Russell Kirk was haunted by the past. Ghosts prowled his house, peering through windows, moving furniture, startling guests. Far from resenting these presences, Kirk welcomed them. For he regarded society as “a spiritual union of the dead, the living, and those yet unborn.” He propounded this view in studies that helped to define the conservative movement as it emerged in the mid-twentieth century. But he expressed it most vividly in supernatural tales that reveal the gothic cast of the conservative mind.
Kirk began writing ghost stories to supplement his income while a student at the University of St Andrews. By the end of his life, he had written twenty-two ghost stories and two gothic novels, a modest output representing a significant accomplishment. Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda has called Kirk “the greatest American author of ghostly tales in the classic style, at least of the post–World War II era,” and it is hard to disagree.
Though Kirk is known as a defender of order, he tends in his fiction to side with eccentrics and rebels who defy propriety for the sake of something higher. “I’d rather be scandalous than damned,” says the heroine of “Sorworth Place.” And so she scandalously asks a man to stay the night in order to guard her from a spirit that would drag her down to hell. “The relish for risk, denial, experience far out of the ordinary moves sinners and saints both,” the narrator observes in “Lex Talionis.” In that story, as in others, Kirk chooses as his hero an ex-convict.
