Vampires are coming to Paramount — and they’ve already got Stephen King‘s seal of approval. Keith Rosson’s acclaimed 2025 horror novel Coffin Moon is being developed as a television series by Paramount Television Studios and Jessica Biel and Michelle Purple’s Iron Ocean. Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue, whose credits include A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and Netflix’s Painkiller, are attached to develop and adapt the book and serve as showrunners.
The timing couldn’t be better for anyone curious about the book: the adaptation was announced just as Coffin Moon arrived in paperback on September 22, 2026. The original hardcover was published September 9, 2025.
What is Coffin Moon about?
Set during the winter of 1975, Coffin Moon introduces Duane Minor, a Vietnam veteran who has returned home to Portland, Oregon, and is struggling to put his life back together. He’s tending bar, trying to remain sober, attempting to save his marriage to Heidi and raising his 13-year-old niece, Julia. Then a vampire walks into his bar. The creature is John Varley, a killer who spends daylight hours buried beneath loose earth and emerges after dark. After Duane crosses him, Varley retaliates by murdering Heidi. Duane is left consumed by guilt, while Julia wants revenge.
What follows isn’t a traditional Gothic tale of elegant vampires and ancient castles. Rosson sends Duane and Julia on a bloody pursuit across the Pacific Northwest, populated by undead children, vampire hunters, silver bullets and people who have become fascinated by Varley’s brutality. Underneath the carnage is a story about grief, family and what vengeance can do to the people seeking it. That last element could be particularly important to a television adaptation. The book isn’t simply asking whether its heroes can kill the monster; it’s interested in what might remain of them after they’ve devoted themselves to doing it.
“I’ve been calling it True Grit with vampires,” Rosson told comicsbeat. “Essentially, it’s a 1970s revenge story where a Vietnam War veteran and his adopted niece hunt the vampire who slaughtered their family. Like all of my work, it’s taking a horror trope and running through the colander of crime fiction. It’s very gritty and crime-like, but has supernatural shit going on.”
Stephen King really loved Coffin Moon
If Paramount needed a pull quote for the eventual trailer, Stephen King has already supplied one. The Carrie and ‘Salem’s Lot author called Coffin Moon the “Best modern vampire story ever” and described it as “a mind-blowingly good horror novel.”
That’s considerably stronger than the abbreviated “mind-blowingly good” quote in the adaptation announcement. The publisher’s page carries King’s fuller endorsement, including his warning that the novel will keep readers awake after they’ve finished it. King’s enthusiasm for Rosson didn’t begin with Coffin Moon. He previously praised Rosson’s 2023 novel Fever House, describing it as exciting, suspenseful and horrifying and urging readers to pick it up.
Who is Keith Rosson?
Rosson has quietly been building an impressive body of dark fiction. In addition to Coffin Moon, he’s the author of Fever House, its sequel The Devil by Name, Smoke City, Road Seven and The Mercy of the Tide, as well as the Shirley Jackson Award-winning collection Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons. Like Coffin Moon, several of his books combine horror with crime, damaged characters and distinctly working-class settings.
And he’s certainly not slowing down. His newest novel, Crone, was also published September 22. It follows a former detective and grieving father investigating a murder that may connect to his daughter’s decade-old disappearance—and to something witchlike lurking in the woods.
When will the Coffin Moon TV series premiere?
That’s the big question that can’t be answered yet. Coffin Moon is currently in development, which means Paramount has not announced when production will begin, where the series will ultimately air or stream, who will play Duane, Julia or John Varley, or when viewers might actually see it. Jessica Biel’s involvement at this stage is through Iron Ocean as a producer/developer; the announcement does not say that she will appear onscreen.
But the ingredients are certainly there: a recent vampire novel with a distinctive 1970s setting, a road-movie structure, a family revenge story at its center—and an endorsement from the author of ‘Salem’s Lot that’s going to be difficult for Paramount’s marketing department to resist.
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