Rose of Jericho: Eerie, beguiling fantastical Americana

Rose of Jericho by Alex Grecian

Rose of Jericho (2025) is a sequel to Alex Grecian’s wild and vivid Americana fantasy Red Rabbit. Several characters from that book appear here, as the action shifts from the 1880s Midwest to Ascension, Massachusetts, where people who die aren’t staying dead.

This review contains spoilers for Red Rabbit.

In the village of Ascension, Clarissa Sinclair is dying of cancer. Her self-centered, uncaring husband sent her to their summer home, mainly so he didn’t have to watch her die. Her teenaged son Benjamin is with her. Clarissa’s cousin, Rose Nettles, comes up from Philadelphia to care for Clarissa. Rose bought the town’s haunted house, Bethany Hall, and is bringing her partner Sadie Grace and a strange young woman who goes by Rabbit. Ascension is not a big place, but it is filled with death and secrets—like a cottage hidden deep in the woods, where terrible things have been done. The town has a reputation. Young women go missing from it at an alarming rate.

Meanwhile, in Kansas, Moses Burke has fallen in love and gotten married. Katie is pregnant, and Moses sees a bright future stretching out before him. It’s abruptly cut off when Katie sickens and dies, their baby stillborn. Wracked with pain and rage, Moses commits a terrible act. When he comes to his senses, he realizes he needs help, and the only people he can think of to help him are his old friends Rose Nettles and Sadie Grace. He sets out to find them.

Like Red Rabbit, Rose of Jericho moves between the things happening in Ascension and Moses’s adventures on the road. Some are similar. In this book, like the first one, Moses ends up with a “posse,” as a yellow dog, a hanged man, and later a girl named Esmerelda join him. Otherwise, the stories are very different. What is happening in Ascension, people remaining animate after they’ve died, is now happening everywhere. In Ascension, two other beings, brothers Bell and Alexander, have joined the game, and they are more powerful than Sadie, maybe even than Rabbit.

Can you call it a body count when the body is still walking, talking, feeling and thinking? Let’s say “the death count” soon grows, and soon, those dead people, like Clarissa, start to change. Not only do their ethics and philosophies shift, but in Clarissa’s case, executive function in her brain starts to fade. She keeps a journal, and the spelling and vocabulary deteriorate in a way that’s scary. The dead are animate and verbal, but their connections to the living and the earth are breaking.

Rabbit is a young woman of incredible power, and she begins to grow into it here. Even she, though, is not as powerful as the two entities engaged in their own power struggle. I loved how they were portrayed, one in particular, because Grecian did some research. The secret of the cabin and the action Sadie and later Rabbit take to get justice was very satisfying.

Alex Grecian

I wasn’t as satisfied with the ending of this book. In the middle of the book, Rose makes a decision. At the end of the book she makes a different decision. Certainly, things have changed and she has seen those changes, but I never got to see Rose struggling with the choice, or mulling over the decision, and I would have liked to. Along the way, Bell, one of the two brother entities, manipulates Sadie into setting up one of her witchy barriers. This will effectively stop Moses from doing what he needs to do to set things right. Bell doesn’t know that Moses isn’t traveling alone. The story is prepared to sidestep Bell’s manipulations completely, when Alexander, Bell’s adversary, simply removes the barrier. That move is important for another reason, one that affects Moses, but I felt like the rug was pulled out from me. I’d been so pleased that the story was ready to circumvent Bell in a way that relied on the characters, not supernatural power.

The prose is wonderful. This book is darker, taking place in a Massachusetts winter, and filled with more intentionally disgusting images and more strangeness. Wounds don’t heal, dead animals wander the village dragging their intestines, and so on. It’s well done, and shades closer to horror than the first book did, at least to me.

The lengths Moses is willing to go to make amends for his rash act are impressive, and we definitely see more of him as a character in this book.

Rose of Jericho is an eerie, shivery, creepy story of magic, family and consequences. I recommend it.