SOURCE: Herron, Don. “Russell Kirk: Ghost Master of Mecosta.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, pp. 21-47. Mercer Island: Starmont House, 1986.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1985, Herron examines the elements of Gothic horror in Kirk's fiction, noting Kirk's skill at grappling with serious themes in both his fiction and nonfiction.]

“For the sake of his art, the author of ghostly narrations ought never to enjoy freedom from fear … so the ‘invisible prince,’ Sheridan Le Fanu, archetype of ghost-story writers, is believed to have died literally of fright. He knew that his creations were not his creations merely, but glimpses of the abyss.”

So wrote Russell Kirk in his essay “A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale,” whose knell brings to an end his first collection of supernatural tales, The Surly Sullen Bell (1962). In the intervening two decades, Kirk, an author haunted by his characters, has emerged as the premiere writer of classical ghost stories in America.

Yet his renown in the supernatural arena is possibly the least of Kirk's fame. With the publication of The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana in 1953 Kirk was hailed as a major conservative political thinker and writer, and soon became a prominent figure among the New Conservatives. His books and articles on education and religion likewise carved Kirk's name into the minds of educators and members of the religious communities. His syndicated column “To the Point” appeared in newspapers from April 30, 1962 through August 3, 1975. Since 1955 he has been a regular contributor to National Review: hundreds of his articles have been published in this and other magazines, including Modern Age and the University Bookman, publications launched with Kirk as editor. From 1948 to the present he has served as a professor or distinguished visiting professor at many universities, and has lectured and debated widely on college campuses, radio, and television. Among the speakers he has debated may be counted Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.; Max Lerner; William Kuntsler; Hubert Humphrey; Dick Gregory; Ayn Rand; Karl Hess; and Malcolm X.

On October 1, 1981 a black tie testimonial dinner was given at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. to honor Kirk's three decades in the vanguard of conservative thought. In attendance were the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs; the Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science, and Technology; the Director of the CIA; the Assistant to the President for Policy Development; and hundreds more. As Richard Brookhiser noted when he commented on this event in National Review, if you “wished to dispel lingering doubts about who won the last election, all you had to do was present yourself” at this testimonial.

The reader of supernatural horror, seeking entertainment in shudders and thrills, might well be wary of approaching Russell Kirk's fiction because of the serious intent of his non-fiction and his efforts as an educator. The Serious Writer, after all, often lacks the art of entertaining. The Academic Mind, in turning its attention to fiction, with amazing regularity produces very dull stuff. Indeed, the ghost story fan could look upon Kirk's major accomplishments with not quite the right sort of horror. What could sound more ominous, in this respect, than the catalogue of Kirk's main works? Titles such as A Program for Conservatives, Academic Freedom, The American Cause, The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft, Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century, The Roots of American Order, and Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Education may cause the heart of a reader of popular fiction to miss its beat.

But so may the ghost stories of Russell Kirk. …

Kirk's serious work requires no apologies, yet if Serious Writers are dependably lame fictioneers, the rule is not without exception: C. S. Lewis was a Serious Writer. If Kirk has busied himself for over forty years in acquiring education and dispensing it, the lengthy tenure at Oxford of J. R. R. Tolkien is best recalled; the immense scholarship of M. R. James, master of the malignant ghost story, is a matter of unburied public record. Certain imaginations do survive education and serious pursuits.

Furthermore, do not indulge in suspicions before approaching Kirk's fiction that his interest in the supernatural is held lightly. You do not find Kirk abandoning the spectre for lucrative literary fads. He has not written a roman a clef out of his experiences among politicians, nor has he penned long narratives about cowboys, movie stars, private detectives or sharks. Kirk is a ghost-story man and a Romantic. His biography indicates long-standing acquaintance with works of supernaturalism and Romance, with people and places spectral and Romantic.

Born on October 19, 1918, in Plymouth, Michigan, Russell Amos Kirk was reared on books and walks and good conversation. His mother read to him from Scott, Stevenson, Grimm, and other Romancers; he read to himself from the books in his grandfather's library. On long walks with his grandfather, a banker, they “talked of the idea of progress, the character of Richard III, the nature of immortality, the significance of dreams, the style of Poe,” and much else. The Great Depression, catching Kirk in his teenage years, held less sway over his reading and walking than did the time getting a solid public education.

Kirk visited often in the large house his great-grandfather had built in 1879 in Mecosta, Michigan, on the hill at the westward end of this hamlet. Known as the Old House, it introduced Kirk early on to the weird. He recalls his grandmother from the 1920s: “There she sat in her high-buttoned black shoes and immaculate old-fashioned dress, a dignified and even haughty little figure; she owned a respectable library, and was fond of Willa Cather's novels; and at nighttime—so I was told in later years—she used to retire to her room to talk with the dead.” Spirituality of this kind was widespread in the Mecosta of old; the town once had a Spiritualist Church, of which Kirk's ancestors were staunch members. He speculates that in the Old House occurred “glimpses into the abyss little short of necromancy.”

Upon graduation from high school in 1936, Kirk applied for a scholarship to the State University. With this for tuition, he spent the next years in East Lansing, eschewing manual labor and extra pocket money in favor of leisure time for study in and outside of his courses. He reveled in his Gissing-like existence, surviving on peanut-butter and crackers, working toward his bachelor's degree, and contriving, in his words, “to read extensively in fields my proper studies never touched upon—old books of travel, forgotten corners of belles-lettres, African history, Samuel Johnson's essays.” He went to Duke University, North Carolina, for his Masters studies, putting together a dissertation on John Randolph of Roanoke, planter and politician.

For some months, after so much education, Kirk worked for the Ford Motor Company in Rouge, as he had worked for Ford in summers past. But he says of this time, “In a lodging house in Dearborn I sank rapidly into an apathy which the modern industrial system induces, sleeping long, ignoring the future, reading nothing but Charles Lamb in the course of six months, and filled with a sense of the disjointedness of time.”

World War II intervened. Kirk spent three years as a sergeant in Chemical Warfare Services, stationed in the Great Salt Lake Desert, and a fourth year overseas. Camped amid vast desolation, he found time for reading and thinking, seated on the sand dunes, and came to recognize for himself Divine nature, which forced the man to cast aside the Stoic convictions of the young man, as in its turn Stoicism had forced the young man to cast aside the atheism of the teenager. Furthermore, he came to recognize the nature of his own mind:

Mine was not an Enlightened mind. I now was aware: it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive loyalties. I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.

Kirk followed his impulse after the war, in 1948 settling in “the ghostly ancient gray town of St. Andrews” in Scotland to take his Doctor of Letters from this senior Scottish University, the first American to earn the highest degree from St. Andrews.

Until 1955 Kirk was abroad much of the time, becoming fully a man of letters, meeting and befriending other literary men. As he recalls in his autobiographical statement, “Reflections of a Gothic Mind,” which serves as introduction to his Confessions of a Bohemian Tory (1963):

I sat with blind old Wyndham Lewis in his studio at Notting Hill Gate, ‘Rotting Hill’; with T. S. Eliot, at the Garrick Club, I talked of the sunk condition of the universe; Roy Campbell and I drank our beer in pubs full of Irish laborers; high in the ancient decayed tenement of James' Court, below Edinburgh Castle, I munched pickled walnuts with George Scott-Moncrieff where David Hume had eaten his porridge.

