![\"Coffin](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/CXC5PMCVEZEMFILDHTI34KMDDA.jpg\")
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Coffin Moon by Portland author Keith Rosson released on September 9, 2025.<\/p>\n
courtesy of Penguin Random House<\/p>\n
A vampire walks into a Portland dive bar \u2026 and starts a story of vengeance and bloody horror. <\/p>\n
Fans of scary stories can dig their teeth into \u201cCoffin Moon,\u201d a book set in Portland right after the Vietnam War and full of surprising twists on the vampire genre. <\/p>\n
OPB Morning Edition host Jess Hazel spoke with Portland author Keith Rosson about his new book. <\/p>\n
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity<\/p>\n
Jess Hazel: So first off, I do want to dig into specifics, but I don\u2019t want to give away too much of the plot. Can you give us a little summary about what \u201cCoffin Moon\u201d is?<\/p>\n
Keith Rosson: Yeah, I think the best summation I have is it\u2019s \u201cTrue Grit\u201d with vampires. It\u2019s about a Vietnam veteran who has come home from the conflict and is trying to raise his adopted niece with his wife. And he runs afoul of the wrong guy trying to do what he thinks is right. Essentially, his family is slaughtered. And he and his niece spend a vast majority of the book seeking revenge on the vampires that killed their family. <\/p>\n
![\"Portland](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/T7SSKPHTHZGCNE5TCG3QLOWQPI.jpg\")
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Portland author Keith Rosson released his new book “Coffin Moon” on September 9th, 2025.<\/p>\n
Robin Corbo<\/p>\n
Hazel: Yes, vengeance is definitely a driving force of this story. It starts in 1975 and then kind of goes from there over the course of a couple of years, this plot plays out. But Portland as a place kind of feels like a character in and of itself. It\u2019s industrial, it retains a lot of the grit that might not exist as much now, but is certainly familiar to people who\u2019ve lived in Portland for a long time. What kind of research went into crafting that sense of place?<\/p>\n
Rosson: I mean, I\u2019ve lived here for a long time. Obviously not since the 70s, since this book is set before I was born. I researched as much as I could as far as certain monuments, like there\u2019s a park that figures pretty prominently in it. Just checking about like what that looked like at the time and if the space was used the same and things like that.<\/p>\n
Hazel: Most people associate Portland with rain, but you chose snow, and for me that really enhanced some of the elements that you associate with vampirism. It\u2019s cold, it\u2019s the long nights, feeling like you\u2019re being buried alive sometimes. Am I just overanalyzing or did snow play a part into crafting that feeling of the book?<\/p>\n
Rosson: One of the aspects of research [for this book] was looking at that winter and it was actually a very gnarly winter. But yeah, I think it certainly adds to the kind of miasma of wretchedness and singularity, like being alone and all that.<\/p>\n
Hazel: That\u2019s definitely something that both of the characters, Dwayne and Julia, and even the main antagonist in the story, I would say, grapple with that sense of isolation throughout the story.<\/p>\n
Rosson: Yeah, but there\u2019s nobody who escapes unscathed, emotionally or otherwise in the book.<\/p>\n
Hazel: And kind of in that vein, with vampires comes a lot of blood. How did you approach writing the scenes in \u201cCoffin Moon\u201d that describe some often creative moments of gore?<\/p>\n
Rosson: We\u2019ve seen every avenue of vampirism in media and so you\u2019ve got to get a little weird with it. And so I just pretty much ran with it kind of unflinchingly, just tried not to shy away from the grossness. <\/p>\n
Hazel: Is that a theme for you in your work?<\/p>\n
Rosson: Basically, my shtick as a writer is I take a kind of common horror trope, and I just kind of twist it on its head a little bit. So I did that with zombies with \u201cFever House\u201d and \u201cThe Devil by Name.\u201d I did it with ghosts in my novel, \u201dSmoke City.\u201d And I\u2019m doing it here with vampires. <\/p>\n
I really wanted to counter the whole sexy, mysterious vampire thing that we have going, because I think it\u2019s just so wildly untrue. Only a certain subsect of people could manage emotionally and psychologically what it would require to be a vampire, which is murder. I just don\u2019t think that a lot of people could do that. And so those who do manage it and who succeed and thrive in that environment, like, you better watch out.<\/p>\n
Hazel: I think that vulnerability of vampires comes up a lot more than it does in other books. It\u2019s not like, \u2018oh, these are these super powerful, they\u2019re gonna get you no matter what.\u2019 It\u2019s like, \u2018well, actually they have this, this and this where they\u2019re just done.\u2019<\/p>\n
Rosson: If you and I stay up past our bedtime, we don\u2019t die, you know, we don\u2019t turn into a puff of smoke or whatever. These guys do. Yeah, there\u2019s limitations. Sexy vampire\u2026 I don\u2019t know\u2026 doesn\u2019t fly with me.<\/p>\n
Keith Rosson is a Portland based author and his new book \u201cCoffin Moon\u201d released on September 9th, 2025. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Coffin Moon by Portland author Keith Rosson released on September 9, 2025. courtesy of Penguin Random House A…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18053,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,19802,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-18052","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-books-portland","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18052\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}