Robert M. Woods
During my years of teaching, I have frequently admonished students with this deeply held conviction. If you can find a cultural critic or essayist that you enjoy, and he or she also happens to write fiction—read it.
While Russell Kirk (1918-94) is best known as one of the founding fathers of post-World War II conservatism, a cultural critic, historian and political thinker, he has also been praised by the likes of Ray Bradbury, T.S. Eliot, and Madeleine L’Engle as a teller of ghostly tales.
Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales is a collection of nineteen of Kirk’s best “ghostly” tales from periodicals and anthologies published throughout his life. The average literary treat is approximately seventeen pages in length. A few of these tales delightfully exceed forty. These stories are a real intellectual pleasure by an accomplished scholar and man of letters. The intellectual virtues wonderfully blended with form and content are manifested within this fiction, which conveys the essence of the permanent things by means of the moral imagination.
If this is the reader’s first encounter with the thought of Russell Kirk, great assistance comes by way of the helpful introduction by Vigen Guroian. Guroian contends that “for a comprehensive understanding of Kirk’s conservative vision, a familiarity with his fiction is necessary, for it is here that Kirk’s rich imaginative mind vividly casts the drama of the soul’s struggle with good and evil in relation to a transcendent realm of meaning and purpose.”
After the introductory essay by Guroian, the reader may actually benefit by reading the concluding essay by Kirk. “A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale” is an insightful addition in which Kirk muses over why he writes such stories. Kirk observes, “All important literature has some ethical end…and the tale of the preternatural — as written by George Macdonald, » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/10/other-side-keyhole-russell-kirk-ghost-stories-robert-m-woods.html