There’s a new monster hunter prowling the shelves.
“I like tackling standard horror tropes and flipping them on their heads and seeing what I can do with them,” said Keith Rosson during a recent email interview.
And flip them on their heads he does. You won’t find any sexy monsters or happy endings in a Rosson novel. What you will find are stories about the human spirit told through a gritty lens.
“Crone,” the latest from the author, follows a grieving father indebted to a motorcycle gang — one fans of Rosson’s work will recognize — as he learns the fate of his missing daughter. It may sound like a simple premise, but as Rosson put it, “Everything I write is kind of run through that strainer of crime, violence [and] desperation.”
Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and more
Despite not having a favorite horror subgenre, the Portland-based author has managed to center his career around them. With “Crone” — out Tuesday, Sept. 22, from Random House — he’s taking on witches.
“My whole writerly shtick is that I pretty much just take a common horror trope — vampires, witches, ghosts — and rework it until it fits in my particular crime/horror/broken people mashup,” Rosson said. “With ‘Crone,’ it was time to explore witches and try to make that little subsect of horror something of my own.”
The illustrator-turned-author has become well known for that mashup of crime and horror, drawing praise from critics and literary giants alike, including Stephen King and King’s bestselling son, Joe Hill, whose blurb is featured on the cover of “Crone,” calling Rosson a commanding voice in modern horror. Take a dive through the reviews on Rosson’s website and like author Nick Cutter, you’ll be “along for the ride wherever he’s driving.”
These questions have been edited for length and clarity.
Q. With “Coffin Moon,” you took the sexy vampire trope and threw it out the window and set it on fire. Do you feel like you went into “Crone” thinking the same way about witches?
Yeah, again, it was just a case of trying to make things into my own shape. So it was just a matter of fitting the trope of the witch into the foundational aspects of my work.
Q. Do you think of all your stories taking place in the same universe? Or are you just dropping breadcrumbs between your books for avid readers?
I think the veil is thin in certain places in my books. I think a character who met their fate in one world might not necessarily meet the same fate in the world next to it, and if you got the skills — or the tremendously bad luck in some cases — you can slip between. But yeah, I absolutely love forming that connective tissue between my stories; it’s so fun when I come across one of those in a book I’m reading, so why not do it for other folks?
Why ‘Clown in a Cornfield’ author Adam Cesare says horror is ‘in the blood’
Q. What about the Crooked Wheel motorcycle gang, which plays a key role in “Crone” and some of your other work, keeps you writing about it?
Again, there’s that idea of connective tissue. And something about 1% biker culture — that is both a disavowal of “lawfulness” but also has a super strict rigidity of rules and hierarchies and culture — that’s interesting to me.
Q. One of the main characters in “Crone” has optic nerve hypoplasia, the same condition you have. What made you decide to make the character legally blind? What was the experience like writing about something you deal with daily?
There are certain books that you want to write and for whatever reason, just aren’t ready to at a certain point. For me, there were a number of aspects, including writing a character with my own disability, that I was finally ready for. I couldn’t have written this book two years, three years ago, and there are things, ideas for books, characters, I want to tackle in the future that I’m just not ready to.
45 new books publishing in September 2026 to read and add to your TBR list
Q. You’ve written pieces before about what it’s like to create artwork with ONH. Do you have the same experiences with writing? Do you still work as a graphic designer?
Honestly, that is the lovely thing about writing. All it requires is a blank screen. There’s no pens or pencils or erasers or white-out pens or scanners or Photoshop or paper of the right density or all of that. I’ve fallen in love with the simplicity of writing, and have long been exhausted by all the minutiae of graphic design. Who knows if that’ll ever change.
Q. A lot of your work is genre-bending, blending crime and horror. While working with indie publishers, many dubbed the work as literary fiction. Since you’ve been working with Random House, it seems like you’ve dived deeper into the horror genre. Was that a conscious decision? How do you feel about being called a horror author?
I think my stuff still kind of toes the line, but the shift from magical realism or “weird” fiction happened pretty organically while writing “Fever House” a few years back. And then came the sequel, “The Devil by Name,” and I’ve always wanted to write a vampire book, which became “Coffin Moon,” etc. It’s happened pretty naturally.
Q. What draws you to magical realism and horror?
I’m drawn to this stuff because it gives me room to merge the mundane with the impossible. I get to see — to invent — how people might live and/or survive in that half-lit space between what’s expected and what should not be. It’s fun, to put it simply.
Q. What is your favorite witchy story, movie or work of art? Were there any you drew inspiration from for “Crone”?
I made a pretty conscious decision to steer away from witch-centric media while writing the book, but I think “[The] Blair Witch [Project]” and [Zach] Cregger’s “Weapons” are both fantastic, wildly different films. And there’s a scene, only a few pages long, in Christopher Buehlman’s “Between Two Fires,” in which a young girl talks to (and outsmarts) a witch in the pure dark of a blown-out monastery, and it’s some of the most thrilling fiction I’ve read in years. Absolutely awesome. Fantastic book.
Q. You’re currently working on another novel, “The Hollowlands,” coming out in 2027. Can you tell us anything about that project? Or do you have any other projects that you’d like to talk about?
You know, since I became a parent, every book finds a way to be about that, and “The Hollowlands” is no different. I also have a story collection coming out next year called “Sorrow Bends the Wing,” coming from Blackstone Publishing. Exciting, because my first book, “The Mercy of the Tide,” came out in 2017, and with two books coming out next year, I’ll have published ten of them in a decade, which is pretty rad.
Map: 100 Southern California independent bookstores to visit in 2026
Q. And finally, if you could ask your fans one question, what would it be?
I wouldn’t ask them anything, honestly. What I’d like all my readers to know is that I absolutely don’t take any of this for granted, and I’m profoundly grateful to all of them. This is hands down the best job in the world, and I’m so damn lucky to get to do this.