DARK SLEEPER

If Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft had collaborated on a novel (which, in a properly run universe, assuredly would have happened), the result might have been like this engagingly goofy fantasy melodrama, in which mastodons and “saber cats” prowl the environs of an embattled seaport city very like Victorian London.

A second Ice Age, however, has intervened. Former neighboring countries are now unexplored wastelands to one another, and French has become a “dead language.” Residents of Salterton (the aforementioned metropolis) are terrorized by the spectral vision of a “drowned sailor”—a phenomenon related to “a series of disturbances in [nearby] Eaton Wafers”; or such is the opinion of metaphysician and amateur sleuth Titus Tiggs, whose investigations unravel the many confusions of “past and present” that comprise Barlough’s terrific plot. Announced as the first in the Western Lights series, it abounds with Dickensian atmospherics and mannerisms (not to mention outright steals), and takes its time getting beyond pastiche. There’s the fog, for example, described with rapturous redundancy in the opening pages (exactly as in Bleak House). There are the garrulous eccentrics (choleric pubkeeper Gervase Balliol, timid elderly Sally Spriggs, waterfront bad-apple Robert Nightingale), aggrieved maidens (such as sisters Mona and Nina Jacks) and their several protectors and suitors, and a plethora of darkly motivated scoundrels—notably resourceful “driver of mastodons” (creatures that serve wonderfully as work beasts) Hatch Hoakum and heartless miser Josiah Tusk, ever accompanied by his “surly” mastiff Turk (whose terrifying canine presence gradually assumes even more menacing proportions). All this glorious nonsense (and much more) marches smartly toward an appropriately bizarre resolution in which, nevertheless, those who deserve to be are appropriately rewarded and all villains incapable of reforming are suitably reproved.

An imperturbably entertaining romance—and biologist, veterinarian, science scholar Barlough’s “first novel from a mainstream publisher.”