Keith Rosson is the author of the novels Coffin Moon, Fever House, The Devil by Name, Smoke City, Road Seven, and The Mercy of the Tide, as well as the Shirley Jackson Award–winning story collection Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons. He arrived at Coffin Moon through years of lean, brutally disciplined work in the horror and dark fiction community, building a reputation as a writer whose sentences hit like cold rain on cracked pavement. He lives in Portland, Oregon — the very city in which the novel’s opening dread takes root — and that geographic intimacy gives the book an almost confessional texture, as though the Pacific Northwest’s grey and unrelenting sky were a collaborator. Stephen King called it “mind-blowingly good,” and for once the blurb earns its keep. Rosson described Coffin Moon as “True Grit with vampires,” and it’s accurate — and undersells the novel slightly, because what Rosson has actually done is take a revenge western structure and run it through the machinery of crime fiction and vampire mythology simultaneously.
It’s the winter of 1975, and Portland, Oregon, is all sleet and neon. Duane Minor is back home after a tour in Vietnam, a bartender just trying to stay sober, save his marriage, and connect with his thirteen-year-old niece, Julia. Then a vampire walks into his bar and ruins his life. When the ancient, ferociously powerful John Varley retaliates against Minor for a slight, he leaves behind only wreckage — and two people with nothing left but the hollow religion of revenge.
Each of them carry rage in their own way, each shaped by it, formed of it, directed by it — all three victims and perpetrators, all three made of violence. Rosson’s prose is third-person present tense, relentless and propulsive, a runaway train with no brakes and no mercy. From grimy alleyways to desolate highways to snow-lashed plains, Minor and Julia are cast into the dark orbit of undead children, silver bullet casters, and broken men transfixed by Varley’s ferocity. Coffin Moon is ugly and devastating and entirely, searingly alive.
