Retired NMSU journalism prof publishes ‘the ultimate vampire story’

Retired New Mexico State University professor Frank Thayer has published a new novel, “The Vampire of San Vicente,” which is available at amazon.com and Kindle. Soon, it will also be available at COAS bookstores, he said.

Here is a synopsis of “The Vampire of San Vicente,” in Thayer’s own words:

“It is rumored in 1994 that a long series of attacks and unexplained deaths in the southern New Mexico town of San Vicente may be associated with an old man who has been there almost since the town was founded. It was almost by accident that water utilities engineer Ferris Taylor began to assemble the evidence after his unrequited high school love dies without reason.

“Taylor finds himself in hot water when he leaves his wife and ends up in an affair with a sultry college student. The inevitable collision of Taylor with his own failings and what may be a true vampire leads to an underground horror. He is supported by lifelong friends who share in his discovery and the final conflict with the undead.”

"It seems I have an appetite for writing beyond that of my 30-year career as a journalism professor at NMSU,” Thayer said. “I am dedicated to defending the incredible reality of the flying saucer that crashed and was recovered outside of Aztec, New Mexico in March 1948. My fiction writing follows the classic supernatural horror themes as explored by Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. ‘The Vampire of San Vicente’ is my longest work to date, and its social dynamic is strangely affected, not only by Lovecraft, but by master novelist John LeCarré, whose flawed characters come to life through his verisimilitude."

Thayer’s other books are “The Whispering Darkness,” a 2018 novel; “Terror Tales of the Southwest,” a 2017 short-story anthology;  “The Aztec UFO Incident,” co-authored with Scott and Suzanne Ramsey; published in 2015 by New Page Books, it is the non-fiction story of a flying saucer crash and recovery; “Cobston Trilogy: The Ontario Horror,” a  novel of undead evil in a Canadian town across three generations published by Sun Cross Books in 2015; “Magic in the Desert,” co-written with Mike Waldner for their departed NMSU roommate and credited to Dan Perry, it tells the story of the Aggies’ 1960 undefeated football team; and “The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon,” co-written with Scott and Suzanne Ramsey and Frank Warren, Aztec.48 Productions, 2011, it is “the first book exposing the reality of the Aztec flying saucer,” Thayer said.

Thayer said he has loved horror stories since his childhood in Grant County, New Mexico, just south of Mogollon. Thayer spent years exploring Mogollon, Silver City, Hillsboro and nearby Chino Mines and other places that would feature in his novels and short stories.

“Almost every story has a hook from real experience,“ Thayer said, and many of his characters are based at least in part on real people.

Thayer’s teaching career included 11 years in Canada, which ended in 1977 when he began missing the desert and returned to New Mexico. Thayer worked for Silver Consolidated Schools in Silver City for four years before coming to Las Cruces to teach and complete his master’s and doctoral degrees at NMSU. He retired in 2012 but remains on the university’s teaching faculty as a journalism professor emeritus.

One of his abiding principals as a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Thayer said, is that “mysteries are not made to be solved. They’re made to be experienced.”

Contact Thayer at gticruiser@aim.com.