JOE HILL
The American author on how Friends inspired The One With A Dragon
Words by 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.’”