Description
Product Description
Jeffrey E. Barlough, acclaimed author of the weird and wonderful
Dark Sleeper, returns with a novel as charming-and chilling-as a good old-fashioned ghost story...
Strange things are afoot in the town of Shilston Upcot. A mysterious owl hovers in the sky. Mournful voices cry out for a lost child. Townsfolk are besieged by nightmares. And only one man, the reclusive squire Mark Trench, dares to investigate the strange omens to face the truth: The horror has returned.
From Publishers Weekly
Dark Sleeper, Barlough's fantasy debut, earned kudos for its impressive recreation of the tone and texture of the Dickensian triple-decker. This second volume in his Western Lights Series duplicates the feat, immersing the reader in a Victorian pastiche thick with earthy characters, social politics and supernatural intrigue. Although set in a peculiar alternate world where modern civilization abuts a prehistoric wilderness, the novel focuses on daily life in rural Shilston Upcot and its disruption when mysterious Bede Wintermarch moves into Skylingden House, a brooding deserted mansion in the hills overlooking the town. Once the site of a monastery of mad friars, the house has been gossip fodder for decades, since its former owner was implicated in the shame and suicide of a vicar's daughter. Secrets dislodged by wagging tongues and the nocturnal activities of a giant predatory owl soon have rationalist Squire Mark Trench and his guest, writer Oliver Langley, exploring caverns beneath Skylingden and digging up clues to a macabre revenge plot. Barlough keeps the fantasy effectively low-key, grounding it in the eccentricities of a large, vividly drawn supporting cast that includes smarmy barrister Thomas Dogger and besotted bible-spouting stonemason Shank Bottom. Their vivid personalities sustain the multilayered plot through its subtly orchestrated build to a chilling crescendo, and affirm the author's talent for working a dark comedy of manners into an eerie Gothic melodrama.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
This is the second novel, after
Dark Sleeper (2000), in a series, Western Lights, that is set in an alternative nineteenth-century Britain and has already been characterized as "Dickens flavored with Lovecraft" but also recalls Wilkie Collins or toned-down Poe. The plot is familiar enough: new tenants have taken the hard-to-let old house in the village of Shilston Upcot. They tend to keep to themselves, which, of course, sets all the tongues in the village wagging and speculating. Barlough masterfully works those well-worn elements toward a horrific conclusion, as archetypal but well-delineated characters learn more about the horror stalking them and finally take up arms for a fight to the finish from which only the narrator escapes alive. Very good but also rather demanding, because one needs some knowledge of nineteenth-century English social customs and a high tolerance for realistically depicted demonic possession to fully appreciate it, Barlough's series merits inclusion in virtually all horror collections.
Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
An atmospheric tale of dark imaginings that belongs in most horror collections. --
Library Journal
Barlough combines the witty detail of Dickensian fiction with the insidious terror of Lovecraftian horror. --
Library Journal
About the Author
Jeffrey E. Barlough is a trained biologist and veterinarian with a Ph.D. in Virology from Cornell, and has published over 60 research and review articles in scientific journals since 1979. He is also an armchair historian and has edited small press publications of minor and archaic English works.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Part One
DARKNESS
A Stranger hereStrange Things doth meet.
THOMAS TRAHERNECHAPTER IIN THE LODGE-ROOM
THERE were tenants again at Skylingden.
F