Kirk's first book, Randolph of Roanoke, appeared in 1951, his Masters work made good. While at St. Andrews he wrote The Conservative Rout, which publisher Henry Regnery retitled The Conservative Mind before issuing it in 1953. It made Kirk's fame. To this day, The Conservative Mind remains the single book most associated with his name, though over two dozen volumes have appeared since. Yet a year before his first book saw print one of Kirk's ghost tales appeared in the pages of London Mystery Magazine. Six more saw publication before The Conservative Mind.

In 1955 he acquired the ancestral manor, the Old House, on Piety Hill in Mecosta, Michigan, and made his home there between peregrinations. Nineteen sixty-four saw him renounce bachelorhood for the hand of Annette Cecile Courtemanche; the latest of their four daughters was born in 1975. And in 1975 fire razed Kirk's Old House; he wrote that “Most of all shall I miss my great-grandfather's splendid immense tall walnut bed, so very comfortable, on the headboard of which the dead were heard to knock, now and again over the decades.”

Such, in outline, are the origins and accomplishments of Russell Kirk, who is sometimes called the Wizard of Mecosta. This title becomes him, because he endeavors “to entertain after the fashion of the Wizard of the North, at Abbotsford.” He had constructed on the site of the Old House a New, a brick mansion of Italianate design. In recent years it has sheltered “a congeries of fugitives from Progress”: young mothers with babies, half-reformed burglars, hobos, Ethiopian exiles, college students, thirteen Vietnamese refugees, sundry distinguished visitors, and Russell Kirk, kith and kin.

Mecosta itself deserves a word or two as the undoubted locus for Kirk's connection with the supernatural. Situated some seventy miles north of Grand Rapids, it is classified by the government as a depressed area, though it is not without glamour. As Kirk noted in his Confessions, “depressed areas aren't necessarily depressing.” Mecosta had endless eldritch charms.

The concluding sketch in The Surly Sullen Bell is a True Narration entitled “Lost Lake,” describing the sinister genius loci of “a dark little sheet of water” some two miles from Kirk's village. Attempts to reside near this lake have ended tragically, and the surrounding area abounds in ghastly tales. Mercifully, no one discovered what Mr. Van Tassel did to make him shout, during a particularly powerful exhortation by the preacher calling for confessions of sins: “I'll tell it; I'll tell it if they send me to state's prison!” For Van Tassel reconsidered, in the shocked silence that followed this outburst, and sat down in his pew without explanation. One winter his children invited their school chums over to play with their “new doll.” But the new doll “was a human baby, the youngest Van Tassel, dead and frozen stiff. The baby had died the previous week, and had been stored in the woodshed for burial when the frost was out of the ground; the other children had asked if they might have Susan for a doll, and Mrs. Van Tassel had not demurred.”

In Mecosta is the wellspring for Kirk's interest in the supernatural, yet this interest was not wholly sated by the bogies prowling the spectral hamlet, nor by accounts of grisly acts, told at first hand. Kirk the literary man is an artist, and, as he states in his introduction to The Surly Sullen Bell, “the True Narration … rarely succeeds as a work of literary art: it is too fragmentary and inconclusive.”

Kirk came to the notice of the reading public as a supernatural fictioneer in 1961, when Fleet Publishing Company of New York issued his first novel, Old House of Fear—a Gothic Romance “in unblushing line of direct descent from The Castle of Otranto.” Kirk transports the Gothic conventions into our century, rattling ghostly chains in a rousing yarn. Duncan MacAskival, wealthy Michigan industrialist, dispatches lawyer Hugh Logan to buy a piece of property for him: the island Carnglass, off Scotland, ancestral home to the MacAskival clan. He tells Logan of the only livable house now on the island, the Old House of Fear. “And the name is Gaelic, not English: ‘faer’ is spelled ‘fir’ or ‘fhir,’ sometimes, and it means ‘man’.” The inhabitants are the aged Lady MacAskival and her servants.

In Glasgow, Logan gradually discovers that seeing Lady MacAskival about purchasing her island will be no easy matter. The Carnglass factor in Mutto's Wynd, Gallowgate, puts him off. Upon leaving this interview Logan is set upon by ruffians—“no simple robbery: they meant to slash or cripple him, or something worse.” After an affray, constables rescue him, and he travels on to Oban, where he realizes he is being followed. Here he has a strange encounter with Captain Gare. This episode derives from a chance meeting Kirk himself once had with a man calling himself “Captain Gair” on a lonely street in medieval St. Andrews. As he recalls in his Confessions, this man asked for cigarettes; Kirk had none. “‘No, no,’ went on my Captain, nervously, ‘I don't require cigarettes. I don't smoke—nor drink, either. It's petrol—yes, that's it, petrol, petrol.’ “From out of these unusual conversations Logan first learns of Dr. Jackman, said to be attending the ailing Lady MacAskival. Logan determines to reach Carnglass, and takes ship in a beautifully written passage among Scottish isles:

They crossed the Firth of Lorne; and then, to the north, they skirted the great rocky mass of Mull, while the wild shores of Morven frowned upon them from the north. Several islanders were among the passengers, and for the first time in years Logan heard the Gaelic spoken naturally, that beautifully singing Gaelic of the Hebrides. It went with the cliffs, the sea-rocks, the ruined strongholds of Mull and Morven, the damp air, the whitewashed lonely cottages by the deep and smoothly sinister sea.

Once Logan lands on the island—a wild, daring dinghy-ride through needle-sharp skerries and “wicked immense swirls and eddies”—the main action begins, relentlessly carrying him through one perilous encounter after another, with no halt. He meets Seamus Donley, IRA bomb-man, who informs him at gunpoint of the murderous activities of Dr. Jackman and his crew of spies—Iron Curtain sorts. He and young Mary MacAskival, a not unexpected heroine in a Gothic novel, conspire against Jackman, only to be caught. Logan is imprisoned, escapes along waterclogged tunnels dug from the rock centuries before by burrowing Picts, and finally leads an armed remnant of the ancient MacAskival clan against the victims holed up in the Old House of Fear. Adventurous stuff!

A couple of features deserve particular note. Although numerous suggestions of the supernatural appear in the novel, Kirk follows the Gothic convention which allows apparent supernaturalism throughout a work only to have the manifestations explained naturally at the end. The exception to this may be the occult identification of Dr. Jackman with the legendary Firgower, or man-goat, a demon believed to be native to Carnglass. Jackman has a “third eye” just as the Firgower had—a place in his forehead where the bone is missing, and the brain may be seen pulsating beneath the skin.

Too, Jackman is an especially arresting nemesis—not because he is powerful as most such villains are, but because he was once powerful and now is wasting away. As Kirk writes:

The man's brain must be damaged, and under Jackman's outward imperiousness, Logan suspected, vacillation was gnawing away. Logan thought also that had he encountered Jackman at the height of the man's powers, Mary would have had a sorry knight-errant. But now the merciless energy and talent which had been Jackman's were flickering in the socket, like enough, and Logan had only to deal with the remnant of a bad man.

Still, Jackman puts up a tough contest; the outcome hangs in the balance until the last page.

