“What? Another podcast? I already can’t keep up with what I’ve got on my phone!” Well, this one’s different–or at least we think it is. We’ll combine series TV with politics, and shake out our 2024 anxiety.

So, get away from the chaos and grab a pop-culture latte for conversation, interviews, and more. We’ll cover The Boys, The Morning Show, and re-watch the oldies but goodies, musing about What would President Jed (West Wing) Bartlett do? How would Diane’s Good Fight handle 2024—and lots more.

Do you long for a world where Star Trek’s visionary idea of IDIC was still revered? Stop banging your head against the wall with the news on an endless loop, and join the conversation! (We’ll invite folks to join us on Zoom for the taping sessions most of the time, so follow me on Twitter (@B_Barnett) or Threads (bbarnett830)

 C’mon aboard, and let’s talk a little TV and more—pop literature with your latte hosted by award-winning novelist and pop-culture author/blogger (and political science geek) Barbara Barnett.

And in the meantime, have a listen to an old podcast about the impact of TV docs on society and more.

The post (Re)-Introducing the ‘Let’s Talk TV’ Podcast appeared first on Barbara Barnett.

Part of this novel (as was Apothecary’s Curse)

is set in the North Shore of the Chicago metroplex–specifically, the Ravines area. Simon Bell’s home

is here, on a high bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. In Alchemy of Glass, it is now Anne’s home, left to her by her Uncle–many generations removed. It’s a beautiful place, an object of my fascination since I was a child. THE place I take visitors from other cities to show them that Chicago isn’t really all that flat.

Somewhere north of Northwestern University, which, in Evanston is at lake level, the terrain begins to morph. Suddenly, while you are tooling along Sheridan Road, hugging the road just off the coastline, the houses to the west are high above the road on towering hilltops. It’s a bit weird, coming out of the semi-urbanity of Evanston and Wilmette, you’re in the middle of a forest-like two-lane road–as if you’ve been transported to Mendocino California. Cool.

Then, a little further north the road twists and turns (rather wickedly in places (which is good because at least you’re at ground level at this point), and you quite quickly find yourself high up above the lake. To your left and right on the still slightly narrow and very curvy road are deep ravines, plummeting a hundred or so feet below you. Yikes. You’re up high on a bluff, eyes glued to the spectacular and stately lakefront mansions that fringe Sheridan, but at the same time trying hard to keep your eyes on the road (especially when it’s icy). No guard rails here among the s-curves and zigzags of the roadway.

You have to stop a moment because Sheridan takes a sharp left and as it does, on the northern edge of Highland Park, the vista opens up before you. The lake is churning with waves that more resemble what you’d expect below Santa Monica pier than the in the Chicago suburbs. Stepping out of the car, the wind whipping, the pounding of the waves is nearly deafening below you, echoing up from the bluff.

The post Virtual Vacationing ala Alchemy of Glass #1: The Ravines appeared first on Barbara Barnett.

As some of you know, my official book launch party was to take place at Winnetka’s The Book Stall on April 26. When that was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to do a virtual Zoom/FB Live simulcast event. I am now pleased to announce that my Zoom/FB party will be in partnership with The Book Stall.

If you pre-order or order a copy of Alchemy of Glass from The Book Stall, and send me proof via email or Tweet (with a picture), I will send you a beautiful Victorian bookplate (autographed, of course).

I hope you can join us Sunday, April 26 from 2-3 P.M. (Central Time) either on Facebook Live or by RSVP-ing to the Zoom Live event by clicking here.

News and Buzz about Alchemy of Glass:

From Amazing Stories Magazine:
Alchemy of Glass, like the first book, the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Apothecary’s Curse, is a genre-bending historical/urban fantasy with its heart in Victorian literature, brain in present-day Chicago, soul in mythological tales and ballads of the British Isles.

The hero of both novels, Gaelan Erceldoune is the descendant of a character out of British legend called Thomas the Rhymer (AKA True Thomas, AKA Lord Thomas Learmont de Ercildoune). Thomas has quite a story behind him. There’s the legend and ballad, and there is the real person who lived during the thirteenth century in the Borders area of Scotland. He was said to have been a confederate of William Wallace during the Scottish war against the English. Gaelan Erceldoune was born in the late sixteenth century, some three hundred years after Thomas lived. (Read more)

Interviews with Barbara in Rising Shadow and The Civilian Reader

I’ve written a bit about the work behind the scenes of crafting a sequel here at Lost in Storyland!
 

