Bookmarked: Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson
Hey y'all let's see what's up today! I decided to give this a listen on audiobook to help achieve my reading goals for the month, however I ended up purchasing a copy of this for the Kindle app on my phone, and I'll explain why in my review.
The Summary
This novel follows the story of Vietnam Veteran Duane Minor, his wife Heidi, and his niece Julia. Minor and his family live above the Last Call bar, owned by Heidi's family. Duane works at this bar, which is probably a bad decision for a recovering alcoholic, along with other members of his family like his mother-in-law Joanne. After a run in with some mysterious bikers dealing drugs in the bar, things quickly go sour for Duane.
He and Julia must try to find the man responsible for their family's demise while changing themselves in the process. Are they chasing a ghost? Can the killer be caught? What will they do when all is said and done?
The Review
I'll be honest, because I always want to be up front with you guys, I was really close to DNF-ing this book. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, DNF stands for Did Not Finish, a term used when a reader willingly stops reading the book and does not finish it. Going into the novel, I thought this would be my cup of tea. It's set in the 70s, which is generally something that I'd be really fond of. However, when listening to the audio book I noticed the sentences didn't really make sense to me. I thought it was just me being generally unable to hear, so I bought the book on Kindle instead only to find that... nope it was written that way. I'll get into that a little more later on I don't like to start these reviews off on a bad note so I'll get into what I did like first.
I found the characters to be very likeable and raw, even the antagonist had me feeling for him just a little bit. They show active character development, they're self aware of their mistakes and their changes and that's something that helps the reader to get a good picture of who these characters are, it humanizes them and it makes the events of the novel feel more like a punch in the gut than anything.
I also found Rosson's depiction of vampires to be very interesting. Vampires are one of those folkloric creatures that are so old and so timeless it's hard to find ways to reinvent them but he did that extremely well. I would love to see a prequel or sequel to this novel that goes a bit more in depth with the vampiric hierarchy and magic system because they are genuinely really interesting and we know from the novel there are so many other vampires out there. It takes a special kind of creative mind to approach a concept that is so overdone like a vampire or a zombie and make it into something new, and I think Rosson really stepped up to that challenge and excelled with it.
Why this book was almost a DNF for me is largely in part to the fact that lines that should be one sentence are broken up into several, incomplete, smaller sentences. Along with that, things that should be broken up are one long continuous block of text. As I mentioned before, I started listening to this on an audio book and had to switch to a real book because I thought I was mishearing things. The entire novel just felt incredibly choppy which is really disappointing because it has an amazing plotline. I think the way that it's written almost makes it feel like it was written by ChatGPT. It was just really frustrating for me, I was having to re-read pages because my brain just started skipping text or adding words to complete the sentences.
Closing
Overall, I did enjoy the important aspects of this book which are the world building and character aspects. However, the way that things are written also play a big part in the reading experience and that's where this novel fell flat for me. Despite this, I actually would read it again, it was a challenge but I think now that I'm used to it I wouldn't have such a hard time. I will leave a link to Coffin Moon here if you guys would like to try it out, I think you should definitely give it a go just go in with the expectation that it is written rather strangely. That's all that I have for you guys for now, hopefully we'll have more to come. If you want to see more from me feel free to click the link below where you can find my other socials. Y'all take care, and thanks for stopping by!
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