In the strange high desert of Canyon County, Oregon, people learn early on not to ask too many questions. The land is rugged. The nights are long. The stories whispered across bar tops, truck stops, lonely highways, and backcountry roads have a way of staying with you.
In Moonlight Shade: Files From The Canyon County Arcanum, author Erick Mertz presents twenty-eight unsettling eyewitness accounts drawn from the shadowy world of "The Strange Air" mysteries. Cowboys, waitresses, drifters, firefighters, college students, preachers, wrestlers, and small-town locals all claim to have encountered something they cannot explain.
A phantom gambler changes realities with the turn of a card. A smokejumper follows a singing figure into a living wildfire. A prison psychiatrist uncovers evidence of impossible mimicry. A roadside town becomes haunted by voices, disappearances, and things that refuse to stay buried.
Some stories read like folklore. Others feel disturbingly real.
Blending pulp horror, paranormal mystery, Americana, and dark desert noir in the spirit of Unsolved Mysteries meets the X-Files, Moonlight Shade invites readers into a world where truth and fiction blur beneath the wide Oregon sky. The question in these stories is not whether something strange exists in Canyon County.
The question is whether you're willing to believe the people who survived it.
