Barbara Barnett is the author of three  books,  including  the award-winning The Apothecary’s Curse, a finalist for the prestigious Bram Stoker Award for a debut novel. She is publisher and executive editor of Blog- critics (blogcritics.org), an Internet maga- zine of pop culture, politics, and more, for which she has also contributed nearly 1,000 essays, reviews, and interviews over the past decade. 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 fiction’s tragic anti- heroes and misunderstood champions, whether on TV, in the movies, or in literature. (In other words, Spock, not Kirk; Han Solo, not Luke Skywalker!) Her first  book,  Chasing  Zebras:  The  Unofficial  Guide  to House, M.D. (ECW Press), reflects her passion for these Byronic heroes, and it was inevitable that she would have to someday create one of her own in Gaelan Erceldoune, hero of both The Apothecary’s Curse and The Alchemy of Glass.

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,” “Our Passion for Disaster (Movies),” and “The Conan Doyle Conundrum.”

A lifelong resident of the Chicago area, she lives in a Victorian coach house with her husband, Phil, and their border collie–Aussie, Semra, on a bluff along the Lake Michigan shore, an area that serves as the modern-day setting for both Apothecary novels. She is the proud mother of Shoshanna (Mike) and Adam, and the loving savta of Ari and Meital.