Read an Excerpt (Chapter 8) in DreamForge Magazine

Gaelan’s mind had always provided a fertile landscape for such horrors and delights to conjure from his unconscious at will. To terrify or soothe. Yet, his mind had never before ventured here, to this place, neither in dream nor vision.
Yet, why would it not, other than it hadn’t? And why not now, at long last, a dream of safety he’d not felt for hundreds of years? Why not this place? And who knew what havoc the poison had wrought?
Ah, the poison . . . Was this his death, and this his singular heaven?
For the moment, Gaelan was satisfied to avoid the question and go along for the ride—wherever it took him. Not that he had much choice. And that meant, for now, up the staircase and out of the stale air of the cellarium.
The narrow, steep stairs spiraled up toward ground level, and Gaelan stayed close to the retaining wall, a small lantern his meager guide up the pitted and cracked stones.
The hospice Dernwode House had been notorious in its day. A place of mystery, its black-hooded brethren but phantoms, the remnant few of a once-grand monastery at Soutra, most of whom had been exe- cuted long before Gaelan was born. Yet, a small band survived, said the legend, haunting the Borders in perpetuity. Gaelan believed it a tale perpetrated by the brethren themselves as means to an end—keep the secret and continue their practices of medicine and scholarship. Work and study.
Yet, Dernwode, even in its veil of secrecy, became welcome sanc- tuary for those in need of its generosity, and the skill of the monks, whose medical skills were far more advanced than any known in Britain. Skills gladly offered, but only on the promise of absolute dis- cretion beyond the hospice walls, well sequestered within the arms of the Eildon Hills.
For Gaelan, Dernwode House had been sanctuary and more.
A third of the way up the stairs, Gaelan was breathless, drenched in sweat. The trek up to the surface was more arduous than he recalled; his injuries must have been worse than he’d imagined. He needed to rest.
Sitting on a mud-caked stair, he raked filthy fingers through his equally filthy hair and closed his eyes, elbows on his knees. The voice of his tutor Brother Hugh echoed softly through the dark, reminding Gaelan of the first time he’d been down these stairs as a lad of twelve and only just arrived. Turn of a new century, 1600.
“We are a house of healing, a house of learning and work. A hospice to those who have need of us, who will find our door, no matter how hidden we are—or whom we shall find, as we did you, my lad.
“Your dear papa and grandfather we considered great friends and allies and could never forsake. We worried for your safety after the execution, lad, and grieved the loss of them, both bright lights in the darkness of ignorance, which flourishes yet upon these shores.” (Read More…)

The post Alchemy of Glass Launch Update appeared first on Barbara Barnett.

Even (perhaps especially) in these challenging times, new books are a welcome escape. I want to let you know about my newest Historical Science Fantasy Alchemy of Glass, coming this Tuesday (April 21) from Pyr and Simon & Schuster.  click here for an invitation to the official (virtual) launch party! I would appreciate it if you put Alchemy of Glass on your “to be read list” on Goodreads!!

The post Alchemy of Glass Arrives Tuesday, April 21 appeared first on Barbara Barnett.

Six months from now, my debut novel The Apothecary’s Curse will hit the shelves: the wood shelves of brick and mortar booksellers, the virtual bookshelves of every online merchant, library shelves, and wherever else fiction is perused and consumed. The novel will be published “traditional” – Pyr, the SF imprint of an established independent publisher Prometheus Books (sales and distribution by Penguin-Random House).

This series on writing, a sort of retrospective journal, details my journey: from my initial idea, through outlining, writing (and continuing to use my outline as a touchstone even when the story ventured far from my original concept), editing, re-editing (and some interesting new ideas that process triggered), the decision making process (self-publish or traditional, and all that entails, structural decisions, and “killing my darlings”), and finally, sale. Workshopping, tricks, software apps and online resources are all part of my tale that go hand-in-hand with crafting a well-written (and hopefully a compelling and successful) first novel.

I want this to be a conversation among us: published novelists and those who wish to be (whether self-published or traditional, with these weekly columns providing the fodder for lively debate. But first, a little background on me and my story as a writer.

Novelists are perpetual dreamers, even (or perhaps especially) in broad daylight. We imagine and then create worlds that don’t exist, characters that live and speak only in our minds in some alternate or altered reality.  We are storytellers, often have been since childhood.

I love stories. I love to experience them unfold in ink and paper, in pixels and iPad, on screens large and small. Even more than reading and watching them, I love writing them. I must write. I have been through several re-imaginings of my career; some have been writing related, some not. But since I was a young child I have been compelled to write fiction.

