"Slowly, and not without a certain inexplicable feeling of foreboding, I limped up the weed-grown gravel path to the door of Cliff House . .

. " John Montrolfe, malformed and malevolent, the latest inheritor of the family curse, has come to England to claim his ancestral inheritance.

He is grudgingly admitted to the Gothic mansion by a toothless old crone, and night after night his dreams are haunted by the phantom image of a beautiful young maiden. When he reaches out to touch the girl, the spectre's head falls grotesquely to one side and she vanishes as he awakes in horror.

Montrolfe happens upon a secret drawer containing an old journal, written by the girl whose ghost has haunted him. In its pages a strange and horrible story unfolds, a tale of murder and buried treasure, a story that will finally reveal young Pippin's terrible fate and the origin of the Curse of the Montrolfes .

. .

A spellbinding Gothic page-turner, Rohan O'Grady's Pippin's Journal (1962) received rave reviews on its initial publication and returns to print at last to enchant and terrify a new generation of readers. "A story that should be read at a sitting, preferably when the wind whistles like a demon around the house and curtains are drawn against rain-splashed windows .

. .

O'Grady writes in the tradition of the Gothic novelists and the story she tells might have been written by Edgar Allan Poe or a Brontë . .

. Sheer reading enjoyment.

" - Pittsburgh Press"An engaging tale of horror. " - New York Herald Tribune"There is a lurid fascination about the yarn, which instills a blood-chilling impatience to learn what happens next.

" - Chicago Tribune"Elegance and sinister poetry . .

. O'Grady manages the romantic macabre with dancing gusto [and] moves naturally in the language and atmosphere of the eighteenth century of her ghosts.

" - Daily Herald (London)"Who could resist the pursuit of the Montrolfe curse? . .

. [T]ruly in the spirit and tradition of Otranto.

" - Baltimore Sun"A natural, well-wrought, well-written shocker. " - Buffalo News.