After Tim Reed cuts the engine of his rusty Datsun hatchback, his business compadre Hutch Holtz fishes around in the trunk for a baseball bat. Hutch has a bad feeling. Soon, it’ll be a feeling that says something more than that “a guy twelve thousand in the hole is willing to do a lot of things.”

Like many good horror stories, Keith Rosson’s “Fever House” opens on a dark and stormy night — which isn’t unusual for Portland, Ore., but it adds a particular mood just the same. Hutch and Tim are debt collectors, working for a guy named Peach Serrano, an old pro who’s careful not to do anything that will cause police attention. But soon that will be unavoidable. Because the night Peach sends the guys out to collect a large sum from a meth addict named Wesley, everything changes.

Wesley isn’t fazed by their threats of violence. In fact, he seems to welcome it, to almost enjoy it — and he seems to be on something more than just meth. “I’m invincible,” insists Wesley through bloodied lips. But when Hutch and Tim say it’s time to meet Peach, Wesley buckles, insisting that there’s something he truly can’t leave behind.

It’s a hand. A severed hand.

As soon as Hutch pulls the thing out of Wesley’s fridge, the feeling in his bones shifts into something he’s never felt before, where “some part of him wants to puke and mewl, while another part wants to just start biting Wesley’s face, the skin of his neck. Just savage him.”

Thus, it begins.

Once the hand is out in the world, a catastrophic chaos unfolds. The hand causes anyone in its proximity to crave some insane brand of violence that soon turns the city of Portland into a madhouse of blood and frenzied darkness. It’s what a special forces team called the ARC refers to as a fever house, which soon has cops shooting down affected folks like they’re playing a video game.

Told in three parts through its rotating cast of characters, “Fever” is a mix between horror and crime thriller run through what Rosson calls a “literary strainer.” Though we’ve seen some parts of this theme before — male-centered casts of tough guys who brandish guns, smoke endless cigarettes and overuse phrases like “dick swinging” — the prose is imagery infused, alongside entertaining dialogue that manages to feel unique.

Rosson, who lives in Portland, is no stranger to horror. He won the 2021 Shirley Jackson Award for his short story “Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons.” In his fourth novel, “Fever,” Rosson shows off his knack for describing the gruesome. You can almost smell “the bright, coppery fug of blood” and can almost hear the sound of a guy running on a broken ankle, “running on the bone itself, the ankle bone, his shoed foot flopping uselessly to the side.”

充满了波特兰的引用,音乐industry and police brutality, “Fever” is a modern-meets-classic horror story that keeps the stakes high until the very last sentence. Rosson has just completed its sequel, “The Devil by Name.”

Michelle Kicherer is a freelance writer.