If the reader of supernatural horror begrudges the lack of genuine ghosts in Old House of Fear, he cannot lodge a like complaint against Kirk's next volume. Encouraged by sales of the novel, Fleet collected Kirk's scattered ghost tales, together with new material, and brought out The Surly Sullen Bell; Ten Stories and Sketches, Uncanny or Uncomfortable, With a Note on the Ghostly Tale, by Russell Kirk, the following year. In the foreword Kirk states that in these stories may be found “hints of M. R. James, Henry James, and even Jesse James”! A warning to invite the curious!

The first tale, “Uncle Isaiah,” occurs in a run-down section of a large American city. The gangster Bruno Costa—conveniently calling his organization the North End Cleaners Prudential Association—demands a weekly fee out of Daniel Kinnaird's cleaning business. Kinnaird, his receipts in decline, his nature opposed to such extortion, discusses his options with his wife; they decide they have little recourse except to pay.

“‘Then there's nowhere to appeal,’ she muttered, rising from her chair. ‘We'll pay.’

“Kinnaird motioned her back. ‘We'll appeal to Uncle Isaiah.’

“She gritted her teeth. ‘Appeal to a lunatic?’

“‘Isaiah was in the asylum for only two months—you know that.’”

The story justifies its inclusion in this collection after Kinnaird asks for such help and Uncle Isaiah agrees to act in his behalf to “make a final settlement with Mr. Costa. …” And the woodcut Kirk did to illustrate the story, like his woodcuts for the rest of the book (the ten sketches mentioned in the subtitle), adds something to the effect of the tale, showing as it does the decayed building in which the final settlement takes place.

“Off the Sand Road” is set in the stump country near Mecosta. Doctor Cross and two local boys are wild strawberry picking, when the doctor notices the abandoned farmstead of the Clatry family. The Clatrys share several unwholesome characteristics with the actual Van Tassels, mentioned beforehand—both groups stark sandhill savages. Investigating the weather-beaten house built of concrete blocks, the doctor discovers a pile of the most sinisterly suggestive love letters ever unearthed in a story, the epistolary courtship of Ella and Gerald Clatry. The boys tell him that Mr. Clatry was found hanging from the limb of the sycamore beside the house: “There were lumps and bruises all over him, but probably Mrs. Clatry left marks on him most days, anyway.”

A modern classic of the traditional ghostly tale, “Ex Tenebris,” features Mrs. Oliver, an old little woman who keeps a cottage in Low Wentford. Hers is the only cottage still inhabited by the living in that desolate hamlet. Mr. S. G. W. Barner, a modern Planning Officer, wishes to evict her and make of Low Wentford something of tracts and council house and cinemas. Mrs. Oliver confides her problems, as she should, to her vicar, Abner Hargreaves—though the parish church is long derelict. The vicar on his visits would sit “moodily in his corner away from the fire, always dripping, somehow, even when Mrs. Oliver had thought the evening fair … ; he would eat nothing, yet he drank her tea with a prodigious thirst; and he seemed to need it, for his voice was fearfully dry and harsh; and to judge by his eyes, he suffered from malaria.” The meeting of this dripping, red-eyed apparition of the Past with Barner, communal-minded apparition of the Present, is one of several recommendations of this charming, creepy tale.

The title story too has its suggestions of Satan-worship and magicking, its call to ghosts, but largely is a tale of lost love, an uncomfortable romantic triangle, and a jealous man's fondness for poison.

“The Cellar of Little Egypt” is another regional tale set in Michigan, in the town of New Devon and the tavern called Little Egypt, where the bartender in the days the story occurs was a part-time butcher of hogs and cows, yet “nobody minded a bartender with a little blood … slopped on him.” Mr. Trimble, a spiritualist, does some “seeing” into a crime for the deputy—a murder in which the bartender is a suspect—and is himself last seen alive in the filthy tavern. Pieces of his corpse are found, “everything, at last, except one thumb.” The murdered Mr. Trimble, however, makes another appearance in the story—before its end.

A third Michigan vignette is “Skyberia,” which tells of two hunters from Cleveland lost in a forsaken area of stump-country “in part a patchwork of abandoned or moribund farms,” all under a sneering sky “smokeless and empty, forever popping unexpectedly from behind a pine-veiled ridge. …” They meet one of the farmers still hanging on to his place and his primitive way of life. The philosophy of the farmer is so alien to the hunters that it frightens them; when they leave for home they feel “the snow and stumps and second growth of Skyberia closing behind them like the doors of Ali Baba's cavern.”

“Sorworth Place” turns to Scotland and the classic form once more. Perhaps one of Kirk's best-known stories (it was televised by Rod Serling as an episode in “Night Gallery”), this tale introduces Ralph Bain, a Military Cross man who tramps about, having his pension cheques sent to places he chooses, quite at random, to be lingering for the first few days of each month. March sees him in Sorworth, where he meets the widow Mrs. Ann Lurlin. Her presence enlivens his routine of “drinks with strangers in one village, listless games of cards in the next town, inconsequential talks on buses or trains, dull glimpses of a pleasant wood there, an old church here.” He calls on Mrs. Lurlin on the justifiable pretext that he has an architectural interest in the Old Place of Sorworth, her Scots mansion house with “Two square towers, at either end; and between them, extending also far to the rear, an immense block of building, in part ashlar, but mostly rubble. None of this, except a fine large window above the entrance, was later than the seventeenth century, and most was far older. An intricacy of crowstepped gables, turrets, dormers, and chimneys confused one's eyes when they roved upward.” In this setting Ralph Bain and Ann Lurlin are drawn together by common interests; growth into love, however, is hampered by the shade (and eventually more than merely a “shade”) of her late husband. The motto on the Lurlin coat-of-arms is Larva Resurgat. Ann Lurlin fears this eerie motto may be too true, and begs for Bain's protection. Such warding he agrees to give; surely he does not have to worry about Mr. Lurlin digging from his grave. Night falls, Bain, fortified in Sorworth Place, finds the mansion under assault from a shambling corpse, eager to be reunited with its wife. The siege and battle are uncanny, yet Ann Lurlin is saved—though Bain, in the saving, comes to a most unpleasant end.

Again a story of classic ghostly form, again a Michigan regional, in “Behind the Stumps” Kirk details the cause of heart failure in the chest of Cribben, a Special Interviewer from the Regional Office of the Special Census, dispatched to Bear City in Pottawattomie County. He is successful in taking census on most of the obdurate farmers in the area; “neither coward nor laggard,” he also determines to interview the Gholsons, though he is told to let the matter go by people who know of the family's reputation—somewhat like that of the actual Van Tassel clan. Cribben goes to the house in the wastelike stump country. Its second-floor windows are all boarded-up. What Cribben finds sprawled on a bed on that dark second floor never makes the official census.

