Crone

Keith Rosson 

By guest reviewer
Nicholas Litchfield, 
editor of the Lowestoft Chronicle

A TEENAGE girl’s disappearance on a rain-soaked Oregon highway casts a long shadow over Salt Point, a coastal town where secrets cling as tightly as the fog.

Keith Rosson (pictured below) – a Shirley Jackson Award-winner who has garnered widespread acclaim for his genre-defying fiction from the likes of Stephen King – plunges readers into a world where the boundary between the living and the dead often vanishes in his electrifying new novel Crone. Released next month, the story blends rural noir and supernatural horror, and is rooted in the isolation and decay of a town marked by grief and addiction.

Set in the fictional town of Salt Point, Crone opens with fifteen-year-old Hannah Lamp and her best friend, Avery Bryant, caught in a torrential rainstorm as they walk home at night after a party. Nearly blind from birth, Hannah is fiercely independent but isolated, her mother gone and her father troubled. Exhausted and frustrated by her limited vision, Hannah insists they accept a ride from a blue van. Avery is wary, but ultimately Hannah approaches the van alone and vanishes, leaving Avery burdened by guilt.

Thirteen years later, Hannah’s father, Eli Lamp, is desperate and broken. Once a respected detective, now a recovering addict, Eli works as an enforcer for Dave Novak’s Crooked Wheel, a biker gang that controls the local trade in ‘wire,’ a hallucinogenic street drug that rots its users. Guilt, debt, and the unsolved mystery of Hannah’s fate haunt his every move.

Salt Point is further unsettled when Vicki Stubbs, the eccentric town witch, discovers a human heart on the beach, bound with blackthorn and amaranth and pierced with ritual objects. Alarmed, Vicki investigates, quietly convinced something darker is at work. Meanwhile, Eli’s violent enforcement of Novak’s rules deepens his self-loathing, even as he is sent to intimidate a low-level dealer selling wire without approval. Soon after, Eli is summoned by Novak’s right-hand man to examine the mutilated body of Novak’s son, Anton, at a local creek. Forced to investigate discreetly, Eli suspects the murder is more than Novak’s claim that he is a victim of rival gang Brother Night. Consumed by grief, Novak demands personal vengeance and refuses to involve the police. Desperate for answers, Eli is offered a deal… if he finds Anton’s killer, Novak will clear his debt.

Meanwhile, Hannah’s friend Avery returns to Salt Point after years away, compelled by dreams of the missing girl. Arrested for having drug paraphernalia and reunited with Eli, Avery finds old wounds reopened. Alone and desperate, she slips back into addiction and is drawn deeper into Salt Point’s shadows, pursued by her abusive boyfriend and hunted by men from Brother Night.

A violent confrontation leaves her wounded and alone, until a harrowing encounter with a monstrous, witch-like figure in the woods sets her on a collision course with the town’s darkest secrets...

Rosson expertly ratchets up the tension, drawing vivid, empathetic characters in taut, immersive prose. Salt Point emerges as both the setting and a leading player in Crone, its secrets as much a part of the landscape as the towering firs and restless sea. Full of menace and heartbreak, Crone is a lyrical meditation on loss and resilience, a story where the past refuses to stay buried and the price of truth is nothing less than a transformation.
(Black Crow Books, hardback, £19.99)

⬛Nicholas Litchfield is an English-born author and journalist who lives in Western New York. He established the Lowestoft Chronicle, a quarterly online magazine, in 2009. It  publishes short stories, flash fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, interviews, and artwork.(lowestoftchronicle.com)