By Jim Mcleod 
The parcel from Black Crow Books hit the doormat with a certain weight, a promise. You know the feeling. That specific, quiet thrill before the knife-slide of the box cutter. Inside, the two limited editions, Fever House and The Devil By Name, weren’t just books; they were artefacts of pure beauty. For a horror site, this is the good stuff. It’s the tactile ceremony of it, the art and the signature, before you even revisit the devastating worlds Keith Rosson built inside. A true collector’s shiver.
Parcels from Black Crow Books carry a certain heft, don’t they? Not just physical weight, but the promise of something considered. That’s their entire ethos, condensed into cardboard and paper. This isn’t a factory line. It’s a boutique operation founded by two serious genre nerds who know precisely what makes a collector’s heart beat faster: genre bookseller Matt Holland (of The Broken Binding fame) and top-tier publicist Jamie-Lee Nardone. Their mission is simple, brutal, and beautiful: quality over quantity, with a focus on limited editions and bespoke horror.
Why buy from them? Because they’re building artefacts, not just printing books. They talk about “agility and author care,” about “true partnerships”. You feel that. It’s in the deckle-edged paper, the gilt-stamping, the collaboration with artists. They’re leveraging Matt’s proven expertise in producing beautiful books and Jamie-Lee’s deep industry connections to create objects of desire for horror fans. They get it. They’re “lifelong ‘outsiders’” who “know what horror fans want”.
And the word is already out. Look at the chatter for their inaugural anthology. One early adopter, clearly clued into the scene, pre-ordered immediately and raved not just about the “who’s who of modern horror” contents, but specifically about the physical object: “the cover, the end papers and design is bespoke and gorgeous”. They called it “a book made by true lovers of the genre”. That’s the review that matters. It’s not just marketing copy; it’s a sigh of relief from a dedicated reader who finally sees their passion reflected back at them in slipcase form.
This is the new pulse. It’s two experts uniting, not following trends but setting a standard. When you order a Black Crow edition, you’re not just buying a story. You’re securing a piece of a very specific, very passionate vision for the future of horror publishing. You’re buying into the weird and wonderful, crafted by hands that genuinely give a damn.
These are books that don’t just want to scare you for a night. They want to sit with you in the quiet morning after, asking what you’d be willing to break, and what you’d fight to keep whole, when everything else has already burned.
This is the new pulse. It’s two experts uniting, not following trends but setting a standard. When you order a Black Crow edition, you’re not just buying a story. You’re securing a piece of a very specific, very passionate vision for the future of horror publishing. You’re buying into the weird and wonderful, crafted by hands that genuinely give a damn.
These are books that don’t just want to scare you for a night. They want to sit with you in the quiet morning after, asking what you’d be willing to break, and what you’d fight to keep whole, when everything else has already burned.
Keith Rosson’s Fever House and the Devil By Name: A Duet of Destruction
Fever House
It’s funny the things you remember when a book scares you stupid. Not the gore, though there’s plenty of that. A hand in a freezer, sure. But it’s the smaller, human wreckage that sticks. The smell of meth-sweat in a Portland tweaker’s apartment, the specific ache of a washed-up rock star’s agoraphobia, the way two lifelong friends look at each other right before the cursed thing in the room makes one of them do the unthinkable. That’s the magic trick Keith Rosson pulls in Fever House. He makes you believe, utterly, in the people first. Then he unleashes hell.
The set-up is a thing of brutal, efficient beauty. Two small-time leg-breakers, Hutch and Tim, are just trying to collect a debt. A routine job. Then they find the hand. Not just any hand. A devil’s hand. And it whispers. It doesn’t just suggest violence; it compels it, turning every person it touches into a liability, a blood-soaked problem.
What follows isn’t just a horror novel; it’s a narrative chain reaction. The hand passes from low-level criminals to paranoid feds to a reclusive punk icon, Katherine Moriarty, each chapter a self-contained character grenade. Rosson structures the book as a series of interlocking short stories, diving deep into the psyches of a corrupt agent, a grieving mother, and a guilt-ridden cop, right at the moment their worlds detonate.
And the pace. Joe Hill said it was like being in a car going 150 mph while the driver bleeds from his eyeballs. That’s not hyperbole. The entire, breathless, 400-plus-page catastrophe unfolds over a single, relentless night. The chaos is both sprawling and claustrophobic, a punk-rock manifesto scored to feedback and panic.
Yet, for all the grand guignol spectacle, the self-amputations, the zombie hordes, the cosmic stakes, the heart of the book is deeply, tragically human. It’s about the debts we can’t pay, the grief that cages us, and the fragile alliances we form when the world starts biting itself. The ending doesn’t so much conclude as launch you screaming into the abyss, a masterful cliffhanger that makes the sequel not a want, but a physical need.
Devil By Name
Five years later. That’s where The Devil By Name finds us. Five years after the “Message”, that devil-voiced broadcast that turned the world’s population into feverish, violent husks, scorched the planet. The breakneck crime thriller is gone. In its place is a slower, sadder, genuinely post-apocalyptic road novel. The palette isn’t neon and blood anymore; it’s the grey of ash, the washed-out green of dead countryside, the sterile white of a corporate theocracy’s “Providence Initiative” trying to rebuild atop the rubble.
