THE HENRY JAMES OF THE RIGHT (via Paul Cella):

The Ghosts of Kirk: The sage of Mecosta’s short stories are back in print. (John Miller, January 23, 2003, National Review)

As one of the great conservative minds of the 20th century, Kirk is best known as a founding intellectual of a modern political movement. When he wasn't writing books about Edmund Burke or columns for National Review, however, he was scribbling away for publications such as Fantasy and Science Fiction, London Mystery Magazine, and New Terrors. In 1958, T. S. Eliot wrote to him: "How amazingly versatile and prolific you are! Now you have written what I should have least expected of you--ghost stories!"

If Eliot had been a bit more familiar with Kirk, he wouldn't have been surprised at all. Kirk often talked about his brushes with revenants, and was convinced that his big house in Mecosta, Mich., was haunted. Visitors to his home--myself included, as a college student on a trip sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute--were regaled with ghost stories told by candlelight.

Kirk's most-influential book was The Conservative Mind, but his most popular one was a novel, The Old House of Fear. It made the bestseller lists in the early 1960s and sold more copies than all of Kirk's other books combined. It employed the conventions of Gothic fiction to tell a great story set on a remote and mysterious Scottish island — and also to satirize Marxism and liberalism.

Many of Kirk's books remain in print, but The Old House of Fear is not one of them. It isn't easy to find copies on the secondhand market, either. The same goes for Kirk's other fiction--mainly ghost stories told in a traditional vein--even though collections of them were published in the 1980s.

Today, however, it's a bit easier, and will remain so for a short time. Ash-Tree Press, a small publisher in rural British Columbia, has just issued Off the Sand Road, the first of two volumes that will collect all of Kirk's short fiction. The second book, What Shadows We Pursue, is scheduled for release in late March. (Sadly, there are no plans to reprint The Old House of Fear.)

In a better world more folks would have read The Conservative Mind, but whjat's not to love about anti-Left ghost stories?

MORE:
-REVIEW: of Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind. By James E. Person, Jr. (Jeremy M. Beer, First Things)

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 24, 2003 8:42 AM