Keith Rosson: Writing the Chaos, Through the Chaos

This is a guest post by author Keith Rosson about his new novel, Fever House, out today. If I may offer a brief editorial, here: this book arrived for me to blurb once upon a time and I failed to read it in time to do so, but having since read it, I will say this will almost assuredly be one of my favorite novels of the year. It is electric and mad. It defies genre. It is a horror novel, but it is also not only a horror novel — it is part rock-and-roll bio, part spy thriller, part crime noir nightmare, and it’s written in a way with sharp, incisive, thoughtful prose that, somehow, mysteriously, kicks you in the teeth but also makes you feel good while it’s happening. I fucking loved it and I think you will too.

Buy links at the bottom of the post. — c.

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My author’s copies of my new novel, Fever House, arrived today. Three big-ass boxes from UPS, my oldest kid, the seven-year-old, struggling to help me carry them in.

We put them on the coffee table and then I went through that moment where I was almost afraid to open them up. That last stretch of time before the book became a tangible, real thing – be it beautiful or be it be-warted, you know?

But then I cracked open a box and marveled at the thing. I felt such gratitude – realizing how lucky I was to have an entire team of people whose jobs are to make my book the best it can be. Lucky, man. 

 Cracking open that box also reminded me that every single book I write is a highwire act and a sleight-of-hand trick and a mystery all smooshed together. Because there’s always that nattering question buried beneath the wonder of holding your book in your hands for the first time. Always the same thing: How the hell did I do this? And will I ever manage to do it again?

Early drafts of Fever House were written in my kid’s bedroom while she was in kindergarten. We live in a small house where space is at a premium, and during the day – this was that first tumultuous year when the schools reopened – was unoccupied. The irony is not lost on me, that I penned this wildly violent, propulsive horror novel in which the severed body parts of a possibly slain devil are a not inconsequential plot-point, and I did all of it while sitting at a desk under my kid’s finger paintings of Pikachu and unicorns and rainbows and stuff. Let it be a testament, I guess – if you really want to write, you’ll find a way.

It was a tremendous release valve, this book. During those early drafts, my partner and I had just become foster parents of two little girls, aged two and three at the time, and I found myself, with zero experience as a parent, suddenly flung into the exacting demands of fatherhood. The sudden caregiver for these two young kids who had been run through the trauma of the foster care system; it was very much, for all of us, a trial by fire.

And then – ta-da! – about a month after we got them, COVID ripped its way across the country and our state was placed in lockdown.

So I was new father to challenging, wounded, terribly frightened children. And all of the sudden we’re in the midst of a pandemic and none of us can leave the house.

I was the stay-at-home parent that first year. So many times I felt like I was failing – failing everyone, constantly – and there was this profound sense of encapsulation. Claustrophobia. I think we all experienced it, or something like it. A period there in those first months where only essential workers went outside, ostensibly kept the world running; we hardly went anywhere. Our local playground had yellow caution tape around it. Had signs warning everyone away. We lived inside.

Fever House kickstarts with a pair of legbreakers who discover a severed hand in a freezer while collecting debts for their boss; proximity to the hand induces a near-uncontrollable desire for violence to those in its proximity. There is a sense of steeped paranoia all throughout the book – its dark-funded black ops agencies, its twisting, ricocheting narrative through multiple POVs, it’s veering, historied world-building. In retrospect, I can see where it all came from, tapping away in my kid’s room under those rainbows and Pokemon drawings; it was me trying to quell the fear that the world was dying, to counterbalance that feeling that I was profoundly fucking up and was ill-equipped to be a parent of any lasting decency or accord, you know?

All of that personal stuff – the COVID-bubble, the panic around my new responsibilities – butted up against the political, too. Portland – where the novel takes place – became an absolute hellhouse of egregious law enforcement overstep and violence in the weeks following the murder of George Floyd. While it sparked the mass-mobilization of some of the largest protests in history, Portland uniquely stepped it up and kept street-bound protests going for over 100 days straight, every single night. Often multiple that ranged in the thousands to, sometimes, a hundred or so black bloc folks. Chad Wolf – acting-head of Homeland Security at the time, at the behest of President Trump, decided to send in a mish-mash of officers from a number of federal law enforcement agencies, agencies which were allowed to remove insignia and badge numbers. It was madness. So much tear gas was fired in Portland, and with such impunity, later studies showed that protestors were exposed to CS gas at a level more than 50 times what federal regulators consider “immediately dangerous to life or health.”[1] People had their arms and legs broken with batons, had their skulls fractured. You’d find tear gas canisters and bean bag projectiles in the gutter the following morning. People were being pulled off the street into unmarked, rented vans and brought into the bowels of the Justice Center for interrogation.[2] The Federal Courthouse and PPB police union buildings were broken into and lit on fire. Again, madness, and while so much of it felt like the world was careening out of control, it also felt like some notion of justice was being metered out against malevolent institutions that felt impervious and untouchable. Like these untouchable entities might actually face some modicum of change or alteration in the face of this massive, global upheaval. I went to protests, marched, had friends who were “legal watchdogs” for the ACLU and had to crowdfund for a bulletproof vest after getting with munitions, watched countless acts of police violence on social media; the vast majority of injuries committed during those protests were by law enforcement officers without identifying marks on their uniforms or helmets. And to this day the Portland Police Bureau, despite being rocked with scandal after scandal and bucking multiple federal orders regarding use-of-force protocol or tear gas/munitions allowances, have not faced any significant consequences for their actions during the protests.

That notion of overstep? Of agencies tasked with protecting us instead stomping over any measure of legality to get what they want? What they deem is right?

All of that sure as hell made it into the book. Writing – with Fever House, at least – really did serve as a kind of osmosis for me, an emotional tacking-on of a bunch of stuff that was happening at the time. The claustrophobia of lockdown, the panicked trial-by-fire of new parenthood, and the egregiousness of government agencies that believe might makes right.

I held the book in my hands. Those puzzle pieces interlocking, but that remains the quiet wonder of writing. When it goes well, when it works, it feels like magic.

Fever House: Bookshop | B&N | Powells | Amazon

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[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2023/apr/17/teargas-effect-portland-police-investigation

[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-use-unmarked-vehicles-to-grab-protesters-in-portland