C.S. Lewis’s range of work—at a very high level, done with pellucid clarity and frequent epigrammatic wit—places him at, or near, the top of literary figures writing in English since the seventeenth century. In a recent issue of The Spectator (August 2025), Alexander Laman treated us to “Still Roaring,” a left-handed recognition of the staying [...]
At this season of the year, on the 1st and 2nd of November, the Church ‘keeps the feast’ two days running, with a pair of feasts; All Saints and All Souls, each of which begins with that wonderfully Biblical and inclusive little word All. I remember the effect that little word had on me, coming [...]
It makes no sense to reward someone who frustrates the purposes of literature with a major prize. Imagine literary works with plots in dystopian settings where the characters act within an unraveling social order. Apocalyptic events abound inside absurd situations. This is the literature of Laszlo Krasznakorkai. There is more. Imagine an unreadable and drawn-out [...]
Remember that Halloween is simply the eve of All Hallows, All Saints Day, which is followed by All Souls Day on the Christian calendar. Death, and one’s own future death in particular, ought to be remembered, but not as a morbid fascination. Rather, it should be meditated on as the inevitable gateway to eternal life [...]
What is this fear of spiders? There is a natural fear of venomous creatures, but the spider’s venom is not the only threat. She spins a web. She entraps her prey. She wraps them tightly to eat them later. As the ghost in Hamlet cries about his own venomous murder: “O Horrible, O horrible, most [...]
Was the immense popularity of the 1960s television series "Dark Shadows" some sort of cry for help during a decade of brutish violence and social sickness? After all, its central character Barnabas Collins was a vampire with moral compunction. I recently finished watching all 1,225 episodes of Dark Shadows, the campy gothic soap opera that [...]
However we choose to look at it, October thrills and titillates each of our senses and reaches into the very depths of our suspect souls, whether we actually encounter the dead or merely imagine their various states of being. Oh, the blessings of October, my favorite month. As far back as I can remember, in [...]
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore — While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “ ’Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door — Only [...]
"You are holding in your hands one of the most important dystopian novels ever written,” claims the introduction to the new edition of Jean Raspail's controversial 1973 novel, "The Camp of the Saints," an alternately brutal and comedic savaging of guilt-ridden Westerners, who allow their civilization to disappear by welcoming mass migration from the Third [...]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s romantic conservatism is passionate, incisive, and high-minded. His notion of the “Idea” is persuasive in regard to how it exists in human society, and he lit the way to resolving the ever-present conservative tension between theory and practice. The life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, if tumultuous and at times disastrous, was a [...]
Fr. Philip Caraman not only epitomized the best of the Jesuit tradition in England, but he also chronicled the legacy of his heroic forebears: the Jesuit missionaries and martyrs of Tudor England as well as the courageous counter-Reformation apostles to the Americas, India, China, and beyond. Philip Caraman Rex Mottram—the Canadian dolt who [...]
The curtain between the world of the living and that of the dead was for Russell Kirk truly thin, as evidenced in his scholarly work and in his fiction. A ghost, as Kirk understood it, was a soul trapped between physical and eternal existence. The curtain between the world of the living and of the [...]
In his upcoming book, "Futuristic," Mark Voger explores what might have been had the 1950s and 1960s shaped the aesthetic of space flight and the space age. The book, simply put, is “retro”: a nostalgic celebrations of the Space Age and all its hope and optimism for a better and more humane world. Marvel’s most [...]
It is precisely because of our weakness that we need friends who will not encourage us in our folly but will have the courage to correct us. Love necessitates saying no to sin. We need friends who will not turn a blind eye to our blamefulness. True friends are not timid. They are not tame. [...]