King Dork is a young adult novel by Frank Portman first published in 2006. The novel features protagonist and disaffected slacker Tom Henderson in the fall of his high school sophomore year. The storyline focuses on Tom’s many problems in life including the death of his police officer father six years previous; his attempts to start a hard-rock band with his best and only friend Sam Hellerman; the daily difficulties of surviving a contemporary American high school filled with cruel peers, uncaring administrators and teachers obsessed with the novel Catcher in the Rye; his evolving relationship with his mother and stepfather; and negotiating the complexities of relating to the opposite sex.

The novel, while following a traditional linear narrative, frequently makes tangents in the first-person narrative where Tom examines his life and relationship to the rest of the world. The character of Tom speaks rarely and sparsely in the novel, but his internal dialogue is both verbose and extensive.

Plot summary

Outcast Tom Henderson begins his sophomore year of high school in as quiet way as possible but is set upon by the school’s many bullies and administration. Through a series of chance circumstances he soon finds himself investigating his father’s death, trying to put together a decent rock band with his only friend, searching out the identity of a mystery girl he met and made out with at a party, struggling to keep out of the way of the school’s psychotic “normal” kids bent on cruelly punishing him for existing. The myriad plot strands are brought together during and after a climatic battle of the bands in the school where he inadvertently is the cause of the disappearance of at least one teacher, earns the wrath of a new group of student, and the surprising admiration of some of those who previously despised him.