Showing results by author "Scott Skipper" in All Categories

Around the turn of the 15th century, a Dutch master called Hieronymus Bosch painted a very strange painting. According to modern thinking, it is, perhaps, psychedelic. It is a triptych depicting the Garden of Eden, earthly delights, and Hell. Virtually nothing is known about the man known as Hieronymus Bosch. St. Anthony’s Fire explores some possibilities to explain the man and what drove him to paint so bizarrely.

In the late 70s, a young Californian takes a job in South Carolina. On his first day, he is introduced to a stunningly beautiful, but married, woman, the black janitor, a hard-drinking electrical engineer, and a couple dozen assorted misfits. In the first week, the janitor is found hanging from a light pole, and the married woman begins paying attention to him. On his way to work on Monday morning, the vacant field that he thought was a farmers’ market contains the charred remains of three crosses.

A successful author loses his grip on reality, his marriage, and his life as weird and even impossible things begin to happen to him. He struggles to discover where it is coming from and to keep from slipping over the brink of sanity. As the layers peel from the kernel of truth, he grasps at whatever or whoever can pull him back from the abyss. Is the source of his torment human, paranormal, or is it himself?

California is split by a cloud of lethal radiation. Two strangers, a businessman, and a beautiful younger woman are trapped on the wrong side of an impenetrable wall of death. They have to find a way home to loved ones and responsibilities, but there are no flights, no ships, and the highways are impassible. Furthermore, Jamie has nothing - no money, identification, or credit. She is helpless and alone with a strange man. Should she follow him into a strange country?

Dealers in illicit artifacts, murderous pothunters, an amorous homicide detective, an enigmatic shaman, and two irregular aides-de-camp conspire to thwart the larcenous efforts of a young widow from California to recover her husband's body and get rich in the process. Vicki never dreamed that she would turn to a life of crime. Neither did she dream that she would be running through the jungles of southern Mexico dodging a disparate group who variously want to rob her, kill her, and arrest her. She is, however, a resourceful and determined woman who weaves a web of lies.

To the peril of all who accompany him, a salvager sails the globe searching for a creature supposed to have gone extinct before the time of the dinosaurs. Megalodon was the length of a sperm whale with jaws that could swallow an orca. Its teeth that still wash onto distant shores measure six inches from tip to root. How much fame and fortune awaits the one who proves such a monster from the Pleistocene still exists?

When a leftwing activist from the Nixon era morphs into a conservative writer of political incorrectness, can she ever escape the evil eye of the establishment? Political winds may shift but some things never change. If you pull on the dragon's tail, you'd best be ready to take some heat. Kate is no stranger to a jail cell, but she thought she got past that four decades ago. Then again, in a world run amuck with knife brandishing jihadists spilling from their sharia zones, maybe a jail cell is the safest place to be.

Even later presidents were denied the truth about the Roswell incident, but under the directorship of Allen Dulles, the CIA determined the terrible purpose of the aliens' invasion by deciphering a reading device recovered from the crash site. Seventy years later they are coming back to finish the job and one woman is forced into the role of humanity's spokesperson because her uncle, who cracked the alien language, taught it to her as a child.