Book Review: Fever House

Spoilers!

Ha! – would a madman have been so wise as this? The unnamed narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 short story classic, “The Tell-Tale Heart” hasn’t seen, or heard, anything yet. Keith Rosson, 180 years later with his 2023 book, Fever House, takes the concept of a beating, maddening heart to the extreme, infusing it with unrelenting chaos, a punk aesthetic, and upping the stakes to a world-ending calamitous decision to deny one’s acting “mad.”

Joe Hill’s Tweet-length review of the book inspired me to buy Fever House — “It’s like being in a car going 150MPH, and the driver is bleeding from his eyeballs.” — and I thought, there is no way someone can sustain 150MPH of chaos for 412 rip-roaring pages. Rosson proved me wrong because he somehow does, and Joe Hill was right with the other part of his review, in that you never feel safe on a single page. Not once! There was even a moment that gave me goosebumps because I didn’t expect what happened. I love when inky blobs on a page can give me that reaction.

My own version of a Tweet-length review would be: Fever House is like being in the mosh pit at a heavy metal concert with flesh-biting maniacs, mashing their chompers with each revolution through the chorus, and the devil has chains around the exit doors, smoking a cigarette with a triumphant smirk. Somehow, Rosson has made a near-apocalyptic scenario — the world on the brink of ending because arrogant government officials tried dancing with a devil — locked-in-a-bathroom-stall-retching claustrophobic and unnerving.

But why do men (typically men) attempt to dance with a devil (a is the keyword here) in the first place? Power, and what’s the point of power, if you can’t wield it? Why possess a devil’s hand, with the power to make your enemies zombie-like raving maniacs, if you don’t use it? Why possess an angel-like creature with accurate prognosticating abilities, fittingly named Saint Michael, if you don’t use him, even evoking the threat of violence by cutting off his wings? A deep black operation agency within the federal government does all this, and it unravels across only a few hours on one night in Portland, Oregon. That’s the other remarkable aspect of Rosson’s book, and why it feels so breathless, tight despite being 412 pages, and claustrophobic: the events of the novel quite literally occur over one hellish night.

Two leg-breakers for a gangster named Peach, Tim and Hutch, come across a devil’s hand while trying to scare some meth-sweat smelling addict to pay up his debts. That interaction unfurls the chaos therein, which is why I started thinking of the book as a nastier, grimier version of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Because the hand makes you violent, including against yourself. Their fellow gangster, Don, for example, after coming into contact with the hand, absconds to his home with the hand uses a razor to take his own hand off, presumably to attach the devil hand to his stump.

Two agents with the clandestine government group are trying to hunt down the hand, John Bonner and Samantha Weils. She’s a psychological mess, and has become quite literally the “gun” of the agency, ready to kill anyone, whereas Bonner has never actually fired his service weapon and is still reeling from having killed a protester during an anti-police rally years before. (In fact, you could make the argument that the entire book is an allegory of police vs. anti-police protesters, how police “other” protestors, and the punk aesthetic even works with how the protestors dress, act, and navigate the “streets.” Plus, obviously, the Portland setting!) Thus, Weils has no qualms about shooting civilians in pursuit of the hand because I think she also somewhat better grasps the implications of the hand falls into the wrong … hands.

All of this, and this is where more of the punk and heavy metal aesthetic seeps in, comes back to Katherine Moriarty and Nick Coffin, mother and son, and their husband/father, Matthew Coffin, who, along with Katherine, fronted the mega-successful band, The Blank Letters. Their hit song, “I Won’t Forget It” off of their album, All Your Wasted Days, is used by the government in essentially a riff on the Satanic panic of the 1980s with heavy metal music, encoding subliminal messages that make people go mad in a zombie-like fashion. If you’re killed around the hand, you also become zombiefied. We know Matthew killed himself, that Katherine is a shell of herself, anxiety-ridden and afraid to leave the apartment she shares with Nick, and that Nick finds items for Peach (which is how he comes to find the hand, as it were). It’s not until the end of the novel that we learn just how involved Matthew was in the “remnants,” the hand, eye, and voice of a devil. Prior to jumping off of a bridge, he cut his own hand off, plucked his own eyeball out, and recorded himself saying Satanic-like things that underscores the aforementioned song. Matthew surprises Katherine (although maybe not; we learn, after all, she knew about what he’d done and that’s why she was so anxious; ergo, perhaps she had an inkling of what he’d become) zombified in a former band mate’s kitchen.

The visual of Matthew holding out his own eyeball to Katherine, and later returning zombiefied are gnarly visuals in a book filled with such gory and violent details, including shocking moments where, for example, Weils shoots Bonner in the head, but pulls her shot because of a tendril of moral consciousness left in her. He survives! And helps to later uncover a lot of what is going on. Or when Saint Michael finally kills Lundy, the government madman who danced with the devil. Obviously, I’ve read Stephen King, Joe Hill, and some other authors known for their gore and violence, and I’m happy to report Rosson adds his own punk style to the genre. Some of the descriptions of the violence and gory imagery on hand (heh) is unlike anything I’ve read before. It was a treat for sickos like me who enjoy gore done right.

When I added Fever House to my “want to read” list on Goodreads, I noticed a sequel to Fever House was slated to come out this year. So, I knew going into the book that it wasn’t going to tidy everything up, and it doesn’t. Katherine, who is in Chicago, escapes Matthew, and is trying to get back to Nick, while Portland and the entire West Coast of the United States seems on the precipice of apocalypse and/or a nuclear strike from the United States, while also, Bonner’s well-connected defense contractor Uncle Jack, lets loose the devil sound through everyone’s phones in a bid to level the playing field, i.e., they don’t want the U.S. to appear weak, so, they want to unleash this power on our enemies. Instead, they unleash it on everyone in the world, allies and foes alike.

I can only imagine how delightfully deranged and chaotic The Devil by Name will be. Would a madman like me be so wise as to dance with Rosson again? Hell yeah. Oddly, I have a strong desire now to listen to “I Won’t Forget It.” By the way, that’s the corollary to using power because you have it: using something because you’re fundamentally curious.