I think I began my first by-now-long-forgotten novel when I was about ten or eleven years old. Back then, I kept ideas (so many ideas), characters, and opening paragraphs in a classic black marbled composition book. I wrote poems that no one “got.” I remember my sixth grade “advanced” language arts teacher calling one of my best poems (ever) superfluous because it was about the microscopic pond life found in a flooded area of my backyard. She literally called it “superfluous,” which as an eleven-year-old, I, of course, thought meant “super”-something. Imagine my disappointment when I looked it up in the dictionary! Ah, my first SAT word.

In retrospect, she was probably telling me to be more concise (it was a poem after all), but it still stings just a bit. Thanks a lot Miss Lefkowitz! I was more fortunate through the following years. Teachers, like Ruth Ann Belser in freshman English who loved my prose and encouraged my poetry (that A+++ I earned for my work in her class still makes me smile), and the Chicago poet Michael Anania, with whom I studied when I was a Biology/Chemistry major(!), and who helped me develop a sense rhythm to my prose. And then there was my favorite professor all time, an Organic Chemistry professor Dr. Ronald Baumgarten who insisted to us all that science, too, was poetry. He taught us of the connectedness of all things in the physical world, the beauty of molecules, the elegance of crystals. The order and chaos–entropy and order–of the world.

My mother, now gone six years, introduced me at a very young age to the beautiful supernatural ballads of the British Isles, sparking in me a lifelong fascination with the likes of “The Two Magicians,” Tam Lin, elfin lovers, “wraggle-taggle Gypsies,” unquiet Graves and Thomas the Rhymer. Who were these magical characters, so pervasive in literature, yet belonging to a world that did not (in our experience) even exist?

All of these personal influences helped to form me as a writer..and now as a novelist.

It is where my story begins, but in the next entry, we’ll take a long leap forward to the literary embryo that would become The Apothecary’s Curse.

Where does your inner novelist begin? Where did it lead? Tell us below in the comments section (or Tweet me @B_Barnett).

You can buy The Apothecary’s Curse at Amazon.com (or any other online bookseller). Put it on your “to read” list at Goodreads as well!

The post Debut Novelist: Origins appeared first on Barbara Barnett.

I was recently asked whether there was any connection between my critically lauded book about the TV series House, M.D. (Chasing Zebras, ECW Press, 2010) and my novel The Apothecary’s Curse. It’s a great question, and one I hadn’t really thought about very much until now.

I had been drawn (to put it mildly) to House, M.D. by Hugh Laurie’s complex and brilliant portrayal of the caustic, troubled diagnostician Dr. Gregory House. I loved that, through Laurie’s performance, I could see beneath the sarcasm and anti-social behavior a deeply thoughtful intellectual, equally at home with Bach and Monster Trucks. I loved his flat with its stuffed bookshelves and often wondered what they contained. I loved the artifacts with which he surrounded himself, steeped in the history and science of another time. His world was complex and surprising and I found myself completely immersed in it.

House was essentially Sherlock Holmes time-warped into 21st Century New Jersey and slapped with a medical degree. I’ve read the entire canon of Holmes (the Conan Doyle and few other later pastiches), and much more than the plots and mysteries of the Holmes stories, I really gravitated to what they all said about Holmes, himself, through the eyes of John Watson, his best friend and confidante (and partner in crime–solving).

So how does that bring me to The Apothecary’s Curse and its main characters Gaelan Erceldoune and Dr. Simon Bell? Like House, M.D., there is the Holmes connection, which is probably the most direct link. The character of Simon Bell is a direct relation of Joseph Bell, Arthur Conan Doyle’s medical mentor (Conan Doyle was a doctor as well as a writer). Joseph Bell was also Conan Doyle’s touchstone for Sherlock Holmes. And in the present-day timeline of the novel, which is split between early Victorian London and modern Chicago, Simon is a very successful author of Holmes pastiches. Or, as Simon likes to say of himself, a purveyor of “Victorian mysteries written by a Victorian mystery”).

The novel is touched with a bit of Conan Doyle fairy dust, let’s just say, as incongruous as that sounds to those who only know the author’s Holmes stories. I can’t say that either Gaelan or Simon are Holmesian characters like House and Wilson, but the relationship between the two men is as banter-filled and (hopefully) as interesting as as the one between House and Wilson’s on House, M.D.

Over the years of House, M.D. I wrote a weekly column for Blogcritics about the show. I never wrote recaps, but would rather plunge into the themes, characters and relationships explored in the series. Those columns led to Chasing Zebras: The Unofficial Guide to House, M.D.

