Cowboys, Dragons, and the Apocalypse

Review Round-up: “Tom’s Crossing,” “King Sorrow,” and “The End of the World as We Know It”

I didn’t quite hit my reading goal last year, in terms of the raw number of books read. But it wasn’t for lack of reading. In fact, if we’re going by pages and word count, 2025 is the most voracious I’ve read in years thanks to my choice to load up with some massive doorstoppers.

A couple of those were re-reads: Infinite Jest in preparation for a podcast I recorded last spring, followed by the complete and uncut The Stand that I re-read for the umpteenth time since I was a kid (we’ll get to the why of that choice in a minute).

I do love a massive novel. When one clicks, it transforms into a journey. It can be a fantasy, a space opera, a horror classic, or a journey through the American subconscious. No matter how different they may be, each dives into characters, situations, and locations you don’t want to see end but you can’t help racing toward the conclusion. They’re the equivalent of a heavy blanket and cozy chair on a snowy day.

Or an oversized umbrella and sun-drenched beach, if that’s your happy place.

Tom’s Crossing, by Mark Z. Danielewski

Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a post-modern, meta horror novel from 2000, was a sensation and still reigns as one of the most experimental and difficult books in the genre. The story of a house that’s bigger on the inside unfolds as a surreal tapestry through a story inside the story, inside a documentary film, inside footnoted research. His use of typography and layout are an intrinsic part of the story and have become near synonymous with his reputation as a writer.

I haven’t read it since its debut so I would be hard pressed to provide a summary without cribbing from Wikipedia. But certain images and scenes, full of dread and foreboding, have stuck with me over the years. Danielewski is a distinctive writer, regardless of the typesetting and layout shenanigans (which I enjoyed, though they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea) and the idea of him taking on the western genre appealed to me.

Tom’s Crossing is Danielewski’s 1,200-page odyssey through a harsh yet beautiful mountain range in 1982 Orvop (doubling for Provo), Utah. Despite the length, the plot appears straightforward. Kalin March, the teen son of a single mother who recently moved them to Orvop in an ongoing search for stability, finds himself as a topsider-wearing outcast in a cowboy-booted high school. Unexpectedly, he befriends the popular Tom Gatestone, son of a prosperous and prominent Mormon family, over their shared love of two near-forgotten horses that are destined for slaughter. The two boys hatch a plan to save the horses by riding them into the mountains and setting them free. When Tom unexpectedly dies of cancer, Kalin promises him he will lead the horses to freedom at Tom’s Crossing.

That sounds like a spoiler but it’s not. Tom dies in the first few pages and the rest of the novel follows Kalin — a preternaturally gifted rider who also harbors a darker second gift — as he attempts an arduous journey through rockslides and ice, all the while pursued and hounded by the villainous Orwin Porch, patriarch of another powerful (but feared rather than respected) Mormon family who has falsely accused Kalin of murdering the youngest of his brood of sons.

Danielewski lets you know the general destination of the plot from the first line: “Hard to figure out how so much awful horror could’ve started out with just them two horses and not a one yet named….” He repeatedly makes clear that a bloodbath is coming — the tension comes from following these heavily fated characters through tribulations that swing Kalin between exaltation and near despair. It’s a western at heart, not a horror novel, but horror lies as a constant between the lines.

While Danielewski only briefly dabbles in some minor typography — a silkily curved line of text regarding a snake, for example — Tom’s Crossing’s narrative focuses more on how people use art to interpret and understand the world around them. From the first page of the novel, townsfolk create paintings, poems, sculptures, and stories about Kalin’s quest and final confrontation with Porch, their voices stretching from 1982 to the mid-21st century. The name of the book’s “author” is obscured on the title and copyright pages — it’s a journey and puzzle in itself to determine who the near-omniscient, time-spanning narrator actually is.

I’ll note here that I’m not a western fan. I find most western films boring and I’ve never cracked a novel by any giants of the genre. But 200 pages into Tom’s Crossing I realized I was so engrossed I hadn’t taken any notes since the first few pages. Every character, no matter how prominent or incidental, is drawn with exceptional care and detail. Every scene is crafted with meticulousness that could overwhelm but instead illuminates just how broad Danielewski’s canvas is. And while much of what happens is violent and horrific, this remains an adventure story at heart.

Tom’s Crossing ultimately tied for my favorite book of 2025, alongside Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. They both deal with the trauma inflicted on the indigenous tribes of the west, though to different degrees and from vastly different perspectives. I consider myself lucky I got to read them both so close to each other. Perhaps there’s hope for me and the western genre, after all.

King Sorrow, by Joe Hill

My first novel by Joe Hill was N0S4A2, which I luckily picked up before I knew he was the son of Stephen King. My feelings on so-called nepo babies have softened over the years but a part of me will always be a young writer convinced that it’s just unfair for some people to have such a head start on the rest of us.

Then I got older and more fully understood that’s just how the world works, through money and connections and influence. Though I admit I still have a little kernel of bitterness as a person who came from none of those.

Still, we can’t control who we were born to and in the end we all should be judged on what we do, not where we popped out of. And over the years Hill has proven to be a solid horror writer in his own right. Which makes it funnier that his latest novel, King Sorrow, is a pure homage to the massive horror-fantasy tomes that made his father one of the most successful writers in history.

