Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Fever House & The Devil by Name | By Keith Rosson | 427 Pages & 382 Pages
🤘🏼🗣️👁️ = 🥵 🏠
Here we have a rock-and-roll horror-thriller that starts small and goes global. It’s about cursed objects and the horrifying effects they have on the people who possess, or are possessed by, them. And it’s about people who are cursed by their past, their families, their circumstances. It’s pretty bleak at times; fascinating but bleak. Some of the men are monsters, some of the monsters might be men, but they’re all kinda fucked. Cursed. It’s not clear who to root for: the men? The monsters?
It’s got family drama, world-shattering events, devilish (literally) conspiracies, social commentary, and a lot of occult weirdness, symbolism, and mystery.
Rosson’s voice is clear and pulls you in; third-person present, not my favorite perspective, but it works well here. I have aphantasia, but Rosson does an excellent job of pulling me into the story, making me feel like I’m in it. I especially liked his depiction of Portland, a place I’ve been to many times.
The nuance of conversation and setting come through really well. It’s scary at times, with jump scares and horror elements. Creepy. Lots of character depth, too. I found myself drawn into the backstory of the various characters, which was a bit of a surprise because it took me a while to care about any of them, let alone root for them. That came eventually. The structure is a bit strange, jumping back and forth in time and across characters, but it doesn’t wreck the pacing too much.
Speaking of pacing, there is a somewhat jarring shift between books. The Devil by Name is a bit different, both in tone and structure, and it takes place five years after the events of Fever House, filling in the blanks between with vignettes and flashbacks. This works well most of the time, but takes a little getting used to. But once you are used to it, it’s all good, with consistently rising stakes, dilemmas, and surprises right up to the end, and then it pays off those stakes in a bloody, action-packed climax.
Would I recommend? To fans of metal and horror? Hell yeah 🤘🏼
A song pairing for these books
🗣️♀️- 🔔
Now, for a song to pair with it. My first thoughts were around something metal. Something old-school thrash, like Metallica or Iron Maiden. But then I thought about the Blank Letters (the fictional band in the books) and how they were an indie rock band that made it big. And thinking about how they were described was less metal and more hard rock. I went with “Brass Bell” by Screaming Females, picturing the incomparable Marissa Paternoster doing both Katherine Morriarity’s vocals and Matthew Coffin’s guitar work.