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"Imagine a world in which the last Ice Age never ended..."
So begins author Jeffrey E. Barlough's introduction to his Western Lights series, one prepared specially for this website.
The "Western Lights" books are set in an Ice Age America that might have been, had historical - and prehistorical - events taken a different course. The imagined landscape of the series encompasses the western coast of North America, from what is now lower British Columbia to approximately San Diego.
The novels - Dark Sleeper (2000), The House in the High Wood (2001), Strange Cargo (2004), and Bertram of Butter Cross (2007) - have been widely praised by readers and reviewers alike, and are known for their imaginative setting, eccentric characters, droll humor, and unconventional storylines.
Author Barlough likes to point out that the books are as much mystery novels as they are fantasies - mystery novels which happen to take place in an imagined, alternative earth where magic and the supernatural are as real as the Ice Age monsters that prowl its lands, skies, and seas.
"Although the books can be viewed as mysteries with a fantasy setting, or as fantasies with a mystery setting," Barlough explains, "it is the mystery element that I work out first when designing the story and characters. It is liberating for a mystery writer to be allowed to include elements of fantasy and the supernatural in his books."
In a marked departure from common practice, Barlough has constructed each volume of the Western Lights series as an individual, stand-alone story with its own plot line and its own cast of memorable characters. Occasionally a character from one book may reappear or be mentioned in another; in general, however, the novels are complete in and of themselves and need not be read in any particular order.
"Although there will be an exception to that in the future," Barlough says. It seems that the novel he has recently completed, the fifth in the series, can be viewed as a sort of "prequel" to the rest. "In the fifth book I have returned to the scene of Dark Sleeper - the ancient city of Salthead and its fabled university. The time, however, is some thirty years before the events of Dark Sleeper, and certain characters from that novel reappear in the new one as their younger selves."
For a preview of this latest Western Lights book, scheduled for publication in October 2008, click here.
For readers new to the series click here to read author Barlough's specially-prepared introduction to the Western Lights books and the world of the "sundering."
Acknowledgment. Our thanks are extended to Mr. Gary E. Barlough, brother of the author, for his assistance in the preparation of this website.
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