This is a book about the aftermath. About living in the crater. Katherine Moriarty, now living under an assumed name on the East Coast, chains her fever-touched son in a shed out back. That’s the level of bleak, practical horror we’re dealing with here. John Bonner patrols the walled quarantine zone of Portland, haunted by failure. In France, a teenage girl named Naomi discovers a terrifying power that makes her a pawn in a new game. The scope explodes from Portland to a shattered continent, the story becoming a kind of grim Stand-like pilgrimage.
If Fever House was all about the explosive ignition, The Devil By Name is about the long, cold burn. The tone is contemplative, steeped in loss and the grinding work of survival. Rosson isn’t just tying up plot threads; he’s examining what, if anything, remains of humanity after such a total loss. Can care and decency, as the book tentatively suggests, still flicker in this new dark age? The answer plays out in fragile, earned connections, like the beautiful, tentative bond between Katherine and a ragman named Dean, two strangers finding a sliver of warmth in the cold.
Don’t mistake the slower pace for a lack of payoff. The final act accelerates into a cosmic showdown that is both terrifying and strangely beautiful, bringing the duology’s themes full circle. It’s a more controlled, mature book than its predecessor, and arguably a more devastating one. It stares into the abyss left by the first book’s fireworks and finds not just monsters, but the faint, stubborn outline of a soul.
What Rosson pulls off, across both books, is a brutal kind of magic. He makes you stare directly into the howling, unnatural void, a hand that births a plague, a voice that unmakes the world, and then, impossibly, he makes you feel for the shattered people staring back from the edge. It’s the difference between the flash of a detonation and the permanent scarring left by the heat.
You come away from the duology less with a conventional sense of plot resolution and more with a visceral, bone-deep understanding of cost. The cost of violence, the cost of survival, the terrible price of a second chance. These are books that don’t just want to scare you for a night. They want to sit with you in the quiet morning after, asking what you’d be willing to break, and what you’d fight to keep whole, when everything else has already burned.
THE FEVER HOUSE DUOLOGY
FEVER HOUSE & THE DEVIL BY NAME by Keith Rosson
‘Exciting, suspenseful, horrifying. . . Read them now and you can thank me later’ —Stephen King
‘Pulp Fiction meets a punk-rock Da Vinci Code . . . awesomely blood-soaked’ —C.J. Tudor
‘Read this duology as one single grand, mutating epic’ —Esquire
A WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (Fever House)
An ESQUIRE and PASTE MAGAZINE and PARADE BEST HORROR OF 2024 (The Devil by Name)
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.
Welcome to the FEVER HOUSE. When leg-breaker Hutch Holtz rolls up to a rundown apartment complex in Portland, Oregon, a severed hand is the last thing he expects to find in the 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 are on Hutch’s tail, 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. Now agoraphobic and shackled within her apartment, she is looked after by her son, Nick, who is quietly making his living working for Hutch’s boss.
When Hutch calls Nick in distress, Katherine and Nick are plunged into a global struggle that will decimate the walls of the carefully arranged life they’ve built. They must evade both crazed, bloodthirsty masses and deceitful government agents while exorcising family secrets — secrets, they soon discover, that might hold the very key to humanity’s survival.
‘Where were you when the Message came through?’ THE DEVIL BY NAME opens five years after FEVER HOUSE, with survivors finally starting to find a new equilibrium in a world overrun by the zombie-like “fevered.” We meet Naomi, a teenage girl in France with the unique ability to draw the fever out of the afflicted. Naomi has fallen under the control of a vicious man, but the American intelligence community will stop at nothing to bring her and her power to the US.
Back in the US, we find American survivors weighted down by guilt for the lives they couldn’t save: Katherine is a grieving mother living under an assumed name in Cape Cod, visiting her fevered son in a dead-bolted garden shed under the cover of night, and Dean is a peddler who lives on the road, scavenging, selling, trading, and trying to forget the family he once had. When the demonic force that was behind the fever re-emerges, Katherine, Dean, and Naomi will have to make a dangerous journey across a ravaged America, all while scouring the secrets of their own pasts in order to save the world in a heart-stopping, breakneck saga of survival.
Why Ginger Nuts of Horror is a Top Destination for Horror Book Reviews
For dedicated fans searching for their next great scare, finding a trustworthy and passionate source for horror book reviews is essential. Look no further than Ginger Nuts of Horror, a cornerstone of the dark fiction community that has been delivering insightful and enthusiastic coverage for over 16 years.
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Founded by Jim Mcleod, Ginger Nuts of Horror has grown from a passion project into an award-nominated, credible hub for a global community of readers. It’s a place built on a shared joy for horror, making it the perfect guide to help you navigate the vast and thrilling world of horror literature.
If you want to stay informed, inspired, and connected to the heartbeat of the genre, Ginger Nuts of Horror is your ultimate resource. Explore the site today and join a community that lives and breathes dark fiction.
Damascus Mincemeyer