Hey, kids, take it fromJoe Hill: Don't let anyone turn you off from studying Arthurian legend in college. A Vassar class is partly why Hill's latest book features main characters named Arthur and Gwen, knights of a round table (if you squint sort of hard) and a big ol' dragon. "I always knew that course was going to pay off big someday. People doubted me," says Hill, whose latest novel is the 900-page horror fantasy epic "King Sorrow." "Tech broligarchs are like, 'Why would anyone study the liberal arts?' I don't know, it worked out pretty good for this dude." USA TODAY has the first exclusive excerpt from "King Sorrow" (out Oct. 21), which takes places over 25 years beginning in 1989 and follows six friends who strike a deal with a dragon to protect them, though that deal pays a bloody toll over time. Hill's love for literary dragons goes back to his childhood. His dad, legendary authorStephen King, and mom Tabitha read an illustrated edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit" to Hill and his sister Naomi when Hill was 10, and it led to Smaug being his favorite fictional character for decades. "I was completely gripped by that scene where Smaug is talking with an invisible Bilbo Baggins and is slyly trying to get Bilbo to give away his position so that he can lash out and snap him in two. It just lit up my entire imagination," says Hill, who "wanted to have my own Smaug" with King Sorrow. Like Steven Spielberg'siconic shark in "Jaws,"King Sorrow is gradually revealed through the narrative, only seen by characters in peeks and parts. For example, his shadow is projected on a drive-in movie screen and a claw creeps out from under a bed as someone reaches for their shoes before he's seen in full glory later. "I thought that was fun – that the glimpses of him would play on people's nerves in a nice way," Hill says. "Of course, that's the whole job, to shred people's sense of security and ruin their night of sleep." The writer also imagined King Sorrow's accent sounding a bit like Robert Shaw's "Jaws" character, Quint. "He's got a little bit of that rasp and rough edge to him," says Hill, adding that the actor's son, Ian Shaw (who played his dad in "The Shark is Broken"), is the voice of the dragon on the "King Sorrow" audiobook. "It sounds like it's coming out of something that weighs 400 tons and is 40 feet long. I love it." So who's ready to meet King Sorrow? Not Jayne Nighswander, that's for sure. Jayne is one of the human antagonists of the book, who forces Arthur Oakes to steal rare and priceless books from the college library in exchange for his mom's safety. Arthur and his friends sic King Sorrow on Jayne, and in the following excerpt she has a harrowing first encounter with a dragon. Jayne sits up in bed, heart beating too fast, like after a blast of cheap cocaine. There's someone in the house, moving around. The door lolls open a crack. A ghost-colored light flickers in the hall. At the bottom of the doorway, Jayne sees a black shadow. As she watches, it shifts, moves, and disappears . . . as if someone had been standing there and is now backing away. Ronnie sleeps on his stomach, the bedsheets kicked back. He wears white Fruit-of-the-Looms, so old they've assumed a certain transparency, and his face is half-buried in his pillow. The TV is running. That's what's casting the spectral blue light glimmering in the hallway. She can hear "SportsCenter." Then there's a snapping sound and a hiss of static. A moment passes and there's another snap and Jayne can hear MTV, "Headbangers Ball," Ozzy Osbourne pouring himself a suicide solution. Tana. Has to be Tana. She can't sleep either. Still, when Jayne slips out of the bed, she reaches for the shotgun, leaning against the wall. It's a single-barrel Ithaca pump and it was her daddy's gun. It's older than Tana, a slam-fire model. Hold the trigger down and the Ithaca will fire as fast as you can pump shells into the chamber. She nudges the bedroom door open with the barrel of the gun and considers the short corridor to the living room. Tana's bedroom door is ajar on the left. The door to the bathroom stands open on the right, looking into maximum darkness. Jayne creeps sidelong down the hall and peers through the open crack of Tana's door. The sight sends a paralytic tingle of alarm through her. It can't be Tana in the living room because Tana isright there, asleep on her side, one hand cupping the swollen curve of her belly and a copy of "What to Expect When You're Expecting" on the bed beside her. She snores delicately, her hair across her face. In the living room the TV clunks to a new channel. The TV is ten years old, and when someone changes the channel, it sounds like slamming a fresh magazine into a gun. A studio audience roars with unhinged laughter. "Who's there?" she cries. Without waiting for an answer, she shouts, "I have a gun!" The audience laughs and laughs, as if that was the funniest thing ever. She moves,hasto move, can't be still any longer. She ducks into the living room, lifting the Ithaca, swinging the barrel to cover the couch. As she does the TV turns itself off with another loud clunk. Light collapses to a dot in the center of the screen. In its fading glow, Jayne can see the remote on the armrest of the couch. It is not a large living room and there is nowhere to hide. She's alone. The empty sofa, angled to face the TV, takes up most of the space. She wheels toward the front door. A black overcoat hanging from a peg looks like a man slouching against the wall, and for a microsecond Jayne isthi-i-i-i-i-sssclose to emptying a barrel into Ronnie's favorite duster. Then she realizes she's moved too far into the living room and has her back to the open archway of the kitchen. She pivots on her heel . . . and sees a white, gaping corpse face, staring at her through the window over the sink. She catches herself before she can blast away, realizes she's been tricked by her own reflection in the glass. Jayne's hands are shaking as she revolves to face the living room again. And now she can dimly see an image of somethingsquirmingacross the television screen. Jayne hits the wall switch and lights the room up. The TV screen has become a glass window looking into a dry aquarium, and there's a snake stuffed in there, a snake as thick as a firehose, knotted and tangled on itself. It shifts and twists, slowly, inside the boxy old TV.That's an anaconda, she thinks,there is a South American anaconda in the TV, and then she sees it hasarms. Scaly arms, and black talons, and one of those claws draws three white scratches across the inside of the glass with a faint, almost musical whine. Its face presses to the glass, staring out at her with one golden eye, the pupil a vertical black slit. "Who says there's nothin' on the telly this hour of the night," remarks the thing inside the television, in a voice that reminds her of the sailor in "Jaws," what was his name, Quint. "You never know when you might find a good creature feature, babe. Even better than that, Jayney. Sometimes, in the wee hours, a creature feature findsyou." A black forked tongue flickers from the dragon's thin-lipped mouth and that one staring eye closes in a slow wink. Jayne screams. Even so, she can barely hear herself over the thunderous boom of the shotgun. Her hands are shaking, but the shot is true. The curved screen of the TV erupts and its back explodes outward, blowing capacitators and diodes straight through the wall. She advances on the television, coming around the sofa. She racks another shell into the pipe and because she's still depressing the trigger, the Ithaca booms again, this time punching a hole in the floor in front of the television. She hears her sister screaming and Ronnie falling out of bed. Jayne stares at the smoking wreck of her TV, looking for the black ruin of the snake, the thing that spoke to her, but he's gone, he's gone now, which should be a relief, but she's fighting for breath and there's a terrible thought cycling through her head, a paranoid chant, the worst thought of her life,he knows my name, he knows my name, he knows my NAME— This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Meet Joe Hill's dragon in an exclusive 'King Sorrow' excerpt