Here's a book I should like more than I do, because everything about it is a positive but it doesn't press all my buttons somehow and I'm still trying to put my finger on why.

It's a horror novel, but it's built like a drama or maybe a crime novel, it feels gritty and dangerous and, more than anything, it looks at what happens when you let revenge take your soul. I like this heady mix that, with the vampire element added, reminds of me of the movie 'Near Dark'. I'm not the only one to conjure up that comparison, I'm sure, but there's a heck of a lot to prompt it: that grit underneath everything, a child vampire with a need for companionship, constantly moving to stay ahead of pursuit and the lack of real age. Only one of the vampires we meet has been around more than about a hundred years and he's peripheral. These are very American vampires.

We know about vampires going in because that comes up in the second paragraph of the blurb on the front jacket, but it takes a long time for them to show up in the story. There isn't a mention in the first chapter, which runs a ridiculously long sixty pages, though there are subtle hints. Nobody drinks blood until page sixty-nine and that's in a dream. The word vampire doesn't show up until page eighty-eight. Maybe one of my problems with 'Coffin Moon' is balance, given how it shifts as it goes from drama to horror, reality to supernatural and one lead character to another.

Initially, it's all about Duane Miner, who tends bar at the Last Call Tavern in Portland, Oregon. It's 1975 and he's a year back from Vietnam. He's still suffering, stuck in a recurring dream about over there. Much later, we're given some brilliantly evocative passages about the war, and the boot camp before it, that explain how the army turned him into an angry violent man but never changed him back again after he came home. He is what he is by design. No wonder he throws out the couple of bikers who start dealing dope out of the pool room. It's when he throws out their boss, too, that his problems really begin.

That's because their boss is John Varley—not the science fiction novelist—and he's the vampire in the jacket blurb. Next thing we know, Duane's wife Heidi is dead, her blood painting the walls, and her parents, Ed and Joanne, who own the Last Call, are dead too, in exactly the same way. Varley doesn't get Duane, who's working, and he doesn't get their adoptive daughter, Julia, who's over at a friend's house, which is why the story doesn't end here, but he rips a permanent hole in both their lives and sets everything else still to come in motion.

As an angry violent man, it doesn't take much to imagine Duane going after Varley for vengeance and that's exactly what happens. However, having been sober for eighteen months, he also dives back into a bottle and lessens his edge. I didn't expect Rosson to effectively emasculate Duane in one action, but that's what he does. It isn't really his vengeance he seeks, it's Julia's and this book becomes hers relatively quickly after Varley kills the rest of her family here in Portland. When she hears who did it, she actually goes out looking for him in the streets of Portland.

Just as Duane is an angry violent man, she's an angry violent girl and that's because she was also forged in a traumatic environment. No, she didn't go to Nam because she's only thirteen, but she grew up in an environment of domestic abuse that continued until Linda shot Ray Ray Sikes in the face and went to jail for life. Apparently self-defence and mitigating circumstances didn't mean a thing, but then we're in the seventies here. We've learned lots since then about this sort of thing. Anyway, that's why Julia's with the Miners, but she's still processing it all and that's why they get to visit her in the middle school principal's office on a regular basis.

Both these characters are sympathetic but deeply flawed. The third character in this story, John Varley, is even less sympathetic but even more deeply flawed and we get to learn why a hundred or so pages in. For the first time in a long time, he's a vampire who's a believable monster, a man with no restraint who becomes a vampire with no restraint. Being turned in a memorable Seattle gangland turf war doesn't decrease his anger but it does increase his ability to indulge it. It isn't remotely out of character for him to date a serial killer. Suddenly, it's Nosferatu dating Ed Gein and they're raising hell on the road like 'Natural Born Killers'.

As I mentioned at the outset, everything here seems to be positive. The characters are drawn as deeply as I can remember a horror novel drawing three distinct leads, even if they all share anger as a motivating force. Maybe it's appropriate that the early scenes are all thoroughly grounded, as if highlighting how much Duane and Julia are both starting to find their feet again after their respective traumas. We're rooted to Portland and indeed the reality we know. However, after it all goes horribly wrong at the "needlelike, nearly translucent" teeth of Varley, they detach from that and take to the road to hunt the monster and there's no grounding at all. Suddenly, we're in a succession of cars and hotels, bars and barns somewhere, anywhere, nowhere.

Thematically, it's a powerful look at anger and revenge. Some of these characters get what they want but there's always a price to pay for that and it's a telling one. Most notably, Julia is given a place to begin and a place to end up, even if we don't know how long that might last, but we close the final page unsure as to whether Duane's even alive. Nobody else we particularly care about is except perhaps his parents, who he still hasn't told about any of this. They don't even know that Heidi's dead yet.

For vampire fans, Rosson doesn't dig too deep into vampire lore, these being young vampires, if not young by human standards, but he does come up with a few things of note. In particular, John Varley is turned by a Maker, one of the really old ones, which gives him some perks. One of those is blood calling, which is effectively putting out a hit by telepathic video feed. It's like the mailroom in the 'John Wick' franchise; but, instead of rooms of women with typewriters who send messages out to mobile phones, the vampire does that himself with the power of his mind. Varley puts out a hit on Duane and Julia through blood calling but there's a serious catch I'm not going to tell you, which rather lessens its impact.

There's so much here to build character, bolster grit and explore vengeance that there's not a lot of room left for horror. For all that John Varley is a monster of a vampire, his killing scenes aren't frequent and nothing's particularly dwelt on in the way that horror tends to do that. When Duane walks upstairs and finds Heidi's remains, it's not a horror scene but a crime scene. I pictured CSIs talking about vertical blood spatter and applying directional analysis. Of course, it's 1975, so that doesn't happen but I didn't imagine a Hammer horror movie scene, I imagined a primetime CBS television show scene, at a stretch, a 'Dexter' scene without all the transparent wrap.

Where this had the most impact wasn't in the horror scenes at all but in the emotional ones. The pinnacle for me was when Duane finally comes clean to Julia about his past, what he saw and what he did in the war and, most notably, what he did a year earlier that Joanne took care of for him. It plays like he's finally coming clean to himself about what he did and, by extension, who he is. It's a blistering scene with a serious emotional impact. That it's not much compared to what they have both done since doesn't matter. It's a real outpouring.

So there are many positives here. If I try to think of negatives, I come up empty. All I have to chip away at why I didn't like this more than I did—and I did like it, but I didn't love it—are approaches that Rosson took that all seem to make sense when I analyse them. Maybe it all comes down to a disconnect between where I thought this would go and where Rosson took it and that's on me not him. I think what I need to do is leave it a few years, so the details start to fade but I don't forget how powerful it is and that I want to take a fresh run through it. Let's see how it plays then. ~~ Hal C F Astell