BOOK REVIEW | FEVER HOUSE | KEITH ROSSON

 

BOOK DESCRIPTION 

A small-time criminal. A has-been rock star. A shadowy government agency. And a severed hand whose dark powers threaten to destroy them all.

When leg-breaker Hutch Holtz rolls up to a rundown apartment complex in Portland, Oregon, to collect overdue drug money, a severed hand is the last thing he expects to find stashed in the client’s refrigerator. Hutch quickly realizes that the hand induces uncontrollable madness: Anyone in its proximity is overcome with a boundless compulsion for violence. Within hours, catastrophic forces are set into motion: Dark-op government agents who have been desperately hunting for the hand are on Hutch’s tail, more of the city’s residents fall under its brutal influence, and suddenly all of Portland stands at the precipice of disaster. . . .

But it’s all the same for Katherine Moriarty, a singer whose sudden fame and precipitous downfall were followed by the mysterious death of her estranged husband—suicide, allegedly. Her trauma has made her agoraphobic, shackled within the confines of her apartment. Her son, Nick, has moved home to care for her, quietly making his living working for Hutch’s boss.

When Hutch calls Nick in distress, looking for someone else to take the hand, Katherine and Nick are plunged into a global struggle that will decimate the walls of the carefully arranged life they’ve built. Mother and son must evade both crazed, bloodthirsty masses and deceitful government agents while exorcising family secrets that have risen from the dead—secrets, they soon discover, that might hold the very key to humanity’s survival.

Can you resist the hand? Find an excerpt from the next Fever House novel at the end of the book.

PUBLISHED: 15 AUGUST 2024

PUBLISHER: RANDOM HOUSE

EDITIONS: HARDBACK, EBOOK,PAPERBACK

REVIEW

As horror fiction progresses, authors are attempting to find new ways to tell familiar stories, and Fever House by Keith Rosson attempts to take the familiar apocalyptic, demonic horror genre in a different direction.

The story focuses on two career criminals, Hutch and Tim who are ordered by their boss to collect the debt owed to them. However, instead of receiving monetary compensation like they were expecting, they instead get a severed hand in a bread wrapper.

This leads to unexpected results as the hand moves from one person to the next including a young man named Nick Coffin.

In the midst of there are a number of other players. There’s Nick’s mother, Katherine. An agoraphobic ex punk singer, who now makes a living off of writing scores for a TV programme. A couple of Black Ops operatives, John Bonner and Catherine Wiles who are after the hand and to hopefully stop it falling into the wrong hands. And finally, there’s St. Michael, a visionary angel type man who is being kept captive by the very organisation that Wiles and Bonner work for.

Now, I am going to be quite honest, I am not sure whether I actually liked this. It came with the moniker that Stephen king said this was one hell of a scary book.  I am  very quickly coming to the conclusion that if the great tour de force that is Mr Stepen King puts on the front that this is the scariest book he has ever read, then I will be running in the opposite direction, as we are obviously at very different poles to what is scary. 

Don’t get me wrong, the book is well written and there were some good bits in it, but on the whole, I was just thinking when are we actually going to get to the good bits yet, as the narrative is like a meandering river that goes in many different directions to get to the end point.

I know many people have loved this book, but me? I can’t say that I did.

I don’t think that it helped that I listened to this on audio, and I absolutely hated the narrator. In fact, I actually ditched listening to this first time round with a resounding NOPE! when I first  picked it up. It was like listening to Adrienne Barbeau in The Fog, which I liked, but not for a full eleven hours.

Mind you, if I was reading the book I would have probably ditched that much sooner.

By the time I reached the end, I think I had lost the ability to care for most of the characters, and when the book finished on its cliffhanger, I thought to myself ‘am I going to bother with the second one?’ I think I may be able to live without it.