Back in 1989, student Arthur Oakes finds himself ensnared in a criminal plot to steal rare books from is college library. He bands together with his friends to bring a powerful being into existence — the dragon King Sorrow — to free him from his tormentors. That freedom comes with a price: Every year at Easter the group must choose a person to die or else King Sorrow will devour them instead. They find ways — some of them reluctantly, some with gusto — to choose a suitably abhorrent annual sacrifice.

But King Sorrow is a loquacious trickster who delights in crafting linguistic traps to bait his keepers into their own demise.

In many ways, this is a Gen X version of King’s novels that deal with Boomer angst (mainly Vietnam and the Kennedy assassination) and it’s always nice to have my generational cohort find a seat at the culture table. Still, Hill firmly plants himself in his father’s world with references that his characters in the same timeline as his father’s early novel The Dead Zone and a riff on Firestarter. Generally, this all works pretty well, though a few times it dips into the sweaty, as when he notes of a nighttime drive, “It was full dark, no stars.”

There are a number of set pieces throughout the book as the characters slowly break apart under the pressure of their Easter duty. One in particular stands out: King Sorrow tricks one of the group onto a transatlantic 747 flight that the dragon stalks in the air. If she can’t murder a specific passenger on the flight, then King Sorrow will tear the plane from the sky. It’s a tense and often funny sequence that ultimately lays down many of the plot points for the latter half of the book.

Despite the 800-plus pages, King Sorrow moves along a sustained clip, though it flags here and there as it navigates a fairly large cast of characters with shifting allegiances and secret alliances. Hill isn’t afraid to let some of his main characters be somewhat terrible — and a couple ultimately outright monstrous. There is another villain, related to the initial book-theft scheme, who hovers around the edges of the narrative in a very King-ian way, especially because that villain’s denouement is anticlimactic.

If you’re missing this style of novel from King as he continues his focus on crime novels and Holly Gibney, then Joe Hill has put together a healthy dose of the classic for you.

The End of the World as We Know It, edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene

As you can tell, even when I wasn’t reading Stephen King last year I was still kind of reading Stephen King.

Case in point, The End of the World as We Know It, an original anthology of stories from a wide selection of current horror writers all taking place in the world of King’s magnum opus, The Stand. I had been looking forward to this since I first heard of it — I actually pre-ordered, which I rarely do. The Stand was one of the earliest King novels I read, my mom’s Literary Guild book club edition that had been beaten within an inch of its life when loaned out to a family friend.

I was horrified that someone could do that to a hardback book.

I was also horrified by The Stand, in the best way. What appealed to me most, and still does, are the science-fiction aspects of a massive plague sweeping the world. The first half or so of that original version of The Stand were what brought me back to it multiple times as a kid — I was fascinated by the interconnected tick-tock of a man-made disease spreading through America and across the world, another story of man’s folly with technology. The latter half of the book where it morphs from science fiction into Christian supernatural horror is compelling but lesser, to me.

And, yes, I’ve read and re-read the complete and uncut edition from 1990, which I appreciate for packing in even more of the horror of the epidemic itself. I re-read it again after The End of the World as We Know It, just on an urge. It was the first time I’d revisited it since covid and, yep, it hits different now.

A collection of stories set in King’s apocalyptic world is a good idea because such a massive canvas gives space for so many approaches and styles. Unfortunately, too many of the authors stick to a purely American story of a world-wide apocalypse. That’s understandable in King’s original story, although even he hints at the possibilities of the broader world in The Stand when Randall Flagg, the Dark Man, muses briefly that there may be others like him in other places and nations. None of the stories in this collection pick up on that idea, sticking instead to a U.S.-centric focus where the rest of the world dreams of the Dark Man and Mother Abigail but don’t figure into the grand battle

.

That’s not to say there aren’t interesting takes here, there certainly are. Catriona Ward’s “The African Painted Dog” tackles the initial plague from the point of view of a canine in a zoo. “Kovach’s Last Case” by Michael Koryta tracks a hard-boiled homicide detective on the trail of a serial killer at the end of the world (in this case, Cleveland). “The Legion of Swine” by S.A. Cosby posits a farming family eking out a living after the plague in Southwestern Virginia and navigating how much trust to have in strangers who could be in service of Mother Abigail or the Walkin’ Dude. Tim Lebbon takes the story into orbit with “Grace,” where a group of astronauts know their inevitable fate but play a surprising role in the battle between good and evil below them.

There are some misses, most prominent of which is Richard Chizmar’s “Moving Day,” which is basically a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern story that exists mostly to write about actual characters from The Stand. And some of the later stories that stretch into the far future don’t really connect (though the metafictional tale of a character cut from the original novel, Nat Cassidy’s “The Unfortunate Convalescence of the Superlawyer,” is an amusing twist on the real-world publication of the expanded edition).

One thing that bothers me about most of the stories — and that bothered me again when I re-read The Stand afterward — is the handling of the dreams characters have of Randall Flagg and Mother Abigail. Those dreams are the catalyst for so many of the characters, yet the dreams are nigh invariably deterministic. No one seems to be making a choice about which road to follow; the good people dream of the magic woman, the bad people dream of the dark man. For a book (and a group of stories) that posits to be about the struggle between good and evil and making righteous choices, there’s remarkably little free will involved.

But that’s a quibble and hobbyhorse of mine, built on far too many re-readings of a book I’ve adored since childhood. As a collection, The End of the World as We Know It has a high enough hit-to-miss ratio to make it worth your time. If, like me, you’ve enjoyed pondering all the stories that seem to exist just outside the margins of King’s vast tapestry then you’ll find plenty to enjoy here.