Arizona, land of rugged, starkly beautiful scenery, teeming with fascinating history; now learn of the terrors which lurk therein! Noted author of the weird Jeffery Scott Sims, himself a resident, presents Eerie Arizona, a collection of sixteen tales of the strange and macabre set in the Grand Canyon State. Ghost towns and their denizens, haunted houses and their occupants, alien entities and creatures of nightmare; they're all here, plus picture postcard views! In addition, popular character Professor Anton Vorchek, investigator of weird mysteries, returns to confront horrors amidst exotic or lurid settings. Contents: The Ghost Town, At the End of a Dusty Road, A Detour to Skull Valley, The Shack on Escudilla Mountain, The Witch's Cave, Sedona, My War Against the Invisibles, The Diary of Philip Wyler, Among the Hoodoos, A Chance Result, The Mystery of the Inner Basin Lodge, The Legend of the Vulture Mine, The Revenge of the Past, The House on Anderson Mesa, The House on the Hill of Stars, Into the Vortex.
About the Author: Jeffery Scott Sims, an author devoted to the literature of the fantastic and the bizarre, is a degreed anthropologist, a lover of wilderness travel and scenery, and a keen photographer. He lives in Arizona, which forms the background for many of his tales. His writing credits include dozens of horror, science fiction and fantasy tales appearing in magazines and anthologies, two short story collections - Science and Sorcery, Science and Sorcery II - and the dark fantasy novel, The Journey of Jacob Bleek. His writing has been powerfully influenced by the great authors H.P. Lovecraft, M.R. James, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and E.R. Eddison. Many of his story ideas have been derived from dreams, which often lend a peculiarly eerie air to his already unusual subjects. He tells of modern day horrors erupting from the depths of space and time; of morbid ancient wizardry; of the terrors lurking in the future; of epic sword and sorcery heroes winning their way across amazing lost worlds. Within the Sims corpus of fiction, macabre, grotesque, and grand, certain recurrent characters have attained such popularity as to take on lives of their own. There is Professor Anton Vorchek, illustrious scientist and investigator of supernatural or unearthly mysteries, who with his lovely assistant Theresa Delaney eagerly confronts inhuman perils in his obsessive pursuit of esoteric knowledge. Sterk Fontaine, a good-natured cad, only dabbles in occult matters for the sake of a quick buck, but can't avoid regular brushes with embodied nightmares beyond sanity. Stepping back in time, one meets Jacob Bleek, itinerant medieval sorcerer lusting after god-like wisdom and power, who wanders the world for the sake of his personal quest, opening every dark door into Hell on the way. Farther back, much farther into the mists of forgotten prehistory, dwell the great lords of wondrous and magical Dyrezan; Morca, Nantrech, Albragon, and more, wizards or warriors all, scheming for hegemony, standing against evil, or just struggling to survive in a land as dangerous as it is beautiful. The author maintains a literary web site: http: //jefferyscottsims.webs.com/index.html dedicated to his written works, providing copious inside information on his tales. On the site Sims has also freely published for the benefit of his readers an expanding series of essays on topics related to weird fiction, dealing both with his own material and that of other notable contributors to the genre.