Landing Under The Moon

Landing Under The Moon follows Natalie Jane, an eighteen-year-old Auckland girl shaped by foster care, abandonment, loneliness, and survival. Raised between unstable homes and emotional neglect, Natalie has spent most of her life learning how to disappear quietly enough not to become a problem. Books, vampires, and fantasy worlds become her escape from a reality that has always felt temporary. On the night of her eighteenth birthday, during a violent Auckland storm, Natalie receives an impossible visitor. A man named Lucien appears outside her fourth-storey apartment window — ancient, calm, terrifying, and somehow familiar. Natalie quickly discovers he is a vampire, and even more disturbingly, that he has been quietly watching over her for years. That same night, Natalie chooses immortality. Lucien transforms her into a vampire, binding her forever to a hidden world existing beneath ordinary New Zealand life. But becoming immortal is nothing like the fantasy Natalie once imagined. The transformation brings overwhelming hunger, heightened senses, emotional intensity, and the terrifying realisation that she can no longer safely exist among humans. Together, Natalie and Lucien stage her death and flee south through Waikato and the King Country, travelling through isolated towns, forests, and hidden rural communities while Natalie struggles to control her hunger and understand what she has become. As their relationship deepens, Natalie discovers Lucien is far older, lonelier, and more emotionally damaged than he first appears. Meanwhile, Natalie slowly transforms from a traumatised girl surviving day to day into something far stronger — and far more dangerous. Blending gothic romance, psychological tension, dark humour, and emotional realism against the haunting backdrop of New Zealand life, Landing Under The Moon is a story about survival, loneliness, found family, and what it truly means to become a monster.