Coffin Moon

In December 1975, Duane Minor, a mid-twenties Vietnam veteran eighteen months sober, tends bar at the Last Call Tavern in Portland, Oregon. He and his wife, Heidi, a college student finishing a novel manuscript called The Hollow, live in the apartment above the bar, owned by Heidi's parents, Ed and Joanne Shaw. They share the space with Julia, Heidi's thirteen-year-old niece, whose mother is serving a life sentence for shooting her abusive husband. Separated from her younger stepbrother and sent to Portland as the only family willing to take her, Julia is guarded and prone to fighting but slowly warming to Minor and Heidi. Minor's nights are haunted by Vietnam nightmares and a violent secret: Months earlier, he beat two burglars in the bar so savagely he believed he killed them. Joanne helped him dispose of the bodies and made him swear off drinking.

Minor's stability shatters when two members of the Crooked Wheel Motorcycle Club, Bradley and Eugene, begin dealing heroin from the bar's back room. He orders them out with a fish bat. Joanne reveals Ed has terminal cancer and that someone connected to the bikers can save him, though she refuses to explain how. She threatens to expose Minor's secret if he interferes. That night, Minor hears activity in the closed bar and creeps downstairs armed. In the back room he finds Bradley, Eugene, and the man running the operation, John Varley, a massive blond man radiating menace. Joanne sits with them, weeping. Minor photographs all three with a Polaroid, pistol-whips Bradley, and ejects them at gunpoint. Joanne calls Minor a killer and says Ed had a chance until Minor intervened.

Days later, Julia goes to her first sleepover. After midnight, she phones the bar asking to come home; no one answers the apartment. Minor runs upstairs and finds Heidi dismembered in their bedroom. At the police station, detectives tell him Ed and Joanne were also torn apart in their home. They find Minor's story implausible, particularly the claim that a man without biker affiliations could command sworn club members, identified by their sewn patches. The Polaroid of Varley shows only a smokelike distortion with two white holes for eyes, as if he cannot be captured on film.

The narrative reveals Varley as a vampire. After murdering Minor's family, he slaughters his Crooked Wheel allies and flees Portland. On the road, he picks up Johan Claasen, a young Dutch dropout who murders a stranger to prove his loyalty. The two form a violent partnership, and Varley, who has never loved anyone, recognizes in Johan a kindred spirit.

Minor and Julia move into a motel. He breaks his sobriety, consumed by grief. Detective Scoggins reveals that a John Varley was arrested in Portland in 1931 under nearly identical circumstances and that five brutal unsolved homicides occurred that spring before Varley escaped custody. Minor assembles the logic: Varley is a vampire, which explains why Joanne courted his favor to save Ed.

Julia slips out one night to search for Varley on her own. A teenager directs her to a woman named Adeline at Kenton Park. Minor finds Julia, and they visit the park together. Adeline appears to be nine or ten but speaks with ancient authority, attended by Frank, her human servant. She explains that the Children's Museum, a compound of boarded-up Victorian houses across the street, holds thirty-six vampire children she turned over the years, all of whom disappointed her and now starve. Adeline offers to turn Julia into something capable of fighting Varley if Julia will serve as her companion afterward. Minor refuses and pulls Julia away. That night, Julia waits for him to pass out, walks to the Museum, and submits to Adeline's bite. Minor finds her at dawn on a swing set, her eyes cold and glittering, puncture wounds seeping blood at her throat.

Eighteen months later, Minor and the vampiric Julia hunt Varley across the American heartland. Minor trades vials of his own blood for information in the vampire underworld and acquires six hand-cast silver bullets, which are lethal to vampires. Meanwhile, Varley and Johan sell cocaine in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, until a drug sting collapses into violence. Varley then performs a blood-calling, a psychic command pushing Minor's face and the order to kill him into the mind of every vampire in the region. Julia receives the calling but resists. After killing a vampire who attacks their motel room, Minor spots Johan in the parking lot and forces him at gunpoint to drive to Varley's hiding place.

At an abandoned farmstead, Minor shoots Johan in the back. Julia charges Varley, who catches her and hurls her through a barn wall. Minor shoots Varley in the gut with a silver bullet, then puts the barrel to his head, but the round fails to fire. Varley crushes Minor's bones and begins breaking his neck until Julia bursts from the barn, knocks Varley off him, and flees with Minor's broken body. On a dark road, knowing he will die, she bites his throat and begins his transformation. When Minor understands what she has done, he tells her she should have let him die. She responds that he is all she has left.

Varley, grieving Johan, summons the ancient vampire who turned him in Seattle in 1903, known as his Maker. The Maker arrives diminished, a charred wraith scarred by a past sunrise, and mocks Varley for falling in love. Varley kills the creature and drinks its blood, gaining new powers: retractable claws, psychic compulsion over humans, and a binding sense of Julia's location. He compels Detective Scoggins over the phone to reveal the family's burial site at Lone Fir Cemetery and drives toward Portland.

Minor insists on going home. They arrive around three A.M. and drive past their old haunts, including the Last Call, now renamed Lucky's. At Lone Fir Cemetery, Minor finds Heidi's headstone: "Daughter · Aunt · Wife." Scoggins arrives and handcuffs him. Varley appears from behind and slashes the detective's throat. He throws Minor through gravestones and raises his claws to kill him, but Julia steps from behind a mausoleum, the silver revolver burning her flesh, and fires twice, destroying part of Varley's face and arm. Black rot climbs his body from both wounds.

Varley staggers into the city and collapses inside a building where a homeless man sleeps. Minor follows the trail of black blood and finds Varley in a folding chair, dying. Varley warns Minor about the realities of vampiric existence: the compulsion to feed, the madness, and the choice between consuming people or walking into the sunrise. Julia enters, her gun hand charred to a claw, presses the barrel to Varley's forehead, and pulls the trigger. She tells Minor one bullet remains if he wants it. Then she bends to the homeless man Varley attacked and bites him carefully, not to kill but to turn him, ensuring he survives.

They part ways. Julia walks to the Children's Museum to honor her promise to Adeline, resolving that the debt is not forever. She plans, once free, to visit her mother in prison and her stepbrother in Florida, offering each the same choice she was given. She knocks on the Museum door. After a moment, it opens.

Minor breaks into Lucky's and lays the Polaroids and Heidi's manuscript on the bar. The hunger builds, and the choice looms: the last silver bullet, the sunrise, or continuing to exist. He opens The Hollow to its first page and begins reading his dead wife's story.