The Abandoned
by Douglas Clegg

There is a dark and isolated mansion, boarded-up and avoided, on a hill just beyond the town of Watch Point in New York's Hudson Valley. It has been abandoned too long and fallen into disrepair. It is called Harrow and it does not like to be ignored. But a new caretaker has come to Harrow. He is fixing up the rooms and preparing the house for visitors….

And when the body of a child has been found, used for some unknown ritual, at Harrow, what's been trapped inside the house has begun leaking like a poison into the village itself. A man who dreams of winter faces the icy horror within the house; a teenage girl sleeps too much, but when she awakens her nightmares will break loose within her flesh; a mother must confront the horror of her own children's secret dreams; a little boy faces the ultimate fear when the house calls to him; and a young woman must step into the terror of her past to keep Harrow from destroying everything she loves.

The village has gone mad, and blood runs in the streets. Packs of rabid animals chase down those who remain; and teenage girls with axes and knives take out those who have hurt them; children of all ages commit savagery against their parents; and some within the village still lay in an unnatural sleep, their nightmares taking them into the house itself, touching those who have entered in order to stop the horror.

And somewhere within the house a demented child waits for them with teeth like knives.

A Few Words From The Author:
With the Harrow novels, I wanted to explore every aspect of gothic and horror literature, from the quiet to the most extreme. Each novel in the Harrow cycle is a very different kind of novel from the others -- where Mischief is a coming-of-age story that some have even called Young Adult fiction, Nightmare House is an homage to the old-fashioned atmospheric horror novels of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and The Infinite is in many ways a mainstream novel with a classic horror backdrop of psychic investigation. With The Abandoned, I wanted to, well, abandon all that and go all out. The Abandoned goes to the extreme side of the equation -- I let loose with ideas and horrors that I think will surprise people. I don't think I've ever written this brutal a horror novel, and yet I think it's up there with my best. It's horror with a capital H. No way around it.