I had the rare and wonderful opportunity over those years to deconstruct many of the most memorable House episodes with the series writers, producers, production designers and show-runners during numerous interviews. Along with scrutinizing the episodes, and studying the scripts for most them, my conversations with so many on the House creative team provided me with not only incredible insight into the series itself, but also how the talented creative team at House, M.D. sustained characters and narrative arcs over seven seasons, not only with dialogue, but with music, set design–detail that tells as much as a page of talking. How to pull the rug out from under readers (or viewers) just at the time they think they know where the story is going. As David Shore put it, put in a “left turn” just when you don’t expect it. How to keep a character just likable “enough” when need be.

Although House was a television series, so much is applicable to creating a deeply textured, layered novel. Sights, sounds, textures, even lighting are critical to storytelling–even (or perhaps especially) in a novel. Perhaps that’s why several people who’ve read Apothecary along the way have called it cinematic. They can “see” the story.

I was incredibly thrilled (and grateful) when House, M.D. co-executive producer/writer Doris Egan agreed to read Apothecary and was kind enough to write a blurb for the back of The Apothecary’s Curse:

“Myth, medicine, and immortality, braided together like the border of an illuminated manuscript.”

Another of my favorite television writers, the inimitable Jane Espenson (Buffy, Battlestar Galactica, Once Upon a Time) also kindly wrote a blurb:

“Looking for a new narrative world lovingly furnished with the craft and care of an older time? This book feels like Holmes.”

In the character of House, I found the archetype I always seek when reading or watching pretty much everything: that classic (or not-so-classic) Byronic hero. I find them only rarely, and when I do, it’s like magic for me. I can’t pull myself away from the screen; I can’t tear myself away from the next chapter in the novel.

I’ve always felt that one day I would create my own Byronic hero, and in Gaelan Erceldoune, I believe I have. So I hope you feel the same, and if you enjoyed House, M.D. and if you were one of the many thousands who read my weekly columns about House on Blogcritics or read my book Chasing Zebras (still available on Amazon–hint, hint), I think you might find The Apothecary’s Curse a good read.

Of course there were many more inspirations than House, M.D. But that’s for a different column, so feel free to ask

I invite you to read The Apothecary’s Curse from Amazon.com or your favorite bookseller, or tell your local library to order a copy or two. And, of course, pre-order Alchemy of Glass, out in almost exactly two months. And please make sure to follow me on Twitter, Goodreads and right here at BarbaraBarnett.com to learn of online launch events and local Chicago appearances and signings.

The post From House, M.D. to the World of Gaelan Erceldoune appeared first on Barbara Barnett.

The Apothecary’s Curse and Alchemy of Glass are genre-bending historical/urban fantasies with their hearts in Victorian literature, brain in present-day Chicago, soul in mythological tales and ballads of the British Isles.

The main character is Gaelan Erceldoune. So, who is Gaelan Erceldoune and why does he have such a strange name? Thanks for playing!

Gaelan is the descendant of a character out of British lore called Thomas the Rhymer (AKA True Thomas, AKA Lord Thomas Learmont de Ercildoune). Thomas has quite a story behind him. There is the legend and ballad, and there is the real person who lived during the thirteenth century in the Borders area of Scotland. He was said to have been a confederate of William Wallace during the war against the English.

Thomas’s descendent–the main character of The Apothecary’s Curse–Gaelan Erceldoune was born in the late sixteenth century, some three hundred years after Thomas lived.

Back in the 1970s, the British rock group Steeleye Span brought Thomas’s tale into the twentieth century. The original ballad has many variants, including this one:

True Thomas lay on Huntlie bank,
A ferlie he spied wi’ his ee,
And there he saw a lady bright,
Come riding down by the Eildon Tree.

Her shirt was o the grass-green silk,
Her mantle o the velvet fyne,
At ilka tett of her horse’s mane
Hang fifty siller bells and nine.

True Thomas, he pulld aff his cap,
And louted low down to his knee:
‘All hail, thou mighty Queen of Heaven!
For thy peer on earth I never did see.’

‘O no, O no, Thomas,’ she said,
‘That name does not belang to me;
I am but the queen of fair Elfland,
That am hither come to visit thee.

The legend tells that Thomas meets the Queen of Elfland and is quite smitten with her. As the ballad continues, Thomas is taken to Elfland to be the Queen’s consort for seven years, finally returned to his home. (The Eildon hills are in the Scottish Borders region.) Thomas’s gift for prophecy was said to be genuine, and several of his predictions came true. Some say that Thomas returned to his home as an immortal, akin to Merlin, and he dwells still beneath the hills at Eildon.

