Jeffrey E. Barlough

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**Jeffrey E. (Ernest) Barlough**

Born:	1953 Los Angeles, California, USA
Occupation:	Biologist, Veterinarian, Novelist
Genres:	Dark Fantasy, Horror fiction, Alternate History
Debut works:	Novel: Dark Sleeper
Website:	www.westernlightsbooks.com

Jeffrey E. Barlough is a trained biologist and veterinarian with a Ph.D. in Virology from Cornell University who 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.

He is also the author of several dark fantasy novels that comprise his Western Lights series, set in an alternate world where a catastrophic event known as “The Sundering” has wiped out most of the population and plunged the world into another Ice Age. Only a narrow coastline of civilization survives, where Victorian society exists alongside prehistoric beasts. The books are written in a style reminiscent of 19th century authors that has often been referred to Charles Dickens mixed with H.P. Lovecraft. His stories portray eccentric and (mostly) likable characters set within detailed locations that, on the surface, seem mundane and sometimes even cheery, but sinister plots and presences are slowly and carefully revealed.

1 Bibliography
- 1.1 Western Lights novels
  - 1.1.1 The Sundered World
- 1.2 Medical books
2 External links

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Western Lights novels

Dark Sleeper (1998, first trade edition 2000)
The House in the High Wood: A Story of Old Talbotshire (2001)
Strange Cargo (2004)
Bertram of Butter Cross (forthcoming, August 1, 2007)
Anchorwick (forthcoming, August 2008) Description from www.westernlightsbooks.com: "It seems that the novel he is writing at present, 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 famous university. The time, however, is some thirty years before the events of Dark Sleeper, and certain characters from that novel will reappear in the new one as their younger selves."

[edit] The Sundered World

Excerpts taken from www.westernlightsbooks.com:

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.

With much of her territory locked up with ice, medieval England was forced to seek a more habitable clime for her growing population. From every port, merchant-adventurers in their tall ships set sail to scour the earth for a new home. Among the places they came to was the land we know as North America. The shores of the continent were the most amenable to settlement, and there new cities were raised.

Then, in the year 1839, everything changed. It was the year of the "sundering," a cataclysmic event that some attributed to a comet or meteor strike, or a volcanic eruption of unprecedented violence - or was it perhaps something else? Irrespective of the cause, most life on earth was obliterated, and the world plunged into an even deeper Ice Age. In the words of Mr. Kibble in Dark Sleeper: "The sky was filled with clouds of smoke and grew very dark, and remained that way for months and months. Then the great ice sheets came down from the north and froze up the world."

By an accident of geography the cities in the west of America were spared, only to find themselves deprived of all contact with the outside - if, indeed, the outside still existed. For no one who had set out for England had ever returned, and no one had come from there since.

It has been some century and a half now since the sundering, and up and down the long coast life goes on. Victorian society, little changed since 1839, abides in her sundered realm with its array of fearsome monsters, marooned and alone, and a prey to powers even mightier than those of the wilderness that surrounds her - the powers of magic and the supernatural...

Cover art for Dark Sleeper

Cover art for The House in the High Wood: A Story of Old Talbotshire

Cover art for Strange Cargo

Cover art for Bertram of Butter Cross (August 1, 2007)

[edit] Medical books

Manual of Small Animal Infectious Diseases (Editor) (1988)
UC Davis Book of Dogs: The Complete Medical Reference Guide for Dogs and Puppies (Editor, with Mordecai Siegal) (1995)
UC Davis Book of Horses: A Complete Medical Reference Guide for Horses and Foals (Editor, with Mordecai Siegal and Victoria Blankenship Siegal) (1996)