Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #805909 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 410 pages

From Booklist
American historian and advocate of political-cultural conservatism Kirk (1918-94) also wrote fantasy fiction, including the 19 ghost stories that this volume collocates for the first time. Although they have the old-fashioned psychological and descriptive texture of great turn-of-the-twentieth-century ghost stories, they are uniquely theological. A Catholic, Kirk was an orthodox believer in good and evil, sin, repentance, salvation, and, especially, judgment. Most ghosts in his stories are characteristically and actively agents of God's judgment. They literally quash the evil and save the good. Occasionally, in the case of some spirits in "The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost," ghosts are agents of Satan, but such aren't as powerful as God's ghosts, for evil can't be as powerful as goodness. Some of Kirk's confections display their theological programming too obviously, but when powered also by a great character, such as Manfred Arcane, minister without portfolio of the Commonwealth Hamnegri and hero of two stories (and two of Kirk's three novels), they are rich and exceptional masterpieces. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Among the best authors of the literary supernatural tale
The publication of "Ancestral Shadows" is a major event for fans of the ghost story genre and Russell Kirk but also for the reputation of the literary supernatural tale. Russell Kirk (along with the recently deceased Jack Cady) ranks as one of the few top-notch, modern American ghost story writers, and for far too long Kirk's stories have been out of print. This book collects all but a very few of Kirk's lesser tales (which are available for die-hards and completists in the pricey but gorgeous recent Kirk collection produced by Ash-Tree Press in two volumes).

The stories in this collection include many of the best ghostly tales ever written, including "Lex Talionis," "Fate's Purse," "Watchers at the Straight Gate," & "The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost." Not to mention Kirk's masterpiece, "There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding"--if you can read this one alone in your home after dark and, once you finish it, not be driven to turn on every light in the house (and maybe your stereo as well), then you're a braver soul than I. Kirk indulges several of the genre's conventions and breathes new life into them while giving us a whole host of wonderful characters as unforgettable as the denizens of a Dickens novel. The collection does include two or three stories that drop below the high standard of Kirk's usual tales, but this in no way diminishes the his accomplishments as a virtuoso writer crafting prose that is as cultivated and engaging in its own way as that of Flannery O'Connor or F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The dust jacket blurbs--of the rare, substantive variety--lend much legitimacy to Kirk's status as a significant literary figure, culled as these blurbs are from such diverse sources as Ray Bradbury, Madeline L'Engle, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Howard, and Robert Aickman. I fully agree with Bradbury's blurb: "For too many years Russell Kirk, almost like the title of this book, remained half seen in the American literary scene. It is time his critics and readers brought him out into the full light. He deserves to be considered a fine writer and an amazing thinker in literature and in politics."

Kudos to Eerdmans for releasing this relatively inexpensive and very attractive volume. (The gorgeous, black-and-white sketch portrait of Kirk on the cover even has a ghostly tone to it and evokes association with the beautiful woodcuts Kirk made to illustrate his first volume of stories, "The Surly Sullen Bell.") I can only hope this book finds wide placement in libraries and bookstores around the country.