Mad Spirit Canyon

Five retirement-age participants in a stimulating writer’s conference can’t face returning to their humdrum lives, and decide to seek adventure by establishing themselves as a writer’s colony. One of them had lived as part of a now-deserted commune in a canyon in New Mexico, and suggests the place as a venue. Another of the group is rich, and buys a large motor home. They drive there and find a strange scene, with a burned-out mansion, a mine/cave, an arroyo, and strange relics of previous inhabitants. The canyon is isolated. It’s haunted. People lived, worked, hid, and died there over many years, and left spirits. Drinking the local water releases them and induces reality-bending visions and behaviors. The canyon seems to resent people as an invasive species, and turns its immune system on them to drive them out or to commit group suicide. Will these five adventure-seeking writers escape with their lives and sanity?

Ralph Bowden has entertained himself by writing fiction for 25 years, through and following careers as an electrical engineer in the aerospace industry, a history professor, a home builder, an alternative energy consultant, an instructional designer, and a technical writer. Twenty novels, four story collections, and a three-act play hide, mostly unread, on his hard drive. He likes all of his word children. Realistically, some of them are probably terrible. Others might entertain readers besides himself, but Ralph hasn't the time or ego drive to promote and sell, nor the stomach for collecting rejection letters. Self-publishing avoids them, and is quick. If somebody finds and likes what he has written, fine. If not, the world will go on (or not) just the same.