The Abandoned

The Abandoned
by Douglas Clegg

About the Book:
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.

Special Features only available in this edition:
• the never-before-published exclusive novelette, "Mr. Spider and Mrs. Fly," concerning two major players in The Abandoned
• the Harrow Timeline: a previously unpublished history of the house
• a map of Harrow created by Glenn Chadbourne, based on notes provided by the author
• a special foreword by the author
• two different dust jackets — one for the Limited Edition and another for the Lettered Edition

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.

Douglas Clegg is the New York Times bestselling author of The Priest of Blood, Afterlife, Nightmare House, and The Hour Before Dark, among other novels. His recent short story collection, The Machinery of Night, won a Shocker Award; and his first collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, won both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award.

Clegg was born in Virginia and raised in Hawaii, Connecticut and Virginia. He has been writing fiction since childhood, but only pursued publication of it beginning in his late twenties. He has primarily written supernatural fiction -- from horror to fantasy to psychological suspense with a paranormal edge. His fiction-writing career currently spans about 20 years of constant writing and publication. Additionally, he's been Director of Marketing for a publisher, editor for a bookstore's website, a marketing consultant for publishers, publicity firms, and booksellers -- and a wrangler for the cats, dogs and rabbits that have occupied his home. He has also co-authored the book Buzz Your Book with M.J. Rose. The two have also written a screenplay together. So far, these are Clegg's only collaborations.

In 1999, Douglas Clegg launched the internet's (and world's) first publisher-sponsored e-serial novel. Called Naomi, Clegg later went on to sell both hardcover and paperback rights. In 2000, his short novel Purity became one of the most-downloaded fiction ebooks on the internet -- reaching more than 100,000 readers in its first year on the internet. In 2001, Purity became the world's-first fiction to appear on a cell phone -- and was nicknamed an M-Book at the time (for Mobile).

Clegg lives with his partner, Raul, in New England, with a small menagerie of rescued animals.

Published in two states:
• Limited Edition of 750 signed and numbered copies ($40)
• Traycased Lettered Edition of 52 signed and lettered copies bound in leather, with a satin ribbon page marker, and a different dust jacket than the Limited Edition ($275)

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