Portland horror author Keith Rosson is having a good week. On September 22nd, the same day his new novel Crone hit shelves, Deadline announced that Paramount has taken the first steps to turning his vampire novel Coffin Moon into a TV series.
“Jessica Biel heard it and suggested it on her Audible account,” says Rosson. “She’s apparently a fantastic reader and a big fan of horror.” According to Deadline, Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue, the writing and production team behind the Fred Rogers biopic A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, are attached to write, develop, and showrun the project.
Rosson said he was excited about making headlines in a Hollywood trade publication but wasn’t celebrating prematurely about his work hitting the small screen. “There is hopefully going to be a TV show,” he says. “[Biel’s production company] Iron Ocean and Paramount TV have showrunners and writers, but somebody’s got to buy it.”
This isn’t Rosson’s first time having work considered for adaptation. “I’ve had stuff optioned before,” he says. “They could feasibly film a pilot and never air it” According to Rosson, Richard Price was developing his supernatural zombie novel Fever House for at one point, but that work never saw the light of day.
If a TV show does happen, Rosson is fine with not being the driving force behind it. “I’m a consulting producer. That’s essentially appeasing the writer,” he says. “Ultimately I am not precious about the work. I fully understand that this is someone else’s animal. I don’t know the film industry, so I’m very happy to let someone else run it.”
Rosson can’t say whether a hypothetical adaptation of Coffin Moon, which is set in Portland in the 1970s, would be set or filmed here. But he advocates for the Pacific Northwest as a setting for horror and other grimy genre fiction. “I think we’re mysterious in a way,” he says. “Coastal Oregon is so gloomy and dense. And Portland isn’t a teeming metropolis. There’s a good chance that—if you’re writing crime—the shitbags know each other. There’s less of a playing field and that makes things more challenging for the characters.”
Related: Men Are Monsters in Keith Rosson’s Crone
