Synopsis:
It’s the winter of 1975, and Duane Minor, back home in Portland, Oregon, after a tour in Vietnam, is struggling to quell his anger and keep his drinking in check, keep his young marriage intact, and keep the nightmares away. Things get even more complicated when his thirteen-year-old niece, Julia, is sent across the country to live with Duane and his wife, Heidi, after a tragedy. But slowly, carefully, guided by Heidi’s love and patience, the three of them are building a family.
Then Minor crosses the wrong man: John Varley, a criminal with a bloody history and a trail of bodies behind him. Varley, who sleeps during the day beneath loose drifts of earth and grows teeth in the light of the moon. In an act of brutal retaliation, Varley kills Heidi, leaving Minor broken with guilt and Julia filled with rage. The two of them are left united by only one thing: the desire for vengeance.
Review:
Not knowing what to expect from a Keith Rosson vampire novel, I ended up getting exactly what I would expect from a Keith Rosson vampire novel. Much like his brilliant duology of Fever House and Devil by Name, Coffin Moon injects a brutal, gritty magic into an otherwise realistic world, allows all hell to break loose, and offers us real, human characters, all facing the worst days of their lives.
I loved every second of it.
When we meet Duane Minor, it’s 1975, and the Vietnam vet is back home, working at his in-laws’ bar, clean and sober, parenting Julia, his thirteen-year-old niece. There’s a lot of anger in Duane, and that’s led to some bad decisions on his part, but at this moment, things are about as good as they can get. He’s madly in love with his wife, and Julia (who shares some of Duane’s anger issues) is starting to open up, starting to act like a regular kid.
Obviously, there’s nowhere to go but downhill.
Minor tries to do the right thing, kicking some drug-dealing bikers out of the bar, but that puts him up against John Varley, a spooky kind of criminal with his own anger issues. Trouble is, when Varley gets angry, people tend to die.
In a brutal act of revenge, Varley kills Minor’s wife and in-laws, leaving him and Julia alone and bereft. Minor’s pretty sure he’s hit the nadir, rock-bottom, but Rosson has other ideas.
As the unlikely pair set out to hunt John Varley and enact their own revenge, it becomes clear that Varley is more than just a dangerous man. He’s a powerful vampire with a long history of violent massacres.
More bad decisions are made, and soon we’re on a supernatural revenge roadtrip across the nation’s northern edges: two broken people with only one idea to keep them moving forward.
As you might have inferred from the above, Coffin Moon‘s universe is an angry one, where hurt people hurt people, taking place in a long series of dingy motel rooms and even dingier bars. Rage, and its capacity to destroy what is beautiful, is a bright red thread strung through this tale, but as in Rosson’s earlier work, so is love. Family bonds, even when tenuous to begin with, are central. Varley, who in many ways plays Minor’s foil, is different in just this way. He doesn’t understand love, so he can’t understand loss. It might be this fact that makes him truly monstrous.
There’s a little Salem’s Lot in Coffin Moon, with a dash of Let the Right One In, but Rosson creates a unique take, and his nocturnal Portland is a haunted place filled with nightmare children, labyrinthine houses, dark magic, and a whole lot of people just trying to get by. And in the end, it’s the relationship between Minor and Julia that carries Coffin Moon to its inevitably bloody conclusion.
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