Search Results for: Jeffrey E. Barlough

New Treasures: Hooting Grange by Jeffrey E. Barlough

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Hooting Grange, eleventh volume in Jeffrey E. Barlough’s Northern Lights series, published March 2021 by Gresham & Doyle. Cover “The Close Gate” by Ernest William Haslehust. One of the most popular fantasy series in the Black Gate offices these days doesn’t come from a major Manhattan publisher. In fact, it doesn’t come from traditional publishing at all. For the last 23 years Jeffrey E. Barlough has quietly been writing one of the strongest and most unusual fantasy epics on the…

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Future Treasures: The Thing in the Close by Jeffrey E. Barlough

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While Manhattan publishers spend six-figures promoting the latest fantasy doorstopper, on the other side of the continent Jeffrey E. Barlough is quietly producing one of the best and most original fantasy series on the market. The Western Lights novels have steadily been winning readers since the first volume Dark Sleeper appeared in 2000. In his review of Anchorwick, fifth in the series, Jackson Kuhl summarized the setting this way: In a world where the Ice Age never ended, a cataclysm has reduced…

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Where the Time Goes by Jeffrey E. Barlough

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Where the Time Goes by Jeffrey E. Barlough Gresham & Doyle (337 pages, $14.95 trade paperback, October 2016) If you’ve been looking to jump into Jeffrey Barlough’s Western Lights series, his ninth and latest installment makes a good diving board. The books are set in a post-apocalyptic alternate history where woolly mammoths and monsters from Greek and Etruscan legend rub elbows with ghosts, spirits, and worse, but Where the Time Goes adds a third genre to the cake batter: time…

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Future Treasures: Where the Time Goes by Jeffrey E. Barlough

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Back in July, Fletcher Vredenburgh reviewed the opening novel in Jeffrey E. Barlough’s Western Lights series here at Black Gate. I’m not exactly sure what made me buy Dark Sleeper… I’m thinking it was more the Jeff Barson painting of woolly mammoths pulling a coach across a dark, snow swept landscape. Whatever the reason, I’m happy I did, as the book turned out to be a very strange and often funny trip through a weird and fantastical post-apocalyptic alternate reality. In…

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Dark Sleeper by Jeffrey E. Barlough

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Looking back, I’m not exactly sure what made me buy Dark Sleeper (1998), the first volume of Jeffrey E. Barlough’s ongoing Western Lights series. Perhaps it was the Tim Powers blurb on the front cover, but I’m thinking it was more the Jeff Barson painting of woolly mammoths pulling a coach across a dark, snow swept landscape. Whatever the reason, I’m happy I did, as the book turned out to be a very strange and often funny trip through a weird…

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New Treasures: The Cobbler of Ridingham by Jeffrey E. Barlough

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Winter is the best time to appreciate Jeffrey E. Barlough, perhaps none more so than the current brutality we’ve been experiencing in New England. Day after day of snow blowing past the windows makes it easy to imagine oneself in Barlough’s alternate history of an ice age that never fully receded; and a fire in the grate and a cup of hot coffee at hand while the wind howls beyond the lattices blurs the distinction between this reality and living…

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Vintage Treasures: Strange Cargo by Jeffrey E. Barlough

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I didn’t know quite what to make of Strange Cargo when I received a review copy over a decade ago. The cover grabbed my attention immediately, as did the synopsis, but I didn’t immediately realize it was part of Jeffrey E. Barlough’s ongoing Western Lights series, set in a world where the Ice Age never ended and only a narrow sliver of civilization survives along the Pacific American coastline. The vast majority of review copies I received a decade ago…

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Vintage Treasures: The House in the High Wood by Jeffrey E. Barlough

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Jeffrey E. Barlough’s first three Western Lights novels were published in trade paperback by Ace over a decade ago, beginning with Dark Sleeper (2000), and followed by The House in the High Wood (2001) and Strange Cargo (2004). All three are highly prized today. Barlough began to publish them though his own Gresham & Doyle press beginning with the fourth volume, Bertram of Butter Cross (2007). I recently acquired the second book. Back when I was running SF Site, I recruited the author Victoria Strauss…

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Future Treasures: The Cobbler of Ridingham by Jeffrey E. Barlough

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Jeffrey E. Barlough is one of the most gifted and ambitious fantasists at work today and his seven volume Western Lights series is unlike anything else on the shelves. In his review of the fifth volume, Anchorwick, Jackson Kuhl sums up events as follows: Eugene Stanley has come to the university at Salthead (a parallel Seattle? Vancouver?) to assist his professor uncle in preparing a book manuscript. One night, while working in a deserted turret room at the college…  Stanley…

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Cataclysms, Ghosts and Monsters: An Interview With Jeffrey E. Barlough

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There’s nothing out there on the shelves like Jeffrey Barlough’s Western Lights novels. The series — called such because “the sole place on earth where lights still shine at night is in the west” — is a bouillabaisse of mystery, ghost story, and post-apocalyptic gaslamp fantasy. His seventh and most recent book, What I Found at Hoole, was published in November. Dr. Barlough, who moonlights as a veterinary physician, kindly spoke to me about the world-building of the Western Lights, his latest project,…

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