On a freewheeling and literary edition of After Hours AM/America’s Most Haunted Radio — Thursdays 9-11pE with hosts Joel Sturgis and Eric Olsen — we plunge into 2017 Bram Stoker Award nominated supernatural novel THE APOTHECARY’S CURSE with author Barbara Barnett. Barbara will join us in the 10pE hour; at 9pE, Joel and Eric will dive recklessly into the week’s top paranormal news for your amusement and edification.
THE APOTHECARY’S CURSE, a 2017 Bram Stoker Award nominee, is a diabolical supernatural blend of historical fantasy and medical thriller as a physician and an apothecary race against time to recover the ancient book that made them immortal centuries ago. In Victorian London, the fates of physician Simon Bell and apothecary Gaelan Erceldoune entwine when Simon gives his wife an elixir created by Gaelan from an ancient manuscript. Meant to cure her cancer, it instead kills her. Suicidal, Simon swallows the remainder, only to find he cannot die. Five years later, hearing rumors of a Bedlam inmate with regenerative powers like his own, Simon is shocked to discover it’s Gaelan. As the two men conceal their immortality, the only hope of reversing their condition, the apothecary’s curse, rests with Gaelan’s missing manuscript.
When modern-day pharmaceutical company Transdiff Genomics unearths diaries describing the torture of Bedlam inmates, the company’s scientists suspect a link between Gaelan and an unnamed inmate. Gaelan and Transdiff Genomics geneticist Anne Shawe are powerfully drawn to each other, and her family connection to his manuscript leads to a stunning revelation. Will it bring ruin or redemption? Clearly, yes.
Barbara Barnett is author of the Bram Stoker Award-nominated novel THE APOTHECARY’S CURSE and CHASING ZEBRAS: THE UNOFFICIAL GUIDE TO HOUSE, M.D., the critically-acclaimed and quintessential guide to the themes, characters and episodes of the hit TV show. She is also Publisher/Executive Editor of Blogcritics Magazine, an online magazine of pop culture, politics and more, for which she has also contributed nearly 1,000 essays, reviews, and interviews over the past decade. She published in-depth interviews with dozens of writers, actors and producers.
Always a pop-culture and sci-fi geek, Barbara was raised on a steady diet of TV (and TV dinners), but she always found her way to the tragic antiheroes and misunderstood champions, whether on TV, in the movies or in literature. In other words, Spock, not Kirk; Han Solo, not Luke Skywalker! It was inevitable that she would have to someday create one of her own.
She is an accomplished speaker, an annual favorite at MENSA’s HalloWEEM convention, where she has spoken to standing room crowds on subjects as diverse as “The Byronic Hero in Pop Culture,” “The Many Faces of Sherlock Holmes,” “The Hidden History of Science Fiction,” and “Our Passion for Disaster (Movies).” Most recently, she gave a lecture at MENSA “The Conan Doyle Conundrum,” which explored the famous author’s life-long belief in fairies.
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