A desperate woman, a vile ringmaster, and creatures that howl in the night.
Eight miles of mystery. One night of terror.
A beautiful forest. A terrifying legend.
Some grudges never die.
An International Latino Book Awards Gold Medal Winner!
The City Wants Them Gone.
The Demons Want Them Dead.
Before Dodger Stadium, dark forces terrorized the residents of Chavez Ravine.
Two hundred stubborn residents remain in the neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine, tucked in the hills above L.A in 1952. As the holdouts fight eviction by the city, Trini Duran, 22 and feisty, reluctantly returns home. When new and terrifying threats emerge, Trini leads a ragtag group to fight an elusive enemy in a battle for survival.
An urban fantasy novella, available now on Amazon.com
After dark, danger lurks in the ravine.
The bodies of handsome young men are discovered near an elaborate movie set in the northeast hills of Los Angeles. It’s summer, 1950. Each is a gruesome tableau of shocking violence.
Robert is a reporter new to the big city who needs to prove himself.
Catalina is a beautiful healer determined to keep her secrets.
A chance encounter connects them to the case that’s confounding police and commanding headlines. The results are as unexpected as they are horrific.
But when a ghost appears in the semi-rural neighborhoods where evictions loom, frightening the residents, the dark mystery deepens and threatens them all.
The truth is only one story away. If it’s not buried, first.
Paperback and Kindle formats available now
Content Warning: Sexual assault; violence; death; strong language; racism
About Debra Castaneda
Debra Castaneda grew up in the San Gabriel Valley of Southern California as an only child. Finding adult conversation boring, she found companionship in books. She wrote her first murder mystery in the fifth grade and turned it in as a homework assignment.
After college, she became a journalist working in television, radio, and online. Her work has been featured on Marketplace, This American Life, and National Public Radio (one story took her behind bars at San Quentin Prison to cover a baseball game). Most recently, she worked as a TV news director on the Central Coast of California.
Now, she devotes herself full-time to writing horror and dark fiction. Her novella, The Monsters of Chavez Ravine, is a 2021 International Latino Book Awards gold medal winner for Fantasy/SciFi-English. It also made two CrimeReads Best of 2021 lists: Horror and Historical Fiction.
For much of her professional life, she has worked under her married name, Debra Monroe, but she writes fiction under her family name of Castaneda.
For inspiration, Debra draws from her experience as a journalist, as a third-generation Mexican American, and as someone who has lived in various parts of the country, including Dallas, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Portland, and the San Francisco Bay area.
Debra lives in Capitola, California with her husband. She enjoys rediscovering the Mexican dishes of her childhood and texting her two daughters 
about her latest binge-watch.