'Peck convincingly merges the genre of magical realism with American West fiction by invoking the power of personal testimony-not his own, but by presenting the recorded testimony of his characters in letters, journals, poetry, and interview transcripts.

Margaret Blair Young, President: Association for Mormon Letters 'Peck moves easily from the lyrical to the grotesque, and sets his multi-voiced tale in the ideal place: Moab, Utah-where red rocks and surprising arches provide the ideal backdrop for anything in or out of the world, including space ships and kidnapped babies.' Scott Abbott, author of Wild Rides & Wildflowers

'It's satire of the best sort: biting what it loves, snuggling up to what it hates.' Brooke Williams, author of Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness 'Steven Peck has imagined a world ever-so-slightly tweaked from this real one, but-well, why wouldn't conjoined twins have an independent consciousness, bumblebees be more dependent on faith than wings, and Einstein sing German nursery rhymes? The Scholar of Moab explores the otherworld of nature, imagination, and mind.' Peck's rip-roaring tale The Scholar of Moab. His short rich life spans the borderlands of magical realism where geology, ecology, philosophy and consciousness collide, in Steven L. Take a rollicking ride with Hyrum LeRoy Thane, the Lord's Chosen Servant and Defender of Moab. Righteous Moabites accuse Dora of its murder, but who really killed their child? Did a coyote dingo the baby? Was it an alien abduction as Dora claims? Was it Hyrum? Or could it have been the only witness to the crime, one of a pair of Oxford-educated conjoined twins who cowboy in the La Sals on sabbatical? Making matters worse, Hyrum's illicit affair with Dora Tanner, a local poet thought to be mad, ends in the delivery of a premature baby boy who vanishes the night of its birth.

Young Hyrum Thane, unrefined geological surveyor, steals a massive dictionary out of the Grand County library in a midnight raid, startling the people of Moab into believing a nefarious band of Book of Mormon assassins, the Gadianton Robbers, has arisen again. What happens when a two-headed cowboy, a high school dropout who longs to be a scholar, and a poet who claims to have been abducted by aliens come together in 1970's Moab, Utah? The Scholar of Moab, a dark-comedy perambulating murder, affairs, and cowboy mysteries in the shadow of the La Sal Mountains.

The Scholar of Moab by Steven L. Peck