Book Review: Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson

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“Revenge is an eyeblink . . . There and done. Once you’re finished with it, there’s a certain hollowness.”

📚

It’s December 1975, and Duane Minor, back home in Portland, Oregon, following his deployment to Vietnam, works as a bartender, attempting to maintain sobriety and control while salvaging his marriage and bonding with his 13-year-old niece, for whom he’s now responsible. The going is tough, but they’re making it work — until Minor crosses a vampire named John Varley, who savagely retaliates by murdering Minor’s family, shattering his tenuous grip and ruining his life. Fueled by sorrow, guilt, and fury, Minor and Julia unite in the name of vengeance, undertaking a feverish quest that takes them to dark and bloody places: can they avenge Varley’s murderous rampage, and, should they somehow survive, will they have any humanity left by the end?

Coffin Moon is a gritty, gore-drenched tale simmering with rage, a caustic, trauma-fueled driving force that cuts to the bone, exposing previous transgressions and trails of bodies. Loneliness and transformation are paramount; both the living and undead crave love and companionship, escape from the cold, painful realities of existence, forming a world where blame is freely cast and accountability swiftly perishes. 

Filled with unique and fascinating historical details and vampiric lore, Coffin Moon is a mental, emotional, and physical story centered around navigation — boundaries, culpability and shame, stages of grief, delineations of life (befores and afters, points of no return) — as well as choice, death, and circumstance where the line between humans and monsters is blurred, the weight of past horrors and present choices is staggering, the search for meaning amid senselessness is futile, and violence is so plentiful and appalling that one must detach in order to continue, a numbing yet chilling ordeal where the last vestiges of compassion are destroyed.

It’s a hollow and devastating account that shines a spotlight on human fallacy, vulnerability, bias, and toxicity: no person, emotion, need, feeling, experience, or belief is more important, vital, valuable, or real than another, nor is anyone entitled to or worth more than someone else. When these selfish, maniacal beliefs take hold, they result in ruin and waste: cruel, vengeful, egomaniacal crusades. An inability to learn from history and a perpetuation of the issue at hand: the very things that should provide freedom and power — revenge, immortality — are actually destructive prisons of one’s own making.

Favorite Quotes:

“You make these little decisions in a marriage, a hundred of them a day. Some of them mean nothing, so inconsequential that you don’t even notice them, and some of them have the potential to echo through time, through the rooms of your life.”

“Everything hurts, always. Sorrow, vengeance, even joy. Everything’s got teeth on it.”

“Even when it comes to things like death, like vengeance, it’s money does the heavy lifting.”

“All good things eventually lean toward murk and shadow . . .”

“My boy mattered. My love mattered. More than yours, and that’s the simple truth of it.”

🖤Amanda

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