Moonlight Canyon

About Yurie Kiri

Yurie Kiri’s novel Moonlight Beach won the 2020 Hollywood Book Festival’s award for Genre Fiction.  Moonlight Beach is about four friends who contact the spirit of dead Native American woman and have to fight for their lives against the serial killer who had been chasing her.  The second book in the series, where two of the surviving women of Rancho California take a trip to New Mexico, is called Moonlight Canyon.  The third book, called Moonlight Rocks is about a battle over a meteorite that may herald the birth of a new Messiah.  Besides the Moonlight series, Yurie Kiri has also written a series of books about Japan and virtual reality games; the first book is called Tokyo Games.  

Authors note:  

I was sitting in an old room in the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument on a deserted Wednesday morning breathing musky air, soaking up the history and trying to meditate when I became aware of some low, soft voices.  Someone else was nearby in another room which was strange since I didn’t remember seeing any other cars in the parking lot.  Who could it be and how had they gotten there?  But I didn’t want to disturb whoever it was so I kept quiet and tried to listen.  It sounded like two or maybe three people were discussing the history of the old cliff dwellings.  They were talking about what had caused the ancient peoples to carve such precarious dwellings onto the edge of a cliff.  Why should they live in a place where they’d need to use slender, rickety ladders to get home day or black of night?

It didn’t make sense, but the original inhabitants of this canyon were obviously responding to something that had changed in their environment.  Something had forced them to move from snugly living on the safe and stable dry canyon floor to living perched on the edge of a cliff where it appeared one could roll out of bed and fall right off the edge.  What had changed, according to the voices I heard, was that the world suddenly got very dangerous at some point in the mysterious prehistory.  The word, Anasazi, means ‘old enemy’ and once those guys were prowling about, people needed the protection provided by living perched up high and precariously on the cliff side with their houses only accessible by rickety ladders that could be easily drawn up at night.

Listening to the discussion made me aware of my own precarious security.  According to the whispers I heard, bad guys were even more numerous in modern days than they had been back in ancient times.  Even in the city, we live in modern cliff dwellings for the same reason and we’d pull our ladders up if we could and lock our doors at night just like the ancient cliff dwellers did.  Anyway, that overheard discussion prompted me to do a lot of research both locally and otherwise along with reading through a lot of back issues of old newspapers.  I discovered that the ancient enemies were back and they were even more dangerous than before.  Thus, the following story is based upon those overheard whispers and my own research.

Synopsis… 

The rural community of Silver City, south of Moonlight Canyon, has been suffering an unrelenting reign of terror that’s leaving half-eaten, mutilated bodies strewn across town.  Who’s responsible for these nightmarish attacks?  Some of the citizens of Silver City believe the ravaged bodies found by the side of the road are being dumped by extraterrestrials who visit our planet to mutilate cattle.  Some say perhaps it is a powerful, south-of-the-border drug smuggler creating fear and confusion.   And some think it’s a gang of bikers, the Coyotes, who may do more than just mutilate their victim’s bodies.   Besides terrorizing as many people as he can to smuggle drugs and amass more power, Tito Ocotillo plans to use an ancient kiva for a supernatural ceremony that will open up a path to a mythical underworld.  That connection will provide him with the ability to move between this physical world and the underworld where more dark powers await him.  The problem is that ancient kiva is on the property of an old Indian woman called Jane, and Jane does not take kindly to trespassers on her land.