Portland horror author Keith Rosson has been turning Oregon into a horror setting for a while now, most notably with his duology of Fever House (2023) and The Devil by Name (2024) which transformed the Rose City into ground zero for a zombie apocalypse. Last year’s Coffin Moon was similarly a 1970s vampire throwback set upon local earth.
Rosson’s newest, Crone, goes a bit further, making the Oregon coast appear even more bleak, inhospitable, and desolate than it already is. The setting is a sodden, rotting stretch of near-wilderness with no real connection to the larger world, which serves as the backdrop for a bleak and violent crime thriller with supernatural elements.
Despite its title, Crone is about men—the worst and most monstrous kind. Rosson paints the fictional coastal town of Salt Point as a series of fiefdoms overseen by petty tyrants. The head of an outlaw biker gang, a corrupt sheriff, an abusive boyfriend: All of them are petty tyrants who do nasty, self-serving things with whatever authority they happen to have. At one point a character orders a summary execution on a whim, and you instinctively know that it probably wasn’t his first time because Rosson’s good at making real-seeming demons.
Crone operates in a world without institutional authority. None of these men are paragons of intelligence or strength. They just happen to have guns and other guys who listen to them. There’s no law of rationality in Rosson’s world of biker gangs and shitty cops. It’s just men with guns yelling at each other, and that’s more unsettling than any of the book’s witchy bits.
This isn’t to say that Crone is some kind of trenchant critique of masculinity or feminist disquisition on the nature of manhood. It’s a book about drugs, motorcycles, and guns, and if you’re looking for a nastily readable book about a bunch of dudes killing each other, Rosson has you covered. Crone is propulsive, and speeds forward like the motorcycles that dot its pages. It’s a ride. But it’s also got a point of view. Rosson seems to know what he’s doing in creating a book about how awful men can be to each other, to their families, and to themselves.
Despite the best efforts of the terrible men who populate Crone’s pages, though, there are some things that they can’t bully, own, kill, or control. As you might have guess from the title, this book has a witch in it. She is not the kind of witch who’s really into crystals, meditation, or polyamory. She’s properly monstrous, and her monstrosity is a relief. Crone builds up a world of petty tyranny that needs to be transgressed if not destroyed, and something beyond heroism or malevolence does exactly that.
That’s ultimately what gives Crone a feeling of hope. Tyranny only goes so far. Petty tyrants can do their best to control money, guns, drugs, information, law enforcement, or other worldly concerns. But they can’t control everything. The witch lives outside of their control, and she is beyond all of them.
Keith Rosson will appear at Broadway Books for a Crone book release event, 1714 NE Broadway, Tues Sept 22, 6 pm, FREE, more info, all ages.