But what else might have Thomas receive during his adventure to the Otherworld? That is a question explored in The Apothecary’s Curse and further explored in the sequel.

Apothecary speculates about a people out of Celtic mythology called the Thuatha de Dannan. Most associated with Irish mythology, the Tuatha de Dannan were Celtic deities strongly associated with the medical and healing arts. Although they are mostly thought of as Irish fairy folk, some scholarly research actually suggests that the Tuatha de Dannan (who were also a real people!) came to Ireland through Scandinavia and through Scotland and then across the border to Ireland. The Tuatha de Dannan included the Celtic god of medicine Dian Cecht and his daughter, the goddess of healing Airmid. Research suggests that the Tuatha de Dannan were a highly advanced civilization, especially in the sciences and technology–well beyond the times in which they lived.

The legend and the reality of these fascinating folk, particularly the tension between Airmid and her father at a significant point in their history really intrigued me and I enjoyed playing with their mythology to create a fictional backstory for Gaelan’s amazing book of healing, inherited from Thomas.

Greek mythology (a bit less directly) also plays into the fabric of The Apothecary’s Curse, particularly the story of Ariadne, Theseus, Dionysus and the Minotaur. I can’t explain further without spoiling the plot, but the tale plays out in what I hope are interesting ways.

The post Mythological Moorings of the Apothecary Series appeared first on Barbara Barnett.

 Mike Glyer’s File 770 SFF Fanzine posted my new piece on Byronic Heroes in SFF. Give it a read! 

Batman. Severus Snape. Han Solo. Aragorn. Jaime Lannister. Roland in Stephen King’s Dark Tower. Sherlock Holmes (in his many guises). What have they got in common with Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte’s Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, and Notre Dame’s Hunchback in Hugo’s novel? Besides all being fictional male characters?

Each of these modern heroes (or anti-heroes) are, like their Victorian counterparts, descendants of a whole literature of nineteenth century literary heroes—melancholy, romantic anti-heroes who find roots in Lord Byron’s 1812 narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage—they are Byronic heroes. So how’s a Byronic hero different than a hero-hero, you ask. Thanks for playing! (Read more)

The post Byronic Heroes in Pop Culture appeared first on Barbara Barnett.

Since The Apothecary’s Curse came out in 2016, most people in my personal circle of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues are only mildly surprised that I’m a writer in my “other” life. They know I’ve written about television for Blogcritics for many years; some know I wrote a very well-received book about the TV series House, M.D. (that I’m proud to say is still out there in several languages). But when I tell them I’ve written a very dark tale, suitable only for adults, they generally assume I’ve written a kid-friendly story suitable for the educator that I am in my “day job.”

The Apothecary’s Curse and its forthcoming sequel Alchemy of Glass (April 21, 2020) are historical fantasis dealing with the consequences of immortality, of attempting to control technology that is beyond our learning. It leads to torture, trauma, despair, and a life living in the shadows, hiding from any and all who might wish to learn the coveted secret of living forever. Part SF, part Fantasy, part psychological (and a little Gothic) Horror, part Mystery, with a dash of Steampunk and Romance, the novel series has emerged from a place in my imagination formed when I was in elementary school.

I’ve always had a thing for psychological horror stories. I grew up on Edgar Allen Poe and the great Gothic novels. HG Wells and Lovecraft. Asimov, Lester Del Rey, and Arthur C. Clarke. I owe much of that to having had an older brother who’d left home for college and left behind a library of Analog Magazines, along with every other SFF magazine out there. I began reading the genre when I was about nine or ten! I didn’t understand much, I’m sure, of the subtext, the political sensibilities. But I knew I loved the dark foreboding atmosphere, the palpable fear of technology run amok. Yes, even then!

My mom insisted I watch The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and The Outer Limits with her when I was even younger. (Moms, right?) I must’ve been seven or eight years old when I was introduced to these macabre, weird worlds. I loved the eeriness of the opening credits, the dark, dry sense of humor with which Hitchcock presented, and the cool, scary admonitions of Rod Serling. I remember these shows as if I watched them yesterday. They left indelible marks on my mind and in my literary tastes. And Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette” (Hitchcock’s theme song). Yeah, that, too.

The die was cast, and no matter what else I did with my life (and I’ve had careers ranging from biochemistry to environmental policy to Jewish liturgy and education!), my tastes were set. It is little wonder why, when began writing fiction seriously, I would gravitate toward my first influences.

