The ghostly Gothic of Russell Kirk

Only fools and children believe in ghosts, we are told. And yet who hasn’t wondered, sometimes in the night, if there might possibly be another world beyond this realm, and that the unquiet dead sometimes have matters to settle with the living?

Further, what if ghosts exist to do more than frighten mortals — what if they can also deal out retribution, or nudge people heavenward whose lives have otherwise been failures? And of what value are stories of the supernatural?

As a literary form, writes Russell Kirk (1918-1994), the uncanny tale can be a means for expressing truths enchantingly, through parable and fable. Raw, tell-it-like-it-is realism and naturalism are not the only paths to apprehending reality. “All important literature has some ethical end,” Kirk claims, “and the tale of the preternatural — as written by George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and other masters — can be an instrument for the recovery of moral order.”

Kirk is one of the “other masters.” One of the founding fathers of post-World War II conservatism, he is remembered as a distinguished lecturer on political, aesthetic and economic matters, a syndicated columnist, a cultural historian, author of the groundbreaking history of ideas titled “The Conservative Mind” (1953), a longtime contributor to William F. Buckley Jr.’s magazine National Review — and as a writer of ghostly tales.

The recovery and defense of order in a world increasingly given to disorder in the soul and disorder in the commonwealth — in the form of brokenness, noise, confusion, despair, dishonesty and violence — was Kirk’s lifelong work. One way he married this deep concern with his passion for telling and listening to well-crafted tales was through the writing of ghost stories.

Nineteen of Kirk’s very best stories, all of them out of print until now, have been collected in “Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales.” Vigen Guroian, professor of theology and ethics at Loyola College in Baltimore, is to be commended for bringing together these stories, which form nearly the complete contents of three story collections: “The Surly Sullen Bell” (1962), “The Princess of All Lands” (1979) and “Watchers at the Strait Gate” (1984).

Mr. Guroian has contributed an insightful introduction to this new collection. In it he carefully notes and illustrates Kirk’s skill as a storyteller, as well as how the writer’s philosophical stance — traditionalist, favoring old ways, old houses, and established communities, Christian in general and Roman Catholic in particular — figures in the stories.

Life begins and ends in mystery, Kirk believed, and this is reflected throughout his written work in all fields, but with special effectiveness in his ghostly fiction. In an autobiographical essay he once wrote, “Mine was not an Enlightened mind … 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.” There are gargoyles aplenty in “Ancestral Shadows.”

As Mr. Guroian notes, Kirk’s early stories tend to exhibit his revulsion at the work of central planners and officious bureaucrats, who value efficiency far above “variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful.”

In the story “Behind the Stumps,” set in the rural “stump-country” of upper Michigan where Kirk lived most of his life, a cold-blooded census-taker sets out single-mindedly to confront a reclusive old woman who is reputed to be a witch and possibly dead. Warned by the locals to stay away from the old woman’s property, the census-taker nevertheless treks through fields and woods until he eventually finds her seemingly abandoned farmhouse — and comes to a frightening end.

In another story in this vein, “Ex Tenebris,” Kirk transfers his setting to rural England. Here, an officious planning officer visits a crumbling village and attempts to force a harmless old woman to move out of her comfortable cottage and into the boring but efficient tract housing the government has graciously built for the displaced elderly.

His bullying of the woman comes to an abrupt end during a violent encounter with her vicar, a tormented man who (until recently) was dead and buried in the local churchyard, among murderers, liars and other sinners who — in his words — “burn forever.”

In these and certain other stories (such as the creepy “Balgrummo’s Hell”), Kirk tells a rattling good tale while tapping into the traditional ghost-story theme of showing what happens when foolish people “take to meddlin’” when they should have left well enough alone.

Other pieces maintain the prerequisite of any good ghost story — to be a well-turned tale — while integrating themes that more closely reflect Kirk’s Christian beliefs: the sacramental aspect of giving up one’s life for one’s neighbor, the horror of willful self-damnation, the mysterious relationship between time and timelessness, the never-to-be-fully-fathomed aspects of divine grace.

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