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 her Aunt Heidi and Uncle Duane after a tragedy. But slowly, carefully, guided by Heidi’s love and pa-tience, 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 shot through with rage. The two of them are left united by only one thing: the desire for vengeance.
As their quest brings them into the dark orbit of immortal, undead children, silver bullet casters, and the bevy of broken men drawn to Varley’s ferocity, Minor and Julia follow his path of destruction from the gritty al-leyways of 1970s Portland to the desolate highways of the Northwest and the snow-lashed plains of North Dakota – only to have him turn his vicious power back on them. Who will prevail, who will survive, and what remains of our humanity when our thirst for revenge trumps everything else?
Review:
Bloody, revenge-fuelled carnage, “Coffin Moon,” is an action-packed and gritty take upon the vampire, and I adored it. With the pulpy soul of a tattered 70s paperback or a Tarantino film, Rosson’s latest is a messy tangle of love, rage and grief (and vampires) all wrapped up in grime and crime. I found myself stuck in that awful reader’s paradox of wanting to literally inhale this book, whilst not wanting it to end. In “Coffin Moon,” John Ajvide Lindqvist’s “Let The Right One In,” meets Cosby’s “Razorblade Tears,” meets the addictive, brutal prose and pacing signature to Rosson’s work, and I could probably wrap this up here because how could that not be a hit? You’re sold right? It’s out September 9th, a very good day indeed, from Penguin Random House in the US and Black Crow in the UK.
We follow Duane Minor, a war veteran, bartender and recovering alcoholic, who is adjusting to his new life as a family man. His life with his wife Heidi is a pleasant one, albeit one that changed completely when her niece Julia started living with them. It’s not perfect- Julia frequently finds herself in the principal’s office, Heidi’s dad is sick, Minor can’t seem to exorcise his friend Lyle’s death from his head. But it’s good. Flawed but peaceful. Fulfilling. Until it’s dismantled. John Varley and the Crooked Wheel gang want to peddle heroin out the back door of the bar Minor works at -something he refuses to let happen in spite of what his boss (his mother in law) has to say about it. He puts a stop to it, but when he finds his home broken into, Heidi and her parents slaughtered, Minor realises that Varley is not a man who is denied, or indeed a man at all.
The message central to “Coffin Moon,” is similar to that of “Fever House.” It is as old as humanity and as current as today’s headlines. It is that power, and the pursuit of it, corrupts. There are instances of greed over territory, status, money, and when explored alongside immortality, we learn that these are pretty eternally warred over. People hurt people. In the 70s, when the bulk of the novel is set, during the Vietnam war, where Minor saw things he can’t unsee, in the 30s, where the then human John Varley worked to protect the reputation of a bar-owner, and certainly before that… and ever since too. It’s pride and power and its pursuit that can be held responsible for the deaths of Minor’s wife and her parents, along with most things that are wrong with the world frankly, and that’s something Rosson continues to explore with his work.
In “Coffin Moon,” power and rage is the fuel that drives nearly every character forward- it is endlessly destructive. As a counter-weight to all that carnage and bloodshed though Rosson gives us the bond between Minor and Julia. Their relationship is strained, born of pain even, but fiercely genuine, even more so when set against Varley and his long, loveless existence. Yes, we are capable of atrocities fuelled by greed and power and retribution, yet we are equally capable of kindness and care, offering safety, looking out for our friends, standing by our convictions. People hurt people, but, I’d like to think more frequently, people love people.
All of this is presented in a bloody, raucous, action-packed, cross-country, high-speed chase. As I mentioned earlier, “Coffin Moon,” is practically addictive. Propulsive, beautifully written and easy to read, readers will absolutely tear through this one, and can’t be blamed for it. Rosson’s pacing is a relentless, unbroken current that I for one was happy to let carry me away. The character work is equally admirable. Minor is flawed, sure, a man shaped by his trauma and a recovering alcoholic who falls back into old habits when he is probably needed most by the child he’s now responsible for. Julia is only under Duane’s guardianship via a bittersweet, truly violent end to life as she knew it. She is (rightfully) angry and compulsive. They are both driven by retribution, and yet they are both unwaveringly decent people who we feel incredibly deeply for. Their bond, forged mostly in bloodshed and anguish, is the beating heart of “Coffin Moon.”
If you’re already a fan of Keith Rosson, it’s as simple as this… it’s exactly as kick-ass as you think it is. An unrelentingly, explosively, carotid-burstingly violent continuation of his signature high octane gritty, pulpy, grimy, crime-y writing, but this time with vampires. If you’ve yet to read any Rosson, you’re in for something special. A novel that speaks to power and rage and trauma and love and war and immortality, what it means to be human, and what it’s like to lose that… I suppose the word to summarise “Coffin Moon,” would be epic.
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