A vampire walks into a Portland dive bar … and starts a story of vengeance and bloody horror.

Fans of scary stories can dig their teeth into “Coffin Moon,” a book set in Portland right after the Vietnam War and full of surprising twists on the vampire genre.

OPB Morning Edition host Jess Hazel spoke with Portland author Keith Rosson about his new book.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity

Jess Hazel: So first off, I do want to dig into specifics, but I don’t want to give away too much of the plot. Can you give us a little summary about what “Coffin Moon” is?

Keith Rosson: Yeah, I think the best summation I have is it’s “True Grit” with vampires. It’s 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.

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’s industrial, it retains a lot of the grit that might not exist as much now, but is certainly familiar to people who’ve lived in Portland for a long time. What kind of research went into crafting that sense of place?

Rosson: I mean, I’ve 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’s 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.

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’s cold, it’s the long nights, feeling like you’re being buried alive sometimes. Am I just overanalyzing or did snow play a part into crafting that feeling of the book?

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.

Hazel: That’s 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.

Rosson: Yeah, but there’s nobody who escapes unscathed, emotionally or otherwise in the book.

Hazel: And kind of in that vein, with vampires comes a lot of blood. How did you approach writing the scenes in “Coffin Moon” that describe some often creative moments of gore?

Rosson: We’ve seen every avenue of vampirism in media and so you’ve 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.

Hazel: Is that a theme for you in your work?

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 “Fever House” and “The Devil by Name.” I did it with ghosts in my novel, ”Smoke City.” And I’m doing it here with vampires.

I really wanted to counter the whole sexy, mysterious vampire thing that we have going, because I think it’s 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’t 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.

Hazel: I think that vulnerability of vampires comes up a lot more than it does in other books. It’s not like, ‘oh, these are these super powerful, they’re gonna get you no matter what.’ It’s like, ‘well, actually they have this, this and this where they’re just done.’

Rosson: If you and I stay up past our bedtime, we don’t die, you know, we don’t turn into a puff of smoke or whatever. These guys do. Yeah, there’s limitations. Sexy vampire… I don’t know… doesn’t fly with me.

Keith Rosson is a Portland based author and his new book “Coffin Moon” released on September 9th, 2025.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/09/12/portland-author-keith-rosson-new-book-coffin-moon/