Monday, August 19, 2013

Russell Kirk


Russell Kirk (October 19, 1918 – April 29, 1994)
Books At Open Library

The traditional religious imagery – demons, heaven, purgatory – that animates his work is neither window dressing nor a useful convention around which to stretch a yarn. “I venture to suggest that the more orthodox is a writer’s theology,” he maintained, “the more convincing, as symbols and allegories, his uncanny tales will be.” The modern tale that “isolates itself from this authority drifts aimlessly down Styx.”[2] The terror seems more real, after all, if damnation and salvation are real possibilities, if angels and demons inhabit God’s universe, not solely man’s imagination.

Kirk‘s short fiction revolves around the Christian pilgrimage, often filled with hardship and suffering, in this world and in the next. The path to salvation is not easy. “This world,” as Russian Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann insisted, “through all its ‘media’ says: be happy, take it easy, follow the broad way. Christ in the Gospel says: choose the narrow way, fight and suffer, for this is the road to the only genuine happiness.”[3]

As Kirk’s wayfarers discover, this Lenten road is hard, but the destination, an eternal Easter, will make the perseverance, suffering, and struggle worthwhile.
-Newman, R. Andrew. “Pilgrimages and Easter Destinations in the Ghostly Tales of Russell Kirk.” Modern Age 40, no. 3 (summer 1998): 314-18.

 First Published Story Behind the Stumps (1950)
Found in Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology Of Ghostly Tales, (Sep 2004)

Old House of Fear (1961)
Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales (2004)

Article What Should Children Read?

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