Front matter

What was happening on Carnglass, that “Heap of Gray Stones” beyond the Outer Islands of the Hebrides? Old Lady MacAskival, the proprietress, had brought in a queer lot of people from England, and the hostility toward outsiders seemed to emanate from the frowning cliffs of Carnglass. Anyone who tried to land, it was rumored, might be fired upon. On a black night at sea, five MacAskivals from the neighboring island of Daldour had seen a pillar of flame rise near Askival Harbor, and had heard something like gunfire. And away in Michigan, old Duncan MacAskival, the retiring head of the MacAskival Iron Works, had encountered but stony silence in his many attempts to communicate with Lady MacAskival concerning his desire to purchase the home of his ancestors.

When Duncan, for all his pains, receives an odd water-stained note in an unsigned, hastily-scrawled female hand, requesting “confidential agents” and “immediate action,” he sends young Hugh Logan, his legal counsel, to investigate. The adventure that unfolds is calculated to transform the most comfortable armchair into a veritable bucket seat of suspense.

In his efforts to reach Carnglass and the Old House, where Lady MacAskival resides, Logan is confronted by the sinister agents of a puzzling conspiracy—a baleful Glasgow “commission agent,” a cashiered British officer, an Irish terrorist on the run, and, behind the stone mass known as the Old House, the chilling man with the Third Eye.

old house of fear

OLD HOUSE OF FEAR

BY RUSSELL KIRK

FLEET PUBLISHING CORPORATION 230 PARK AVENUE NEW YORK 17, N.Y.

COPYRIGHT © 1961 BY FLEET PUBLISHING CORPORATION 230 Park Avenue, New York 17, New York ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Protected under International Copyright Convention and the Pan American Copyright Convention Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 61-7627 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

This Gothick tale, in unblushing line of direct descent from The Castle of Otranto, I do inscribe to Abigail Fay.