The final story of the book, “What Shadows We Pursue,” is a special delight for book collectors. Again of classic form, it is based on the purchase of an immense personal library made by Kirk and partner, in days when Kirk himself was trying his hand as a bookseller. In this tale, William Stonburner, used bookdealer, is packing away the eleven thousand volumes of a

vast, dusty library. … From thick, faded carpet to mouldedplaster ceiling fifteen feet above, Dr. Corr's books staunchly filled the walls of the long room. Beyond the archway was another room nearly as large, and there books not only jammed the shelves but lay in heaps upon tables and were monumentally stacked upon the floor. The grand, chill corridor upon which this second room opened also was choked with books ….

and all this was not the whole of Corr's collection. The job of carrying the volumes from the dirty house of Mrs. Corr and her daughter, odd sorts; the pervasive odor of gas; and such atmospheric touches as “the actual artificial light came from naked bulbs dangling like hanged felons from the ceilings” are memorable features of this haunted library tale.

The True Narration of “Lost Lake” makes the tenth entry, and the book is closed with “A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale,” altogether a delightful essay on phantoms real and fictional, with such gems of observation as “… man in modern fiction … tends toward a depravity more shocking than Monk Lewis' grotesqueries. … Without straining credulity, no ghost could do half so much mischief as a Private Eye.” Or, speaking of those who substitute science for religion, “Having demolished, to their own satisfaction, the whole edifice of religious learning, abruptly and unconsciously they experience the need for belief in something not mundane; and so, defying their own inductive and mechanistic premises, they take up the cause of Martians and Jovians. As for angels and devils, let along bogles—why, hell, such notions are superstitious!”

Kirk's second novel appeared in 1966. A Creature of the Twilight, like Old House of Fear, has its traces of supernaturalism, but basically is an adventure, a tale of revolution in the Third World, with attendant battles and political machinations. It gains true distinction for its introduction to the reading public of Manfred Arcane, baroque narrator and weaver of fates, who prefaces the book thus: “The time has come for me to put upon paper some memoir of myself, that the history of my extraordinary and malicious talents should not be denied to mankind. … Those familiar with recent events in Africa will recall that President-Sultan Ali was disembowelled alive, in his capital city of Awala, by certain Progressive regicides. Ali gone, upon this consummate sinner your servant … a man damned, bored, and conceivably somewhat mad—descended the duty of restoring order in Hamnegri, and Hamnegri to the comity of nations.”

In A Creature of the Twilight: His Memorials (“Being some account of episodes in the career of His Excellency Manfred Arcane, Minister without Portfolio to the hereditary President of the Commonwealth of Hamnegri, and de facto Field Commander of the armies of that august prince”) Kirk creates the character that will spur his imagination to create story after story. As Sherlock Holmes stands, towering, to the complete works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, so does Manfred Arcane stand to the fiction of Russell Kirk. And as Holmes has his Watson, his Irregulars, and the rest, so too does Arcane keep beside him his confederates: Cleon and Brasidas, “my twin black Satanic imps, alley waifs of my saving, my body-servants, guards, and messengers, skilled in knife and gun under my tutelage;” Don Jesus Pelayo y Iturbide, “that gentle swashbuckler,” commander of Arcane's elite mercenary corps, the Interracial Peace Volunteers; Lady Grizel Fergusson, aged Amazon; Signora Melchiora, Persephone of the Dis-like narrator; and Arpad Nemo, grotesque survivor of Nazi concentration camps, always carrying his Bren gun. Eccentric, his history a colorful and often bloodily violent chronicle, Arcane nevertheless projects a cosmopolitan suavity that dazzles Mary Jo Travers of the Peace Corps and Linda Lawless, Hollywood sexpot, on vacation in Hamnegri. Gus Randolph, Arcane's black secretary, however, sees fearful shapes shift beneath the mask of the Father of Shadows. T. William Tallstall, American diplomat, would prefer to deal with predictable modern progressives or even communists than with this crepuscular political manipulator, whose methods are as ruthless and unaffected as those of an eighteenth-century European prince. And M'Rundu, the Postmaster-General and sorcerer of the backward nation, finds Arcane quite equal to coping with his treacherous plot to throw in with the enemy and leave several heads—including the white-haired, bearded skull of Arcane himself—rotting on stakes in the city square.

Kirk has called this novel his “exercise in black comedy,” and, for all its intrigue and warfare adventure, it is that. Take for example this Arcane description of the harbor of Haggat:

We could see the half-built docks that the Soviets were paying for; near them, the half-built petrol refinery that the Americans were paying for; and trailing toward the refinery, the snake of the half-built pipe-line that the French were paying for. A tidy portion of all these funds had gone into the pockets of Postmaster-General M'Rundu and other Hamnegrian statesmen. As for me, I had my two per cent royalty, skillfully negotiated, upon the crude oil already gushing from the Hamnegrian wells; and so I rose superior to base corruption.

Or, this news reportage of African politics:

Patriotic listeners to Radio Awala are further directed to discount all superstitious whispers that M'Rundu's magical powers caused units of the People's Army to disperse in panic, east of Fort Swaha. The truth of the matter is this: M'Rundu is hundreds of miles distant, at Haggat, and any claims that he can appear in two places simultaneously are grossly contrary to scientific teaching. Several sorcerers much more adept than M'Rundu belong to the Progressive party, and are pitting all their talents, for the sake of the people's democracy, against M'Rundu's obscene magic.

A Creature of the Twilight makes a spectacular advent for Manfred Arcane, whose darkling presence would haunt Kirk, demanding a return. But after publication of this novel, readers would have a long wait for the next volume of fiction, though in the interval Kirk kept his hand in the bogle-business with several stories for magazines.

Finally, new books appeared in 1979, known among Kirk devotees as the Year of the Great Russell Kirk Resurgence. First, Arkham House of Sauk City, Wisconsin, brought forth a second collection of ghost tales, containing the most recent pieces as well as several in reprint from The Surly Sullen Bell, a now rare volume pursued by connoisseurs of the weird tale. Those reprinted include “Ex Tenebris,” “Sorworth Place,” “The Cellar of Little Egypt,” and “Behind the Stumps.” Five new tales, and a brief introduction by the author, complete The Princess of All Lands.

The title story reminds one of a classic oral ghostly tale, told by firelight, all careful horribly-growing accumulation of hints and mood. Yolande, a woman with great virtue for good, psychic of a kind, picks up a teenage hitchhiker during a long drive back to her home, only to find the girl is not the sort of passenger she would wish for. To placate the menacing teenager, Yolande tells a story she thinks will appeal to her, about an Indian who used to appear every seven years, always on Yolande's birthday. Each time this visitor caused greater grief. The day Yolande was born a watchdog was beaten to death. When she turned seven the barn caught fire, nearly taking the house with it as it crumbled in flame. At fourteen, her father died after eating an offering of trout brought by the Indian; at twenty-one her mother died after a confrontation with this sinister figure. And now, on her twenty-eighth birthday, having picked up this sullen hitchhiker, Yolande finds a gun held on her and is ordered to drive to a derelict farmstead, where the Indian waits for her and for his teenage daughter, although neither the father nor the daughter is alive any longer.

“The Last God's Dream” marks the return of Manfred Arcane in a short adventure, here found in the town of Split, with Cleon, Brasidas, and Colonel Fuentes, viewing the ancient palace of Diocletian and relating to a young American couple the story of a haunted room in Spalato he stayed in when young himself, and of what he found years later abutting on that room, when dogs of war pursued him and he sought desperate refuge through a door of stone at the back of a closet. A terrific tale, with such frank admissions by Arcane as “I am a cicerone, a touristguide … cruel necessity compelled me to turn first mercenary and then statesman, despite my natural propensity for moping about ruins,” and such fabulous matters as a meeting between the Father of Shadows and the Emperor Diocletian—and who is to say which of the two was the Shade?

