King Sorrow

 King Sorrow by Joe Hill, 887 pages.

In 1989 Arthur Oakes' friends come together to go to extreme measures to get him out from under the thumb of drug dealer's who have threatened him into stealing rare books from the college library. Arthur and his friends, mostly too wealthy to have any respect for the impossible, use a journal bound in human skin to summon a dragon to take care of their problem. But as with all deals with dark and dangerous entities, there is a catch, and the six young people are tricked into sacrificing someone to the dragon every year, or else be eaten by the dragon themselves. Over decades they tell themselves they are only killing evil people, and that they are improving the world, but dragons aren't interested in good and the cost only gets heavier.

This was a compelling book, although I have to admit that by the last third or so it got exhausting watching bad things happen to bad people. We spend time in the head of each of the six involved in summoning this dragon, and several of them are frankly pretty terrible. I enjoyed this book, although I think I would have enjoyed it more if it was about 200 pages shorter.