The overall vibe of Rose of Jericho is a mixture of eerie Gothic and surreal western, presenting a weird but refreshing premise that keeps the story engaging and unpredictable. Grecian’s sequel to Red Rabbit begins, as all great Gothic Westerns must, with a man destroyed by grief doing something unforgivable. Moses Burke loses his wife and newborn child, and in his grief, takes on Death himself and murders him.
What follows is a small town’s slow unraveling. Something wicked is going on in the town of Ascension — a mother wasting away from cancer is suddenly up and about, a boy trampled by a milk cart walks away from the accident, a hanged man can still speak with his broken neck. The dead are not dying. Grecian understands that there is something more horrifying about the dead who remain than about specters who merely haunt. These are bodies that have overstayed their welcome in a universe that never asked them to linger.
The novel digs into its horror roots with vivid descriptions of those who cannot die, but really ought to. Beneath the grim humor and relentless invention lies a philosophical meditation: what is the value of life when death has been stolen from it? Rose of Jericho is about the duality of death — how it is both heartbreaking and necessary, beautiful and violent, forgiving and vengeful. In the genre’s grand tradition, the most monstrous thing here isn’t the supernatural at all. It’s the human need to deny loss at any cost, even the world’s.
Alex Grecian was born on August 6, 1969, and is an American author of short fiction, novels, comic books, and graphic novels. He worked for an ad agency before returning to writing fiction full-time. Best known for his acclaimed Scotland Yard Murder Squad series — a run of Victorian crime novels that drew comparisons to Dickens — Grecian has spent recent years pushing deeper into supernatural territory, building a shared world of frontier horror that feels genuinely unlike anything else in the field. He lives in the Midwest with his wife, his son, their dog, and a tarantula named Rosie. That last detail seems apt for a man who has made the unsettling and the homely into a kind of artistic signature.