“There's a Long, Long Trail a-Winding” won the 1977 World Fantasy Award as best story of the year, deservedly so. It has a rare atmosphere to it, a peculiar haunting use of time. Frank Sarsfield, an old hobo, seeks refuge from a Midwestern blizzard in a deserted mansion in a deserted town, once site of a federal prison. Worried by his failure to make right with his mother and sister, by thefts at sore need from church poor-boxes, this gentle man feels a waking sense of familiarity with the house, seems to see the people who lived there, to know them. And then, at some strange point in his mind or in time, folded, twisting, Sarsfield gets his chance to make right his little wrongs—the people in the house are besieged by escaped convicts and the timid hobo finds berserker rage in his heart as he meets the assault with a weighty axe.

“Balgrummo's Hell” details the last thought of an art thief so rash as to invade the forbidden keep of Alexander Fillan Inchburn, tenth Baron Balgrummo, in search of plunder. The paintings, one especially blasphemous, hold small interest for the thief when he realizes the undesirability of being alone in that damp castle with the aged, infirm, but nonetheless dreadful baron.

Ralph Bain is reintroduced in “Saviourgate” after his death by uncanny combat in the Old Place of Sorworth. An odd tale, not of horror, but certainly of ghosts. “‘It's a private joke, nearly, that “ghost,”’ Bain said. ‘The Canon and I call anybody a ghost who turns up here, or turns up anywhere else in eternity, but doesn't belong: anybody who hasn't properly crossed the Border, but gets into eternity somehow—for a moment, so to speak—and then passes back into Time again.’” Mark Findlay, a living man with a delicate hold on life, slips across to haunt the spectres, after entering a tavern which does not exist in the sensual world.

October 1979 rushed in with an eldritch Halloween treat from St. Martin's Press: Lord of the Hollow Dark, Kirk's third novel, a dramatic synthesis of terror and spiritual transcendence, in which the wizard of Mecosta finally took the themes central to his ghost stories to book-length, unleashing his bogles from the story and novelette to spirit through a virtuoso literary performance, which is at once a Gothic novel in the tradition of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe and a mystical Romance that conjures up comparison with Arthur Machen.

A number of people meet in a damp castle in Scotland. All bear names taken from the work of T. S. Eliot. They congregate under the auspices of Mr. Apollinax, an occultist and cult leader who promises them a “timeless moment” when soul will strip free of flesh. Of course, Apollinax intends no good, but a timeless moment of hell. Arraigned against his evil are Manfred Arcane, Ralph Bain, and Alexander Fillan Inchburn, tenth Baron Balgrummo! This book has diabolism, disguises, banishings, bogles—the works.

Kirk reaches the current peak of his art in this novel, and it becomes clear that a philosophical background unites all his fiction. To have Manfred Arcane linked by blood to Baron Balgrummo or to have the barely-corporeal Ralph Bain (a true wandering ghost) suddenly plunge off a cliff into the middle of the novel to assist in combating Mr. Apollinax requires a sure hand, and more. Kirk's scattered stories become, after Lord of the Hollow Dark, not merely separate fictions written to startle or entertain, but parts of a Kirkian cosmology not greatly different from the myth cycle H. P. Lovecraft eventually built up in his tales united by the monstrous presence of Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.

This cosmology became a major focus of the tales appearing in the wake of Lord of the Hollow Dark, which Arkham House collected in a third short story volume in 1984 under the title Watchers at the Strait Gate, together with the remaining stories left unreprinted from The Surly Sullen Bell. The latest collection also contains a long foreword by Kirk: another “Cautionary Word on the Ghostly Tale,” differing in many points of wording from the original version of 1962, yet emphasizing the consistency of thought about the unearthly which Kirk expressed at the outset of his career as a ghost-story man.

“Watchers at the Strait Gate” itself is a strongly original tale. The ghost of Frank Sarsfield, met again after “There's a Long, Long Trail a-Winding,” aids the ghost of a priest across darkling plains toward the gates of Paradise, while unseen watchers prowl, ready and eager to snap up the faint-hearted.

“Lex Talionis” presents another of Kirk's spectres wandering the common earth, this time the revenant of a criminal named Eddie Mahaffy. Dragged in on a robbery by a man named Butte, a hardcase, a bully he had known in prison, Mahaffy goes with him to prowl the deserted house where Butte had cached some loot—loot taken after he murdered the entire household. Butte is nervous in the shadowy halls, fearful of the ghosts of his victims. But:

“‘The spook has been beside you all the time.’

“Eddie moved closer to the big man. ‘You're scared of ghosts, buster; well, look at me.’

“Some appalling change had come over his appearance, Eddie sensed; but what it was, only Butte's eyes could see. Butte began to scream. …”

Eddie Mahaffy had, like other cons, his alias, which was Eddie Cain.

“The Peculiar Demesne” is another adventure of Manfred Arcane, Father of Shadows, which transports him once more from the land of the quick to the land of the dead for a rematch with the Archvicar of the Church of Divine Mystery, T. M. A. Gerontion, better known as Mr. Apollinax from Lord of the Hollow Dark. The confrontation with the Archvicar's shambling corpse-candle in the eerie graveyard of a benighted and deserted city, out of space and time, makes an honorable entry into Arcane's biography.

“Fate's Purse” returns the reader to other familiar haunts in Kirk's oeuvre: Bear City, Pottawattomie County, Michigan, previously explored in “Behind the Stumps.” Here we find another fine regional, involving a miser, a murder, and an “obscure hungry thing.”

Presented as if it were a True Narration, taken from transcripts of a memoir found tied within bundles of eighteenth century clothing in a padlocked chest, “The Reflex-Man of Whinnymuir Close” presents the siblings Janet and Dugald Kenly, and tells of their involvement with the roguish Lord Banford—an involvement which ultimately draws in an undoubted ancestor of Manfred Arcane in the person of Colonel Ian Inchburn of Drumcarrow, Scotland, who—for his stocky appearance and longish arms, short legs—was sometimes called the Barbary Ape. Janet is rescued by the Colonel from rape by Banford and his gang in Greyfriars Kirkyard, but her brother is not so lucky: his dealings with Banford lead to his death. When Inchburn goes into Banford's stronghold to resolve matters, however, he finds himself in tandem with a reflex-man—a coinmeadh or CoWalker—who takes Banford's fate into his own cold hands. In the dark of Whinnymuir House, “within like unto the Cretan labyrinth, being of much age and added to, within and without, at divers times,” Inchburn finds himself assaulted by a “shrieking thing” which he runs through with his Indian sword; Lord Banford himself, driven to insane fear by what has faced him in the moist hallways.

