Old House Of Fear

Old House of Fear

A founding father of the American conservative movement, Russell Kirk (1918–94) was also a renowned and bestselling writer of fiction. Kirk’s focus was the ghost story, or “ghostly tale” – a “decayed art” of which he considered himself a “last remaining master.” Old House of Fear, Kirk’s first novel, revealed this mastery at work. Its 1961 publication was a sensation, outselling all of Kirk’s other books combined, including The Conservative Mind, his iconic study of American conservative thought. A native of Michigan, Kirk set Old House of Fear in the haunted isles of the Outer Hebrides, drawing on his time in Scotland as the first American to earn a doctorate of letters from the University of St. Andrews. The story concerns Hugh Logan, an attorney sent by an aging American industrialist to Carnglass to purchase his ancestral island and its castle called the Old House of Fear. On the island, Logan meets Mary MacAskival, a red-haired ingénue and love interest, and the two face off against Dr. Edmund Jackman, a mystic who has the island under his own mysterious control. This new edition features an introduction by James Panero, Executive Editor of The New Criterion.

Old House of Fear

Old House of Fear

Attorney Hugh Logan leaves Canada for Scotland to negotiate the purchase of Carnglass Island and the castle Old House of Fear for his employer, Duncan MacAskival. Logan is continually thwarted and threatened on his journey. But no matter how bad his travels, his arrival onto the island brings much worse trouble. Carnglass is under the control of evil genius Dr. Edmund Jackman, a Soviet-educated political revolutionary convinced that Logan is a spy who must die. Will Jackman's plot be thwarted? Will Logan be able to rescue the lovely niece of the noble owner of Old House? Will anyone get off the island alive? Debuting in the 1960s, Old House of Fear was Russell Kirk's most popular book, selling more than all his other books combined. Yet this Gothic tale is more than just a fascinating work of fiction. As in all of Kirk's stories, a deeper meaning emerges -- in this case, a satirization of Marxism and liberalism -- demonstrating the acute sense of the moral that sets Kirk apart from other genre writers.