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

Western Lights #2

by Jeffrey E. Barlough

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.

Genres: Fantasy, Horror, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Historical

337 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2001

About the author

Author, veterinarian and research scientist, Author Jeffrey E. Barlough has been publishing scientific journal articles, novels, and non-fiction books on a variety of subjects since the 1970's.

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

a lot of times I can understand why an obscure book that I've found and loved is obscure. could be the quirky prose, or that it was published a long time ago, or perhaps the bizarre subject matter. but I remain perplexed as to why the standalone novels within the Western Lights "series" go so unnoticed. the first of them was published in 2000 and they've been regularly appearing ever since. House in the High Woods feels like Dickens reborn, from the the indelible character names and vivacious characterization to its rich sense of place to the perfectly accomplished style of the prose itself. it has all the charming, gore-free menace of the coziest of mysteries. it has the unsettling ambiguity of the best of weird fiction. its humor is sometimes subtle and sly, at other times broad and cartoonish. it drips with atmosphere. and for those nihilistic Ligotti fans, this particular book has an incredibly dire and soul-crushing ending that has been well set-up from its first pages. (apparently this is a unique ending for Barlough's books, which makes my soft heart glad.) this is the second of the author's non-series that I've read; I enjoyed it and Dark Sleeper so much that I made a late-night, perhaps ill-advised purchase - my cat was certainly radiating judgment - of all of the remaining 8 books, in one fell swoop. I need more of these books in my life for the foreseeable future. they really hit a sweet spot.

synopsis: two travelers on a coach meet; one relates to the other the terrible story of a very deep well, an ominous house in the high woods, a bustling inn, a scandal from the past, and why exactly the pleasant lakeside village of Shilston Upcot is now a ghost town. the setting: a Victorian America, trapped in the Ice Age. Victorian America trapped in the Ice Age! I just wanted to literally underline that.

this book had me smiling in a glow of a pleasure whenever I opened its pages. I tried to draw out the experience as long as I possibly could. my one complaint is the - in another reviewer's words - "devastatingly horrific ending". it's a sentimental complaint, because as mentioned that ending is telegraphed from the very first few pages. but it is hard for soft me to get so enamored with such a set of delightful characters, and such a delightful place, and then be faced with inevitable devastating horror. despite that, I have the highest regard for the novel.

bonus delight: the author is a veterinarian, and his love of animals shines through in his depiction of this book's dog, horse - and since this is the Ice Age after all - its teratorn. sorry for the spoiler I'm about to give, but I'm happy to report that they all survive the devastation. I want to protect my fellow animal-lovers from any undue stress!

[Paul Weiss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb horror, fantasy and comic Dickensian story-telling in one package!

In THE HOUSE IN THE HIGH WOOD, Barlough has crafted a compelling and unique novel that defies classification. One can say, I suppose, that it represents a delicious blend of Lovecraft, Collins or Poe's version of tension and horror, Brooks ideas of a modern, dark, urban fantasy and the very best of Dickensian characterization, complex and intricately described environments with superbly comic dialogue and story-telling. But to say that is to suggest somehow that Barlough's efforts are derivative and that is selling him far too short. These thumb-nail descriptions of style can only serve to whet an appetite and, I hope, encourage a potential reader to pick up a novel that I guarantee will be impossible to put down!

Shilston Upcot is a small town set high in the mountains nestled in a volcanic caldera which, like so many other small communities, has its share of dark secrets. Long-time residents like Mr Shank Bottom, a stone cutter by trade and the parish sexton, or Mr Nim Ives, the good humoured landlord of the Village Arms take exception to newcomers or outsiders seeking to open the door to any closets that might contain long dead skeletons. But Mark Trench, the squire of Dalroyd, and Oliver Langley, his long-time friend and confidant, have tumbled onto one of these skeletons in the story of a young girl, pregnant out of wedlock, who took her own life almost thirty years earlier. Mark becomes determined to get to the bottom of the story as he comes to believe that her suicide is somehow related to the untimely death or disappearance of his own father so many years ago.

I suspect that, like me, many readers will be quite surprised when they come to the realization they've been frantically turning pages on a novel whose plot actually moves at a positively glacial pace. But, they'll also quickly understand that it's the compelling, sustained level of tension, the superb characterizations, the exquisitely detailed descriptions of scenery, people and the minutiae of their daily lives, the masterful use of foreshadowing and exactly the right doses of the creepy stuff - ghosts, a mysterious owl hovering in the night sky, mournful voices, eerie nightmares, the suspicious house on the hill with the new reclusive tenants - that actually is what is keeping you awake reading until the wee hours!

Readers with eclectic tastes will be thrilled by this one! And the ending, by the way, is worthy of the finest horror flick!