“The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost” moves the scene to the streets of a modern American city in Kirk's longest novelette. Raymond Thomas Montrose, a black priest in a fading Episcopalian parish in a ghetto called Hawkhill, makes the best of his work, saving what young women he can from white slavery, preaching his sermons to those who still attend services in the century-old church. His work is aided at times by Fork Causland, a blind man who scrounges a living doing odd jobs in the area, eschewing welfare. Fork is an odd fellow, and well-respected by the punks of Hawkhill after a bloody battle he had with the pimp Sherm Stanton and his thugs—a battle from which Causland emerged quite whole, despite his lack of vision, and which left the pimp disembowelled and several of his men dead or dying. When Stanton's sister comes from the small town she and her brother grew up in to find “Sherman” trouble arises: the priest finds himself nurturing fleshly urges he thought he had long since conquered, finds that his urges may not be of his own desire but of that of the demonic Sherm and his slain lackeys—shades eager to drag the sister into hell with them.

The last story of the book, “An Encounter by Mortstone Pond,” is Kirk's shortest to date—a sad but gentle tale of a young boy and an old man, the same person near the beginning and near the end of his life, who haunts his youth and his old age beside a pond in Mortstone, Michigan, as each reaches out with answers to the troubles besieging the boy and the man.

Such then are the three novels, twenty-one tales, one True Narration, and sundry forewords and essays which now comprise the published supernatural Russell Kirk.

Several points about Kirk's work catch the attention. The kinship with M. R. James is striking. Both use the now classic form for the ghost tale—a form which James, through his excellent tales, in effect made the “standard” one for treatment of spectres. James is now considered the master of the classic ghostly tale. Clearly, Kirk is a major practitioner in the same vein, yet where the apparitions James evokes are hairy, thin, not-very-human creations, the ghosts Kirk writes of are of recognizable human form—damned souls, for the most part.

Also common to both James and Kirk, beyond their intent to affright, are the backgrounds for their stories, based upon their special fields of interest. The atmosphere evoked is similar, whether it is James the antiquarian writing of historied cathedrals and ancient curses or Kirk the conservative political thinker writing of the decay of tradition and the iron tread of progress. In M. R. James man is often in search of the old, deliberately delving into antiquity, and unprepared for what his researches unearth. In Russell Kirk man is usually attempting to further the state of modernity and to bury his history—uninteresting stuff!—under a pavement topped with shopping centers and tract housing. In both cases the Past creeps—or springs with rattling claws—into the Present. The result for man: Terror.

But the method, form, and philosophy of the classic or traditional ghostly tale as written by Kirk presents many problems to the modern, and newly expanded, audience for horror fiction. Ghetto kids and housewives who purchase “mainstream horror” novels by Stephen King and company at the supermarket did not come to the field from reading M. R. James or Algernon Blackwood. Rather, they found their appetite for horror whetted by popular films such as The Exorcist or Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and in their desire to read more of the same sort of horror as they have seen at the local movie house, they have made writers who portray similar shocking incidents happening to ordinary Americans—such as King—bestsellers. One senses that these readers of bestselling horror novels would find the charmingly eerie tales of M. R. James irrelevant and a waste of time: certainly James is in no danger of becoming a bestseller.

Likewise Kirk, in his traditional treatment of the spook story, seems to be making little effort to capitalize on the recent surge of interest in horror novels of the King variety. Lord of the Hollow Dark, though published among this wave of late 1970s horror novels, bears almost no resemblance to any other book of the same period. Its concerns are not those of Stephen King or Robert R. McCammon; they are more like those of Arthur Machen in one of his mystical romances such as The Hill of Dreams, with the horror akin to the spiritual terror Machen pictures in “The Great God Pan.” Readers coming to Lord of the Hollow Dark in search of the bloodily physical horror of 'Salem's Lot or They Thirst will find disappointment, if that is all they want in a horror novel.

Kirk, in fact, is at his weakest as a supernaturalist on the few occasions when he does cater to current trends, such as the recent demand for social realism in horror tales, best represented by Ramsey Campbell in England and by Dennis Etchinson in America. His novelette, “The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost,” places the action in a modern American city, but Kirk as a romantic writer does not portray a convincing contemporary urban scene. When a “detective remarked unguardedly to a reporter, ‘Hell, that “Church of Ishtar and Kali” is just a kinky bawdy-house”’ any reader familiar with a metropolis realizes that the remark is guarded: cops are not afraid to say “whore”; and “hell” isn't the four letter word most commonly found in a Stephen King novel. The hero of this story, black priest Raymond Thomas Montrose, is not believable when placed in a gritty universe of pimps and hookers. Walk along Skid Row in New York or Chicago or Detroit or San Francisco and imagine this character living in the area, thinking the thoughts he thinks. The romantic nature of Montrose as drawn by Kirk, the moments of hesitation before a rough scene or an exchange of street dialogue, do not support the setting for this tale.

Yet if Kirk is not as easy with obscenity as King, if his portrait of a slum does not perfectly mirror reality, Kirk's art in his best work does not depend on social realism to meet its ends. As he points out in his new “A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale” which prefaces Watchers at the Strait Gate:

… men of letters need not conjure up horrors worse than those suffered during the past decade by Cambodians and Ugandans, Afghans and Ethiopians.

What I have attempted, rather, are experiments in the moral imagination. Readers will encounter elements of parable and fable. … Literary naturalism is not the only path to apprehension of reality.

Thus, anthologist Kirby McCauley in Dark Forces (1980) described “The Peculiar Demesne” featuring Manfred Arcane as “set in an Africa on no known map.” The Michigan stump country and ruined castles of Scotland used in many of Kirk's tales likewise are at a remove from everyday reality—they are places of weird glamour, and the sudden appearance of a bogle from behind a deadfall or up a damp stone stair is much more credible in these rare realms than is any spectral phenomenon on Main Street. Kirk's Gothic imagination is at home in these places, doing its work; as he wrote of a recent trip: “In Britain my daughter Monica had various wondrous experiences, but Monica didn't notice. A prowl about the Old Calton Hill Burying Ground, in Edinburgh, with the great Roman tower of David Hume looming above the broken gravestones (and the drunkards slouching on the slabs), was particularly eerie; a walk in Greyfriars' Kirkyard, too” (Letter to the author, Dec. 15, 1981). The scenes in Greyfriars' Kirkyard from the subsequently written “The Reflex-Man of Whinnymuir Close” are evidence of the place haunting Kirk, demanding an appropriately weird appearance in one of his tales.

Reality underlies even his most fantastic stories. In the prologue to The Princess of All Lands Kirk states, “My uncanny tales in this present collection, though fanciful, also are true: true in the sense that at the heart of each of them lies some core of real experience (mine, or that of friends), and truer in the sense that these stories may touch upon the darkness or the light in souls. … My lovely young wife may find herself here, or my stalwart old hired man—though translated by a sea change into something new and strange.” Lecturing for the St. Ignatius Institute in San Francisco in November, 1980, Kirk mentioned that “The Princess of All Lands” is based in part on a time when his wife was kidnapped—but managed to talk her way to escape. In his introduction to The Scallion Stone (1980), a collection of fine Jamesian ghost stories by the late Canon Basil A. Smith, Kirk again credits a place and a person for providing a ghostly tale:

York has been a haunted town to me, and my antiquarian conversations with Canon Smith quickened my fancy. One of my eerie tales, ‘Saviourgate,’ set in York, has some connection with Basil Smith. On my second visit to that city … I had made for the railway station; but, little knowing the medieval town, by a circuitous route. As I hurried through the darkening lanes and streets, I glimpsed a short street of handsome neat houses, Queen Anne or Georgian; I hesitated, but there was not time for even a brief side-excursion. Try though I would, on later expeditions, I could not find that fine street again.

