Veterans in Horror Spotlight 2023: David Rose
David Rose Biography
David Rose served in the United States Marine Corps from 2002 to 2006, during which deploying to Iraq to participate in the second battle of Fallujah. Since trading the sword for the almighty pen, he’s crafted multiple collections and composite novels: Forsaken Fantastic and Amden Bog being fine examples. A forthcoming work is Monsters in the Bush, a collection of Lovecraftian military tales, soon brought to the world by Screaming Banshee Press. He lives in Orlando, Florida. He is a founder and co-chair of the HWA committee Veterans in Horror.
Book Recommendation: The Scrolls of Sin
I am going to go with the theme here and recommend one of my own. It’s not military in nature, at least not overtly, though there are a high number of wars and even a few veterans making due in their quasi-medieval cities. I present to you The Scrolls of Sin.
Matt Cardin had this to say: “In The Scrolls of Sin, David Rose paints a fully realized fantasy realm with ingenious plotting, complex characterization, and cleverly lush language. It’s also viscerally involving. The collection is so steeped in the sin of the title that it plunges the reader into a sordid otherworld of corruption, treachery, violence, torture, lust, murder, and dark magic…”
This is not horror in the conventional sense. For one, the tales occur in a secondary world. More, the supernatural elements—ghosts, ghoulism, necromancy—are so common to the backdrop that they’re not what invokes a sense of dread, but rather prosaic “our world” elements such as greed and obsession are, to me at least, what truly blackens the shadow.
Twins who weave spells have a captive in their cellar. A young boy, far from home, becomes the pupil of his aged mentor…or perhaps his corrupter? A mortician. A thief posing as a butler. Lovers who work for rival body-snatcher guilds. Eight tales where horror and fantasy fall over the other, hopefully akin to the writing of the late great Brian McNaughton, whose collection The Throne of Bones was The Scrolls of Sin’s chief literary influence.
