’s not as wacky or as fun as I was expecting. It fumbles the tone in part because it seems undecided about how dark of a story this is and whether Johannes is an honorable person or not. It is often suggested that Johannes is only trying to claim souls from people who are plainly already damned, so he’s not really doing any harm, but when his limits are tested, the source of the conflict is not clear to me: does he actually care about people and not want to cause harm? or is he ruthlessly committed to recovering his soul at any cost? It’s easy to understand why someone would be torn between those two positions, but I never felt like I learned enough about Cabal to understand why he would care much either way. The hero of the story disappointed me both because he was not a skeleton man as I had hoped and because he wasn’t as fleshed-out as I needed. Oh, the irony!

There are some fun encounters Cabal has, some satisfying takedowns of genuinely bad people who are tricked into signing their souls away, some interesting potential challengers to Cabal’s schemes, and a few amusing attempts by the Devil to screw with Cabal. But these individual vignettes didn’t work in service of a larger story that interested me. Most disappointing of all, as Johannes seeks to resolve his bet with the devil once and for all, the whole plot is resolved in a way that asks us to think Cabal did something very clever when really, it just wasn’t that clever at all, and certainly not clever enough to overcome the ultimate mythical trickster. Frankly, I was disappointed in the devil. Shame on you, devil. Do better. Anyway, this one was kind of a bust. It’s the first book in a series that has five full installments plus another seven novellas and short stories, and I did not find myself tempted in the least to read more. Ah well.

Wanderstop by Ivy Road

Wanderstop is the next game from Davey Wreden, who created the hilarious game The Stanley Parable (a game where an authoritative British narrator attempts to narrate what you’re doing and either railroads you into a strange story or gets increasingly apoplectic about your failure to do as he says, a really impressive amount of adaptive narration) and The Beginner’s Guide (a sort of narrative experience presented as exploring a reclusive game creator’s different half-finished pieces of games from over his career in a way that teaches you something about what the creator was going through, an interesting meditation on creativity and expression and authorial intent). Wreden is a creator who makes games to be about something, which is always the kind of game I’m going to keep an eye out for.

Wanderstop is a game that is plainly about career burnout and the cost of striving for success. You play as Alta, some kind of fantasy-style swordfighter who pursued a career in some kind of gladiator combat competition and achieved unparalleled success before a few failures in a row left her humiliated and frustrated and unsure of how to continue. She set off to find her old trainer to reclaim her top form, but finds herself lost and weakened to the point of utter exhaustion outside a mystical tea shop, run by the cheerful and slightly dopey Boro, who encourages her to rest and recover at the tea shop and shows her how to cultivate and brew different teas. The gameplay involves you collecting seeds, clearing out debris, cultivating different varieties of plants for creating tea infusions, and meeting a strange assortment of tea shop guests and brewing the right teas for them based on their personalities and their needs. The message of Wanderstop is that Alta has pursued success over everything else in her life and it hasn’t made her happy, that she needs to slow down, sit in contemplation, and connect with others. It’s encouraging the player to take a meditative approach, and the mechanics try to work with this - sometimes, you just don’t have an objective, sometimes you don’t really have a way to figure out what to give someone, you can just throw some different fruits and spices and teas into a pot and give it to someone and see what they think. It’s very cute and colorful, with some very well-written bits of narrative as people reflect on their lives while drinking the tea that you’ve made them, and there is a truly hilarious sequence involving customers who, despite being this fantastical world full of animalistic creatures and fantasy magic, are little businessmen in suits who keep showing you different inane and absurd PowerPoint presentations about life in business. It’s really very funny.

There was a lot to enjoy in this, but my overwhelming takeaway is that it was just too long. Seeing the story all the way through ended up taking me about 13 hours when I really think it would have been much better off as like a 3-4 hour experience. As much as I respect and appreciate the game’s message about taking your time and not being overly goal-oriented, that did not stop me from feeling frustrated at various points in the game where the game was deliberately withholding from me the next parts of the story and any other checklist-y mechanical goals, requiring me to just kind of wander and fiddle with things for a bit before they decided to trigger the next guest or the next phase of the game. “Ah ha, that just proves me right, you are too interested in achieving ‘progress’ and ‘results,’ you need to learn to let go!” says the game to this feeling. “Yeah but if I want to mediate I can go meditate, I’m playing a video game right now because I want to experience an interesting story and/or solve some puzzles or overcome some challenge, and that you have arbitrarily decided that I’m not allowed to do either of those things for a bit is annoying!” is my response. I don’t know. It really is a sweet game, a cute little world presented to you with some fun characters and situations. And I will never forget those ridiculous little businessmen, really a top-tier bit. There’s just a bit too much of this at too languid of a pace for me to recommend it.

Quicker thoughts:

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms on HBO: I wasn’t sure I was up for a new Game of Thrones spinoff series, but this was a shockingly warm and pleasant adventure. There are still a few sharp twists and a brutal moment or two, but for the most part, this show was sweet and endearing in a way I never would’ve expected out of the Game of Thrones world. I’d previously thought about reading the series of novellas this was based on but wasn’t really sold on it. After watching this season, which is based on the first of three novellas in this series, I’m now definitely planning to get to all of these novellas at some point.

Best Served Cold by Rogueside: Just as I read two books about people making deals with dark forces, I also played two games that involved serving people drinks. At least I noticed this coincidence at the time! Anyway, Best Served Cold is a detective visual novel game set in a speakeasy in a fictional European-style country amid some a sort of cold war scenario. You play the bartender, and through four different cases, a murder has happened that touches on the speakeasy and both the victim and the perpetrator are likely customers of the bar. A snotty and striving police detective coerces you into helping, and soon you’re mixing drinks for the patrons and subtly and not-so-subtly asking them questions to figure out whodunnit. It’s got a very nice classic animation style to the characters and there are some interesting ideas to the mechanics as you figure out each guest’s drink preferences and balance the need to give them enough alcohol to loosen their lips while still being able to ask the questions you need of them. And some of the mysteries are pretty fun, with some clever and thoughtful little twists as the series of cases you work through builds into a larger story. But this, too, was a bit slower than I wanted, taking me well over 20 hours to complete, and despite building towards a comprehensive ending, it felt extremely rushed at the end to the point of feeling unfinished. And selecting and mixing drinks really didn’t add much more than hassle. To mix a drink, there’s a little minigame where you trace a path in a sort of constellation of ingredients while a little figure chases behind you and if it catches you, you’ve mixed the drink poorly, except it’s basically impossible to fail. It’s a pleasant set of mysteries with varied characters in an interesting world, but, it didn’t fully come together.

A song I heard for the first time this month that I listened to over and over - Acolyte by Slaughter Beach, Dog

That’s it for March!