When I told my host about it, Basil Smith suggested that Saviourgate, a street by that time—1954, perhaps—uninhabited and desolate, most nearly met my description. Upon reflection, I concurred. How long before had Saviourgate fallen to its ruinous condition? ‘About 1914,’ said Basil. That was four years before my birth. I offer no rational explanation of that vision of mine when the fog drifted up from the Ouse.

Doubtless the Canon who is Ralph Bain's companion in that lost street, hereafter, is a literary ghost of Basil A. Smith himself.

Kirk's mixing of reality with fantasy creates many intriguing features in his books. Those Pictish tunnels in Old House of Fear, for instance, and similar tunnels known as the Weem which underlie Balgrummo mansion in Lord of the Hollow Dark—who among fantasy writers is more associated with the Picts than the Texan Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan? In Kirk you find the Picts, their full Mystery intact, a lure leading toward the unknown, yet Kirk in most respects is quite unlike Howard. Having voiced that thought, however, is not Kirk in his use of action more akin to Howard than are most supernaturalists? He does not permit himself the reckless, headlong brutality of pace and incident habitual to Howard, but Kirk is almost alone in the supernatural field in portraying strong characters who are willing to give the bogles a struggle before giving up their ghosts. The Sword and Sorcery tale pioneered by Howard, of course, depends on action to realize its aesthetic ends: the creation of high adventure. Supernatural horror, on the other hand, for many years now has eschewed action in the notion that it destroys atmosphere. After far too many stories where the characters are barely able to walk, let alone attempt to defend themselves, in the fiction of Russell Kirk you have a fine supernatural writer who is not afraid of an action scene, and knows how to use it. Imagine “There's a Long, Long Trail a-Winding” without its bloody climactic battle scene and you imagine a different tale altogether, yet no one of good sense will deny the conjuration of a magnificent ghostly ambience in that tale.

The use of strong characters lends Kirk's stories a feeling of reality, for after awhile the mewling victims who populate horror literature become a cliche, and not everyone in real life is a victim. As the poet and critic Steven Eng once noted, these days “wimpy central characters in horror yarns are such a staple. … Dog bites man is not news—wimpy character gets wiped out is expected, not a surprise. Half these protagonists would get hit by a bus if the menace didn't get them first” (letter to the author, Nov. 19, 1983). When a Kirk character meets his fate, whatever it may be, there remains a strong element of the unexpected—few sensations are more vividly real than encountering the unexpected.

Lord of the Hollow Dark best represents Kirk's overall cast of characters. Aside from Manfred Arcane, in company with Lady Grizel Fergusson, Melchiroa, Brasidas, and Ralph Bain—surely an extraordinary group—other protagonists facing Mr. Appolinax are a convicted felon named Sweeney, and a woman called Marina and her baby. A baby as a hero—for sure he is nothing less. One thinks of Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human for an example of a baby as a leading character, yet that baby had superpowers to add to his interest. The baby carried into the hollow dark of the Weem under Balgrummo castle is just a baby, but a participant in heroic feats, nonetheless. Name a writer other than Kirk who as a matter of course has babies, hobos, old ladies, and ghosts as his heroic leads. Kirk is an original.

His originality is best seen in the philosophical background common to all his tales, no matter how apparently unrelated they may seem at first reading. The true greats in supernatural horror have had precise ideas on appropriate style, and firm philosophical and literary systems (at least in their writing, if not in their lives). Edgar Allan Poe, the first major author of terror tales, expounded his ideas on organic unity and the death of beauty in his critical writings. H. P. Lovecraft, the apparent successor to Poe, had his theories, outlined in Supernatural Horror in Literature, and other essays and letters. M. R. James proposed direct guidelines for the introduction of ghostly elements in a supernatural tale—the better to scare you, my lad.

Of course, in Poe we find a world—indeed a universe, if we pause to consider his “Eureka”—where terror abounds. Yet the connecting fabric between his tales is style and theme rather than recurring characters or places interlaced between stories. Much the same is true for James—obviously all his narratives are set in the England and Europe of his day, an England and Europe which would be prosaic except for the hammering intrusion of ghost after ghost. It is the New England fantasist Lovecraft who united his tales not only by style and theme as pronounced as those of Poe, but by recurring characters and places as well. His now-named Cthulhu Mythos provided a background for many stories in which cosmic beings, so large and with interests so alien that mankind and its achievements are as dust, rent the fabric of man's “reality.” The novel, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, connects his more Dunsanian dreamland tales with the many set in New England, and those with his myth cycle. Lovecraft constructed his terror-fraught cosmos on a philosophical base of mechanism, with violation of “natural” cosmic law the supreme horror.

Ironically, the background to Kirk's oeuvre is much like that of Lovecraft in effect, based not however on mechanism, but on Christianity. In Kirk's world Hell and its terrors are quite real. Ghosts wander the earth, trapped in purgatory. And God can be as fearful a thing as man can imagine.

In the non-fiction volume, Enemies of the Permanent Things (1969), Kirk discusses the formation of the normative consciousness, the apprehension and appreciation of timeless moral and political values. Although he does not deal directly with his work in the ghost story, he does formalize a literary system before going on to a discussion of T. S. Eliot, Ray Bradbury, and other authors. He writes:

Tentatively, I distinguish four levels of literature by which a normative consciousness is developed. The upper levels do not supplant the earlier, but instead supplement and blend with them. … We may call these levels fantasy; narrative history and biography; reflective prose and poetic fiction; and philosophy and theology.

Each of these categories finds ample reflection in Kirk's fiction, with narrative history and biography represented by Manfred Arcane's life as set down in A Creature of the Twilight and subsequent stories.

It is in the last category, though, that Kirk attains his true worth and particular quality as a supernatural writer, for his philosophy and theology manifestly direct his fantasy, his reflective prose, his poetic fiction, his perception of Arcane's existence. Edmund Fuller, reviewing The Princess of All Lands in the Wall Street Journal, places his main emphasis on “the struggle of good and evil in the soul” when speaking of the stories, surely a Christian tact, and a just one. Jerry Pournelle in the University Bookman carries the tact farther, comparing Kirk to C. S. Lewis: “Kirk's fantasy, like Lewis', comes from the pen of one who takes Christianity seriously. He blurs the boundaries between the real and the spiritual worlds with a skill that any fantasy writer must envy, and spins nakedly Christian yarns so well that pagan institutions like the World Fantasy Association and the Science Fiction Writers of America take him seriously at award time.”

A recurring note in Kirk's fiction is the fall of man from grace, not only from Christian grace but also from worth as a man. In Old House of Fear we learn that “The dark powers had claimed Edmund Jackman long since … whatever traditional spectres might throng round the Old House of Fear, here right before Logan sat the ghost of what once might have been a vessel for honor.” In “The Princess of All Lands,” Yolande considers her unpleasant passenger: “This sulky child beside her must be diverted. It was weary work, trying to scour vessels for dishonor. This girl was empty; for a little while it had seemed as if she weren't even there in the car beside her.”

