A REVIEW BY DAVID L. VINEYARD:         


RUSSELL KIRK – Old House of Fear. Fleet, US, hardcover, 1961. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, October 1961. Paperback reprint: Avon G-1134, 1961. Trade paperback: Eerdmans, April 2007.

RUSSELL KIRK Old House of Fear

   This unblushing Gothick tale by conservative economist Russell Kirk is a grand thriller with echoes of Buchan, Bram Stoker, and Daphne Du Maurier, and contains one of the great villains in the literature, the magnificent Dr. Jackman.

   Hugh Logan, an American lawyer and veteran born in Edinburgh is dispatched by industrialist Duncan MacAskival to purchase his ancestral home on the wild Scottish island of Carnglass. “Old House of Fear, I like the names. You’re to buy Carnglass for me, cliffs and clachans and deer-forest and Old House and all: and price is no object.”

   The MacAskival castle, a gray mass of stone and disparate architecture is known as the Old House of Fear, and in Gaelic, fear or “fir” means man.

   Almost from the minute he sets foot on Carnglass Logan finds himself facing intimations of danger. Lady MacAskival who owns the castle is a tough old bird under the dire influence of the mysterious Dr. Jackman, who has manned the place with IRA thugs and filled the cellars with explosives.

   Jackman, a Marxist, was a torturer for the party during the Spanish Civil War and later did something so horrible in Rumania that he was driven out by his masters:

    Jackman was a man who had once known good and had deliberately chosen the evil — and ever after had been haunted by that memory. “Evil be thou my good.” Fearless and very clever, somewhere early in life he must have taken some sinister track. And never had he contrived to look back.

   Jackman wants the Old House of Fear for himself and the hand of young Mary MacAskival for her money, so he is less than happy when Logan shows up posing as her fiance, a bank teller from Edinburgh, as his only way to get into the armed fortress Jackman has made of the house.

RUSSELL KIRK Old House of Fear

   As Kirk piles incident on incident and raises the atmosphere to the highest level, Jackman and his men, led by the soulless killer Royal, are pitted against Logan, Mary, Mac MacAskival the young heir, and a handful of villagers from the far side of the island, with the simple giant Angus, who Jackman has tortured, a question mark in the dangerous game that is rapidly coming to a head.

   Meanwhile Kirk draws the characters in three dimensions, none of them existing only for the purpose of the book, but all fully drawn characters, none more so than Jackman, a man who has come to relish evil:

    “Have you ever heard a lady scream?” Dr. Jackman asked Logan. “A full-throated scream, from exquisite agony, I mean.

    “Imagine a gently-bred, soft skinned young lady who hadn’t had a hand laid on her since she was a naughty child; then think of her treated to the worst that the human body can stand. How she would scream, Logan, and babble and beg, and you would have the exquisite experience of watching, unable to intervene.

    “Suppose Miss Mary MacAskival were the young lady?

    “Torment is the great leveler, Logan. In torment the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under the skin. Their are no class distinctions in agony. Our Miss MacAskival would behave like the lowest trull from Piccadilly, except she would scream louder and longer …”

    Hugh Logan set perfectly still, almost hypnotized by Dr. Jackman’s rich voice and shining, marvelous eyes. He wondered what strange species of animal this Dr. Jackman was. Brilliant yes; articulate, acutely sensitive — but he was evil, Hugh realized. Evil, and utterly, dangerously, mad…

RUSSELL KIRK Old House of Fear

   Kirk was well known for his tales of the supernatural, but in the true tradition of the gothic, Old House of Fear deals with human evil however much the setting intimates dark forces operating just beyond the reach of man. Romantic and powerful, like its gothic ancestors the weather and setting play a powerful role in the atmosphere of the tale:

    Far to the west south-west, beyond Cailieach, the Old House stood grim on its rock; lower down the New House, among its plantations. Between them and the Old House stretched glen and hill, heather and bracken, boulder and peat bog, waterfall and burn. On this lovely morning, the mists were quite gone, and there was revealed to him the unearthly beauty of the forgotten island. The girl took his arm. “Hugh, were it yours, would you live here always — or almost always?”

    “That I would, Mary MacAskival.” Carnglass, for good or evil, set its mark upon him.

   Like Manderlay in Du Maurier or Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, the Old House itself becomes a character, at once malignant and threatening and yet beautiful and welcoming depending on whose eyes it is seen from, and in the final conflict open combat breaks out, and Jackman meets his fate on the stormy wind swept cliffs of Carnglass and the fate and future of the Old House is decided.

   Kirk is an extremely literate writer but never sacrifices mood or suspense for that literacy. Old House of Fear is a thriller of the first water, a novel of suspense, adventure, and romance in the grand manner, and one of the best novels of its kind ever written, its hauntings ripped from the human psyche and the depths of the human soul rather than the rarified atmosphere of the supernatural.

   Read it, but be warned, once you have you’ll want to find all of Kirk’s supernatural tales. He is a wonderful writer, and Old House of Fear a once in a lifetime read, published in its time to rave reviews and now a classic of the form.

   As Kirk himself writes in the dedication Old House of Fear is, “a Gothick tale, in unblushing line of direct descent from The Castle of Otranto …” Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, Mary Shelly, and Poe would all welcome this one with open arms. It is indeed an unblushing ‘Gothick’ tale as well as a first class thriller, suspense novel, adventure story, and mystery.