Every time I’ve started a novel (and I have several in progress, in various states), no matter the genre I think I’m writing: medical mystery, romance, political thriller, Victorian drama, the story I want to tell in my deepest writer’s heart takes a fantastical turn toward the dark side. Go figure!

The Apothecary’s Curse and Alchemy of Glass are available from online and brick/mortar booksellers across the globe, or through your local library.

The post From Mild-Mannered Mom to Writer of Dark Fantasy appeared first on Barbara Barnett.

In anticipation of the April release of Alchemy of Glass, the sequel to the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Apothecary’s Curse, I wanted to explore the locations I used for the novels. So without further ado…

Locations in the UK:

Gaelan’s ancestral home is in the Borders region of Scotland. His family name Erceldoune, shortened from his ancestor, Lord Thomas Learmont de Ercildoune, refers to an area that is the present-day Earlston, Scotland. These lands are the stuff of legend, Lord Thomas, also known as Thomas the Rhymer was abducted by a fairy queen from the Eildon Hills not far from Earlston. It is said that Thomas lives still beneath the hills, an immortal like Merlin. The Borders is also the location of a ruined monastery (there is nothing at all left of the place) called Soutra Aisle, which is important to the second book (now a work in progress). Arthur Conan Doyle also comes from this area of Scotland.

Smithfield Market is a crowded, impoverished section of London that was a busy, important market for the buying and selling of animals–a veritable Victorian stockyards! It is here that Gaelan set up his apothecary shop about eleven years before events in The Apothecary’s Curse take place. Interestingly, William Wallace (you remember Braveheart, right?) was executed in Smithfield. What makes it even more interesting for Gaelan’s story (in the second book) is that William Wallace was a confederate and friend of Gaelan’s ancestor Lord Thomas. This is actually historical fact, but from a fictional point of view, would it not be just like Gaelan to be haunted by The Wallace’s ghost?

Simon Bell’s digs are in a much posher section of London, walking distance from Regent’s Park, where he would enjoy taking walks and riding with his beloved Sophie before her untimely death. It is in Regent’s Park he meets with Lord Braithwaite, who tells Simon about the star of a particular Bedlam freak show–a man with the uncanny ability to regenerate his bodily tissues, something that quite piques Simon’s interest for a very important reason.

Speaking of Bedlam, London’s infamous asylum was Gaelan’s home for five years, under the care of the ruthless Dr. Handley. Gaelan’s time at Bedlam scarred him for life (and that, in Gaelan’s case is a very, very long time). Bedlam eventually became the Imperial War Museum, which was undergoing renovation when Dr. Handley’s diaries turn up in the cellar. Their discovery sets off Gaelan’s fateful present-day story.

Locations in Chicago’s North Shore:

Dawes Park, Evanston, is where Simon and Gaelan run into each other at the start of the present-day narrative. It’s a beautiful, large beach fringed with boulders, which act as a breakwater.

Gaelan’s antiquarian bookshop sits adjacent to the El tracks just west of Northwestern University. The entire elevated system, which stretches from Chicago’s south side to the posh suburb of Wilmette on the north, is an old structure, and the various stations have beneath them little, nearly hidden, shops, diners, newsstands, and yes, even bookstores. I set Gaelan’s shop as a two-story, out of the way building, with his flat sitting above the shop, just as it does back in his Smithfield apothecary shop.

Many folks think that Chicago is flat as a pancake, geographically speaking, that is. Then how does Gaelan manage to tumble nearly 100 feet to the beach on his motorbike? Along Lake Michigan, as you head north of Wilmette, begins the Ravines–deep chasms and high bluffs along the lake. When it’s icy, it can be quite unnerving to drive along the twisty road, and Gaelan’s accident, given his state of mind, is pretty plausible!

Simon’s home in the present-day narrative is on a bluff above Lake Michigan at the end of a quiet, private road in Highland Park, Illinois, a very affluent Chicago suburb, dotted with graceful mansions along Sheridan Road. His mansion is based on one of my favorites. It’s quite gothic looking from the outside, and perfect for Simon’s reclusive writer existence.

Hope you enjoyed the tour; here are a few images to give you an idea of some of the places depicted in The Apothecary’s Curse.

The Apothecary’s Curse a Bram Stoker Award nominee for debut novel is available in paperback and all digital forms at libraries, booksellers, online and in your neighborhood.

The post Locations in and Around The Universe of The Apothecary’s Curse appeared first on Barbara Barnett.