Kirk's fiction is about Good and Evil then, is Christian, but is also far more than that; the way it transcends the expected sort of moral fable calls to mind a quote from Gissing, in which he refers to the Jansenists of Port-Royal: “Theirs is not, indeed, the Christianity of the first age; we are among theologians, and the shadow of dogma has dimmed those divine hues of the early morning, yet ever and anon there comes a cool, sweet air, which seems not to have blown across man's common world, which bears no taint of mortality.” Kirk's theology in his stories harkens back just so to the prime of Christianity, with an unusually fresh air to it all. Although in his haunted and bogle-populated universe the air is not so cool as it is chill, nor so sweet as it is sulphuric.

For visions of Purgatory recall the tormented shade of Baron Balgrummo, or Frank Sarsfield in “There's a Long, Long Trail a-Winding,” who unwittingly re-enacts a hellish episode from his past. Eddie Mahaffy, alias Eddie Cain, from “Lex Talionis” is but another among the ghostly legions who wander the earth in Kirk's fiction.

Yet many do not care to contemplate Purgatory, much less Hell. Some have a true fear of Hell, as does Kirk; others cannot accept the possibility that Hell—or even an afterlife—may exist. These people may be driven away from Kirk's tales early, just as others may turn away when they note the conservative philosophy his characters voice. Others, truly modern, may not care for Kirk's leisurely style when compared with other current horror writers. In his Confessions Kirk admits that “If the reader finds in this book any faint echo of Charles Lamb or George Gissing or Robert Louis Stevenson, this writer will be infinitely gratified.” And for the progressive who presses on into Kirk's haunted tales and finds horror in the thoughts expressed, and revulsion when Manfred Arcane's penance chamber with its flagellant occupant is mentioned in passing, well—it is all to the good for Kirk's art.

Several people have told me how terrible a writer H. P. Lovecraft is: “He cannot create a convincing character, his prose is mismanaged, his plots are weak”—and yet, they sometimes add, “damn, but he is creepy.” In horror fiction, the bottom line is fear. If Lovecraft, or Kirk, through their craft or through their subconscious urgings surfacing in their tales, evoke a moment of dread or a shudder, if they take the reader out of his own mental universe for a time and make him contemplate the dreadful, then they have worked their spell and succeeded in their art.

Perhaps the most appalling chord of all thrums in a story which has no ghosts whatever, but which makes it clear that many modern men and women do not have the nerve to live in a nakedly Christian universe. The farmer and his family in Kirk's tale “Skyberia” live what is to the lost deer hunters a pathetic existence, without modern comforts—or apparent concern for acquiring modern comforts. The farmer tells them he intends to stay where he is in the desolate stump country. “Five years ago … I wouldn't have given a plugged nickel for our chances of holding out. But you remember what I said about God's being terrible. Not long past I was certain, sure as Hell's a mantrap, that the game was up for little fellows like me. The Government, the unions, the chain stores, the consolidated schools, the factories, the Army, the movies, radio, television, and Old Man Arithmetic had our number. But now I think I was wrong: because God is terrible, and He loves men, and He's going to make them keep their human nature. He's not intending to let us copy ants. … He's going to burn us, and He's going to starve us, but He'll keep us men.” No wonder the surburbanites were quite eager to leave Skyberia!

No wonder, either, that the fiction of Russell Kirk is scary. He catches you up in compelling narrative and sweeps you into a ghostly universe as fearful to most moderns as the monstrous conceptions of a Lovecraft. Fearful, but wondrous too: no goldpaved streets in Heaven hereafter for Kirk—instead he writes of “timeless moments” in which ghosts enjoy again and again the best episodes of their mortal lives. Fearful and wondrous at once, sometimes, as when the soul makes the passage into eternity toward the strait gate, across the darkling plains, with the watchers baying, oh-so-willing to claw the affrighted, the unwilling, the undeserving.

Russell Kirk has transcended his debts to James, Stevenson, and company, and carved for himself a horrid niche in the field of supernatural horror and fantasy. This niche is richly guarded by bogles and worse, ready to make the acquaintance of unsuspecting readers. Kirk's already alarmed audience may hope for more spectres yet to spring from his Gothic and haunted mind.

Russell Kirk Bibliography

Old House of Fear, New York: Fleet Publishing Corporation, 1961. A novel.

The Surly Sullen Bell, New York: Fleet Publishing Corporation, 1962. Story collection containing a foreword, “Uncle Isiah,” “Off the Sand Road,” “Ex Tenebris,” “The Surly Sullen Bell,” “The Cellar of Little Egypt,” “Skyberia,” “Sorworth Place,” “Behind the Stumps,” “What Shadows We Pursue,” “Lost Lake,” and “A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale.”

A Creature of the Twilight: His Memorials, New York: Fleet Publishing Corporation, 1966. A novel.

The Princess of All Lands, Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House Publishers, 1979. Story collection containing a prologue, “Sorworth Place,” “Behind the Stumps,” “The Princess of All Lands,” “The Last God's Dream,” “The Cellar of Little Egypt,” “Ex Tenebris,” “Balgrummo's Hell,” “There's a Long, Long Trail a-Winding,” and “Saviourgate.”

Lord of the Hollow Dark, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979. A novel.

Watchers at the Strait Gate, Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House Publishers, 1984. Story collection containing “Foreword: A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale,” “The Reflex-Man of Whinnymuir Close,” “Fate's Purse,” “The Surly Sullen Bell,” “Lex Talionis,” “Uncle Isaiah,” “Watchers at the Strait Gate,” “What Shadows We Pursue,” “The Peculiar Demesne of Archvicar Gerontion,” “The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost,” and “An Encounter by Mortstone Pond.”

Secondary Bibliography

A. Books

Brown, Charles, Russell Kirk: A Bibliography, Mount Pleasant, Michigan: Clarke Historical Library, 1981.

Kirk, Russell, Confessions of a Bohemian Tory, New York: Fleet Publishing Corporation, 1963.

B. Articles

Filler, Louis, “‘The Wizard of Mecosta’: Russell Kirk of Michigan,” Michigan History, vol. 63 no. 5, Sept.-Oct. 1979.

Fuller, Edmund, “A Genre for Exploring the Reality of Evil,” Wall Street Journal, July 23, 1979.

Hennelly, Mark M. Jr., “Dark World Enough and Time,” Gothic, vol. 2 no. 1, June 1980.

Herron, Don, “The Crepuscular Romantic: An Appreciation of the Fiction of Russell Kirk,” The Romantist, no. 3, 1979.

Kirk, Russell, “Introduction: The Canon of Ghostly Tales” in The Scallion Stone by Canon Basil A. Smith, Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Whispers Press, 1980.

Pournelle, Jerry, “Uncanny Tales of the Moral Imagination,” University Bookman, Summer, 1979, vol. XIX, no. 4.

Steiger, Brad, “A Note on Ghostly Phenomena in Russell Kirk's Old House at Mecosta, Michigan,” Strange Powers of E.S.P., New York: Belmont Books, 1969.

Sturgeon, Theodore, “A Viewpoint, a Dewpoint,” National Review, vol. XIV no. 6, February 12, 1963.