The Haunting of America: Russell Kirk’s Ghostly Fiction

By |2023-10-29T08:15:41-05:00October 27th, 2023|Categories: Ancestral Shadows, Fiction, Imagination, Literature, Mystery, Russell Kirk, Timeless Essays|

The ghost story was the perfect vehicle for Russell Kirk to extend his own sense of awe-filled wonder to a wider audience. He was keenly aware of the need for romance and mystery in everyday life—and how hard it was to achieve it in America. He created for his readers one of those places in [...]

Horror and Eternity: Russell Kirk’s Ghostly Tales

By |2020-10-18T13:12:43-05:00October 25th, 2018|Categories: Ancestral Shadows, Books, Film, Heaven, Mystery, Russell Kirk|

Russell Kirk’s horror stories are fundamentally conservative, insinuating a chain of being that connects the living and the dead, reminding us of our duty and obligations to the past. They challenge us by piercing our day-to-day sense of the temporal with bright flashes of eternal order. And they lay upon us the heavy but joyous [...]

An Introduction to the Short Stories of Russell Kirk: “Not Written for Children”

By |2017-06-27T15:27:43-05:00March 15th, 2011|Categories: Ancestral Shadows, Conservatism, Featured, Literature, Russell Kirk|

As Russell Kirk recounted in “A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale,” all ghost tales must have “some clear premise about the character of human existence–some theological premise” according to Gerald Head (402). Kirk certainly took this to heart when writing his numerous ghostly tales over some thirty-year period. Taken as a whole, the stories [...]

A Review of Russell Kirk’s Ancestral Shadows

By |2017-06-20T10:36:35-05:00September 3rd, 2010|Categories: Ancestral Shadows, Books, Bradley J. Birzer, Featured, Literature, Russell Kirk|

  Review of Russell Kirk, Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales, ed. by Vigen Guroian In the early 1970s, Barbara Elliott, now an acclaimed Catholic lecturer and writer (Candles Behind the Wall; Street Saints), encountered the Other World in the ancestral home of Dr. Russell Kirk. In the middle of the night, a figure whispered to [...]

Mecosta & The Ghost in the Machine

By |2021-10-25T16:23:47-05:00August 26th, 2010|Categories: Ancestral Shadows, Books, Russell Kirk, Stephen Masty|

Ghost stories have been killed by a ghost—by the ghost in the machine of television, a murder not without irony. Hidden among the posh townhouses and expensive offices of Mayfair is the Savile Club, resembling a merry old English squire with threadbare cuffs. In the library upstairs above the black leather club-chairs, relics of the [...]

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