Rosson, Keith

Entry updated 7 October 2024. Tagged: Author.

(1976- ) US graphic designer, illustrator and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Droppers" in Murky Depths for December 2010. His first collection, Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons (coll 2021), won a Shirley Jackson Award (see Awards); most explore supernatural strategies from the contemporary Fantastika toolkit. Like almost all his fiction, The Mercy of the Tide (2017), his first novel, is at least partially set in the Pacific Rim of America, a region encompassing Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington; a hinterland previously exploited in Horror in SF terms by Mark Frost and David Lynch's surreal Television series Twin Peaks (1990-1991), whose plotting is driven (as are Rosson's) by a sense that the true face of the world is not our friend.

In The Mercy of the Tide, a small Oregon town is transfigured through an intersection of personal tragedies. The protagonist of Smoke City (2018), who is the Reincarnation of the executioner who put the first match to Joan of Arc in 1431, travels into darkest California in search of a woman who may be the tortured saint's own reincarnation. Road Seven (2020) traces its guilt-ridden protagonist, his body covered with runic tattoos, to an Island off the coast of Iceland, where he is engulfed into a chthonic Zone [for Into the Woods see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below].

Rosson is of more direct sf interest for the Fever House series beginning with Fever House (2023), in which what may be the End of the World is triggered by a complexly-sourced Basilisk. "Segments" cut out of the body of a singer-songwriter rock star – a severed hand, an eye on a withered stalk, and an ultimately central voice associated with a severed tongue – somehow combine through the Inventions of a Mad Scientist to become a "Message", a piece of Music that drives anyone insane who hears it on its seemingly accidental transmission across the world through cellphones, a metaphor-rich plot device earlier used by Stephen King in Cell (2006) (see Media Landscape). A prisoner of the American government – it is suggested he/it may be an Extraterrestrial – has been tortured for three decades to deliver his premonitions of the course of Disaster. Those driven insane are known as the fevered, and exhibit Zombie-like characteristics, though – like remarkably similar skittery walking dead in the Videogame and Television series The Last of Us (2023-current) – the term zombie is left more or less consistently unused, and the fevered, who expectably infect others by biting them, may in fact here be curable (see Pandemic).

Throughout, Rosson allows Equipoisal readings of his narrative: that the Message has been created and curated by representatives of a diseased Homo sapiens (see again Horror in SF); or that, as in traditional cosmic horror, the segments exudate the moral poison of the Devil stamping himself into the world. As in The Last of Us, salvation may come in the sequel, The Devil by Name (2024), which is set five years into a Dystopian Near Future, in an America dominated by the corporation responsible for release of the original recording: a young woman is discovered who is immune to the plague; in this case she heals the afflicted directly. Though he does not fully slough off all his influences, Rosson as a stylist of violence conveys a sense of great urgency. [JC]

Keith Rosson

born 1976

works

series

Fever House

Fever House (New York: Random House, 2023) [Fever House: hb/Ella Laytham]
The Devil by Name (New York: Random House, 2024) [Fever House: hb/Ella Laytham]

individual titles

The Mercy of the Tide (Chicago, Illinois: Meerkat Press, 2017) [pb/]
Smoke City (Chicago, Illinois: Meerkat Press, 2018) [hb/]
Road Seven (Chicago, Illinois: Meerkat Press, 2020) [pb/]

collections and stories

Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons (Chicago, Illinois: Meerkat Press, 2021) [coll: pb/]

links

previous versions of this entry

Internet Archive