Paul Weiss

[Terence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jeffrey Barlough's second novel in his Western Lights series is another wicked marriage of Dickens and Lovecraft. However, where in Dark Sleeper the focus was on the Dickensian half of the union, in House, the Lovecraftian half comes to the fore. The blurb at the back of my edition says, "The nightmare has come home again...," and it doesn't end.

I was actually surprised at how thoroughly bleak and hopeless the ending was; no one escapes the savage vengeance of the revenant who returns to the village of Shilston Upcot to exact her revenge on the people who abandoned her 30 years before. And it's very effectively done. Like the Victorians he emulates, Barlough's pacing is very deliberate and measured (perhaps too much so for many modern readers), leading the reader to anticipate a final scene where the villagers overcome the ghost. Reflecting back, however, the outcome is foreshadowed by the framing device: A traveler mets a man along the coach road through Shilston Upcot who explains to him why the village is abandoned. I just didn't expect the reason to be so harrowing.

I liked this book somewhat more than Dark Sleeper, perhaps because I prefer Lovecraft to Dickens, and would recommend it highly.

Another thing I like about Barlough is that, though set in the same alternate Earth as his first novel, House is a completely self-contained novel and can be easily read and understood without reference to others in the series. I hope this may become a general trend in SF and fantasy.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the second in Jeffrey E. Barlough's "Western Lights" novels. Its only relationship with the first book is that its set in the same world. What an unusual world it is too. This is a world in which the ice age never quite ended altering to some extent the course of human history. Human history in this case is then further altered by an event referred to as "the sundering" that seems to have been a cataclysmic event of some kind cutting the locales of our narrative(s) (and alternate North American continent) from the old world (Europe). You end up with a kind of Dickensian style fiction with cosmic horror mixed in. Its a distinctly memorable mix, the like of which I haven't seen again.

Of course now you're doubtless wondering, but why then did you only give it three stars if its so interesting. Well the long and the short of it is that most of this book is spent developing at a glacial pace the quaint mountain town setting of Shilston Upcot. Now that is not necessarily a bad thing, its just not my thing. I have a problem reading about the idle rich, especially when they can be quoted as saying "its the simple life for me" while enjoying all of the holey unsimple labors of servants. Since this aspect of the book can be a bit contrary to my nature and go a bit slow, it drags down the pace of things getting to the strange and mysterious events.

The beginning is briefly intriguing as is the middle, and the last 30-40 pages are downright page turning. The rest of the book took all my powers to get through. The setting is well done, and inhabited by a cast of characters Dickens would be proud of. It is quite simply the pace of the book that drags it down for me. Its only 318 pages long and I've been reading it for very nearly a month. You do the math. Still, I recommend checking out his first book. They are singularly unique and not with out merit, just be forewarned that these are more a literary exercise than brain candy.

I bought this book from a great little book store just outside of Dayton, Ohio called Dark Star Books and Comics. So as always please support brick & mortar book and comic stores.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a page turner! Full of twists and turns. Loved it!!

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where to begin with such a wonderful book? As others have said, it’s HP Lovecraft s written by Charles Dickens. It’s a fantasy set in a fantastic world but that uses that world as nothing more than backdrop, treating it as a known commodity without explaining it to death. This aspect draws the reader in and by the time the ending hits the little mountain village of Shilston Upcot has become real, just as Salthead and Crow’s End are real places. Doom hangs over the story from the first pages, and it doesn’t relent right up to the end. This was my first visit to the land of the Western Lights, and I can’t wait to read the 10 or so others currently in the (loose) series. I also have to add that I love that the only aspect seemingly tying the series together is the world, and not some broad overarching plot. So I’m guessing that realistically it would be possible to read the novels in any order...

[Kivrin · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a very strange book! It was like a gothic Pride & Prejudice with magic set in a primeval world. Or something! First, there are wonderfully drawn characters (drawn with much too much detail) with intriguing characters and secrets who live in a small town in the mountains. As you read, you know that something evil lurks somewhere, but it takes a LONG time for the mystery to become clear. The setting so typically English that when the weird elements appear (the strange birds, the magical well, etc.), they just don't seem to fit. When the mastodon train came into town, I threw up my hands in disbelief!

I did find the mystery intriguing, but the writing was way too wordy. I found myself skimming pages of descriptions. And then the killer was that I came to like many of the characters and DID NOT like the book's ending at all! Sigh.

[Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another excellent novel in the Western Lights series: the mystery of a long-vacant manor house in a country village suddenly occupied again; a stagecoach passenger with a strange tale; an eerie discovery in a mountain cave; revenants witnessed upon the lakeshore; and so on and so forth. Enjoyable as always.

(I timed this one wrong, though, and as September progressed I often found myself reading it on the front porch in a splendid Melbourne springtime. These are books to be read in the dead cold of winter, tucked up in bed with rain tapping at the windowpane.)

[Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barlough's style is very different from a lot of books I've read. It's all about outrageous memorable characters. There was definitely a story there, but it's almost like you can tell he would rather talk about characters than make up some interesting plot.

My wife and I enjoyed it a lot, but we both would have loved there to be some kind of action in the first 3/4ths of the book. It kind of sped to an (very unexpected) ending.

[Mary Good · Rating 3 out of 5]

My bed time reading book, so I did not read it straight through but in many starts and stops. Seemed slow to develop. Had extinct animals in it like mammoths, short faced bears and saber tooth. Also some made up things like the teratorn. Will consider reading another book by this author, if one falls into my lap.

[Blaise Carland · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked it. Cosy at first then gradually more and more horrifying.

Solid.

I have read this one and #9. I have the first five. Not sure which one I’ll read next.

[Noman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well written novel ruined by a stupid ending.

[Boris Cesnik · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author could have pushed himself a bit further. Instead of blending tracts from Dickensian and Lovecraftian stories (which he does just in surface), he should have mashed up the historical eeriness of the best Le Fanu's novels with the dreamy narrative of Sarban's landscapes.
Whereas relying on Victorian syntax and transposing it into a semi-fantastical scenery could have its benefits and result in an interesting setting, it also has its negative effects specially on the scenes where action prevails. The abundant descriptions of characters and places is not counterbalanced by action packed chapters. It all seems going on too slow. Almost every single chapter starts with a long and sometimes tedious recounter of someone's life and wonders; only in the last two paragraphs we are suddenly reverted into the unfolding of the main story.
I welcomed the ending. I felt it was the right one but again some of the more interesting happenings that lead to it could have been explained more in details or developed further (i.e. the well, the abbey etc)
This is not to say that I did not enjoy, the opposite but I felt, as it is, it's reading more appropriate for young-adults. The story and the writing could have been expanded to create a more elaborated and meaty novel. Good and semi-original effort but just average result.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

This second volume in the Western Light's series, again, shows Barlough is a master of characterization. As in the first volume, the characters are everything and Barlough does an excellent job of snaring the reader's interest in each and every one of them, both human and animal. This novel, as I say, is truly a darker offering, and the ending is certainly not of the ;happily ever after' variety. The description of the various points of interest in and about the town of Shilston Upcot and Old Talbotshire made the village a character in its own right, so much so that I wished that I lived in, or could at least visit, just such a village.

However, such was not the case by the time I reached the end of the book. For while the first volume in the series, _Dark_Sleeper_ had some minor horror elements associated with it, the second volume was much darker and horrific, and by horrific I certainly do not mean the run-of-the-mill blood and guts kind of horror fiction. This second volume is most definitely the type of horror that I find truly enjoyable.

[Julie Sandel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I decided to begin re-reading this series from the beginning now that the 13th book is out. I am enjoying the storytelling and writing even more as I read them again. It is a series of only slightly interconnected novels that tell stories about the last of civilization after the "Sundering" a cataclysmic event (not really understood) that last left the last survivors on the North American West Coast - from approximately Southern Oregon up into Canada.

It is a society that is stuck in the Dickensian/Holmesian era, having been isolated from the rest of the world for several centuries. The Last Ice Age still goes on, and gunpowder or weapons other than swords, bows and arrows do not exist. The last very proper Victorian era civilization goes about its business in all its Englishness.

[Catherine Siemann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked the first of Barlough's Western Lights series of alt!history fantasy-mysteries, set in a nineteenth-century inflected world with bonus prehistoric mammals, but I didn't love it. Accordingly, the sequel's been sitting around TBR for a couple of years now. With the second, though, he really hit his stride; he's one of the rare authors who can write Victorian-style prose without sounding affected. The book has a long slow build and a devastating conclusion; this is horror that proves you can be restrained and still disturbing. Looking forward to catching up with the rest.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite enjoyable. A little heavy on the victorian-speak at times, but the mystery is excellent, building up steadily. The characters are enjoyable and drawn well, which makes the resolution even more effective--and despairingly horrifying. I applaud the author for evoking true horror without resorting to tropes. His alternate-history is appealing to this lover of ice-age fauna, although there were tantalizingly few glimpses in this volume. And I'd dearly love of map of the Sundered World, but that's a quibble.

[Kurt Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a weird book to review. I enjoyed it once I got into the writing style, kind a a dense, backhanded victorian thing. It's hilariously funny in places. Unfortunately, huge portions of the book have nothing whatsoever to do with the plot, which doesn't really get seriously started until more than halfway through the book. Also, the resolution was way too fast and disappointing and the promised tension and terror never showed up for me. Nonetheless, I did very much enjoy the read.

[Dahna Solar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this series of books. Love the time period, the suspense. Have read all of his books.

[SmokingMirror · Rating 4 out of 5]

Completed. Thoroughly disturbing by the end.