Fingers of Fear

Utterly ruined by the stock market crash of 1929, Selden Seaforth has lost his money, his job, and his wife. When an old school friend, Ormond Ormes, offers Seaforth a job cataloguing the library at the mansion of Ormesby in the Berkshires, it seems as though things may finally be turning around. But almost as soon as he arrives at Ormesby, it is clear that something is terribly wrong. Ghosts stalk the corridors, and Seaforth awakens to find a mark made by a human mouth on his neck. Is there a vampire, a werewolf, or something even worse, at Ormesby? Seaforth must try to piece together the secrets of the strange Ormes family, but things take a still more sinister turn when the first brutally murdered corpse is found ... The only novel by J. U. Nicolson (1885-1944), Fingers of Fear (1937) was hailed by Karl Edward Wagner as one of the finest supernatural horror novels ever written, and it is perhaps unrivaled in its ability to evoke a weird and uncanny atmosphere of eerie dread. This edition features a reproduction of the original dust jacket art. "Piles horror upon horror until there is not a shiver left in the reader's spine." - New York Times "A blood curdler, with ghosts and werewolves disporting themselves in a house in the Berkshires. Insanity, murder, as bloody as they come." - Kirkus Reviews "A most impressive offering of the vampire school ... an unusual combination of perilous material, real excitement, and good English. What more can you ask?" - Books