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 patience, the three of them are building a family.

Then Minor crosses the wrong 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 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?

IN A NUTSHELL
Original. Bloody. Thoughtful. Emotionally complex and, of course, more than a little horrifying. An historical thriller featuring damaged people driven either by irrepressible malice or an almost unquenchable thirst for revenge, this is a dark tale of escalating violence, sacrifice and loss.

‘Coffin Moon’ got a lot of attention in 2025, including an endorsement from Stephen King, so I bought a copy and stowed it away for Halloween Bingo. 

I’m glad I did, because Keith Rosson is now on my list of buy-their-books horror authors. I have his next book, ‘Crone’, due for release in the UK on 22nd September 2026, on pre-order. 

‘Coffin Moon’ is about vampires, but it doesn’t follow the typical vampire tropes. In ‘Coffin Moon’, the main vampire, John Varley, is an embodiment of all the things that are broken about humanity. He’s violent, angry, narcissistic, almost entirely empathy-free, self-destructive and, unless he’s ripping people to pieces with his bare hands, mostly unhappy. 

Yet, to a great extent, Varley is just another example of the violent fury that has already broken both Vietnam vet Duane Minor and his thirteen-year-old, abuse-survivor step-niece, Julia. Scarred by what he saw and did and had done to him in Vietnam, Duane is a man afraid of the anger inside him that looks forward to opportunities for violence. Julia has difficulty trusting men and is guilty about being happier in her new home with her aunt than she was in the old home that she and her mother were trapped in by a violently abusive man. 

I liked that most of the story was about Duane and Julia, the damage they’d suffered, the happiness that had been ripped from them and the sacrifices they were willing to make to do what they felt had to be done. 

I also liked that John Varley was completely irredeemable. He’d been irredeemable as a murderous young man, working as muscle for hire. Turning him into a vampire didn’t make him worse; it just allowed him to be more himself, while being protected from the consequences of his actions and having decades to practice his vices. 

The pacing of the novel worked for me. Spending time on the backstories of the main characters grounded the story in a (to me, because I remember the 70s) contemporary reality that drove the emotional tone of the story, so that the supernatural aspects never took centre stage. It was a novel where each act of violence triggered consequences that seemed further to doom everyone. It was a dark, sometimes bleak, novel that was never exploitative and which also never completely surrendered the possibility of hope. I found the ending very satisfying.

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