Keith Rosson is the author of the critically acclaimed Fever House duology, and upcoming Americana-noir horror Coffin Moon, which follows a Vietnam veteran and his adopted niece who hunt – and are hunted by – the vampire that slaughtered their family.
How would you pitch The Fever House Duology to a fan of the Evil Dead movies? I think the Evil Dead franchise has a lot of camp in it, a lot of kind of gruesome, joyous irreverence. And while Fever House definitely leaps headlong into a lot of horror tropes (zombies, cursed objects, secret government agencies, the occult), it does so in a way that’s as bombastic but alsomaybea bit less tongue in cheek. I guess I’d pitch the books to Evil Dead fans by saying, “Enter at your own risk. Each are gnarly, and frenetic, as fast-paced, but each are entirely their own things.”
Why a Duology?
Fair warning: There is a significant cliff-hanger at the end of Fever House. It drives people up the wall. I originally wrote Fever House with zero plans to write a sequel. None. I loved that ambiguity, that sense that “Oh my God, this story is just getting started.” Paul Tremblay in particular is a master of that sort of storytelling, those kind of gauzy, questionable endings. So that was my plan, and then we sold the book to Random House five days after it went out, and my editor, in our first phone call, asked me if I would write a sequel and I said, “You just changed my life. I’ll write dog food ad copy for you if you want me to.” So I wrote The Devil by Name, and then I rewrote it, then I rewrote it again. As of now there are no plans for a third book.
I think this is the first venue I’ve told this to – I secretly hope film/TV stuff really takes off, or there’s some other impetus for me to revisit this world. I would love to get to go back and write a third book someday. I think The Devil by Name does a good job of wrapping things up as a duology, but I’m also a writer, and there are always little carrion birds chirping in the back of my brain about how I’d make the Fever House books a trilogy. There are ideas. The will is there.
Why zombies?
Generally, how I write is I come up with four or five things that will hold my interest in a novel and I start writing about them and kind of figure out how all of these things interconnect as I go. Flying through the dark, figuring it out as I go. I also love taking tropes and twisting them a bit, trying to turn them on their heads. So in Fever House, it’s zombies, secret ops, the punk explosion in the 1990s, and legbreakers. I just take that stuff and run with it.
Where did the idea for The Message come from?
It came organically in the way that I wanted a number of artifacts from this devil. I had the hand, that was one of the first images I had of the book, and this skinny kid running down the street with a black leather doctor’s bag in his fist, and inside is a severed hand and a bunch of money. But what other body parts could there be? An eye? A tongue? Or what about the devil actually speaking? What would happen if there was actually a recording of a devil speaking? How that affect the world? You get a thread and you pull and see what’s revealed.
If you could sit one of the characters from the books down and have a word with them, who would it be and what would you say?
I would love to sit down with Katherine Moriarty and listen to her tell war stories from her Blank Letters days. That would be so fun. I would not, ever, want to hang out with Hutch Holtz, because it probably meant that I had screwed up bigtime, given what he does for a living.
Which character was the most fun/interesting to write?
I love the two legbreakers we meet on page one, Hutch Holtz and Tim Reed. They were a blast to write, and trying to humanize these bad, bad men was so fun, and made me really flex those writer muscles. But beyond trying to infuse them with some measure of humanness, I could write about dangerous men hitting people in the knees with hammers and collecting overdue cash all day long. Love crime stuff.
What works of horror fiction inspire you?
Obviously, King. Grew up on his stuff. His stories are embedded in my DNA at this point. But as far as contemporaries go, off the top of my head, I’ve been coming back again and again to Nathan Ballingrud’s story collections, Wounds and North American Lake Monsters. There’s a story in NALM called “Wild Acre,” about a guy who survives a werewolf attack. His two friends are killed during the event, and the killings take place in the first five pages. But the main character survives, see, and the rest of the lengthy story is how this man navigates the trauma that follows that event. It’s brilliant, and an examination of trauma and masculinity and toxicity and it totally transcends what I always thought horror was supposed to be. There are more folks that inspire me sure, but Ballingrud’s work is definitely up there.
Why do we keep returning to the end of the world?
It’s unknown, for one, so there’s breathing room and room to experiment with interpretation. But also, I think there’s a part of us that are fascinated with the notion of shrugging off societal expectations, or re-centering them into something different. It’s a kind of relief at the idea of the end of the world because everything’s gone, yes, but so are our obligations: rent, and bills, and work, and all the wretched, brutal minutiae that grinds us down so much every day. The world as we knew it is gone, and we can rebuild it, that’s a fascinating idea.
What’s the toughest part of the writing process for you?
None of it is particularly hard. I love all of it. This is the best job in the world for me. I love getting sloppy in a first draft, giving myself permission to just got for it, get the idea down and worry about line quality later, and then seeing the scaffolding tighten and become more readable with subsequent drafts. I do think I struggle a bit with giving myself permission to experiment a bit. Like I have a notion of how narrative should go, and how stories should unfold, and I could stand to be a little less rigid. A lot of cool, happy mistakes take place that way, when I give myself permission to cut loose a bit.
If you take something from your writing and put it in the real world, what would it be?
Hmmm, not sure. Not sure how specific or broad you want me to be. Personally and this is a Fever House reference I’d love to check out either Peach Serrano or Herman Goud’s collections of weirdnesses, I bet they have some fascinating stuff in there. I wonder if they ever knew each other?
And if you could take one artwork/piece of media/ thing and ensure that it would survive for thousands of years, what would it be?
Ah, too much pressure! Have you read Will Self’s The Book of Dave? It leapfrogs off this idea to fascinating results. It’s been maybe 20 years since I’ve read, and it’s not an easy book to read, literally, but essentially a future civilization, centuries after the fact, finds a London cab driver’s unhinged treatise that he had fabricated in metal and buried in a backyard, and they form their society around it. I’m due for a reread, but in the meantime, I feel like I’d say here would probably backfire, just like it did for poor Dave.
Simpsons or Futurama?
Simpsons for this guy.
Doctor Who or Doctor No?
Who.
Truth or Beauty?
Oh, gosh. A heady question, and one maybe too wise for me. I feel like they’re often intertwined, right? I also feel the world right now is a bit starved for beauty, but the same could be said for truth. Tough one. Let’s go with truth first, and hopefully beauty will be revealed in the aftermath.
Keith Rosson is the author of Fever House, published by Black Crow Books (ebook out now). It can be found here, here, here and even here. Keith’s website can be found here.
