Russell Kirk, patriarch of conservative thought, believed in ghosts. (Surprised? But what could be more “conservative—that is, backward and wrong-headed—than embracing an ignorant medieval superstition?) Well, maybe he didn’t believe in them. We’ll never know. He did write plenty about them, and he is to be congratulated for it. His ghost stories, gathered in a new volume called Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales, are strange and welcome meat for the bones of conservative thought.
In Kirk’s hands, ghost stories are morality plays, not penny-dreadful amusements. Kirk the medium is a messenger—and his message is: if you think you can discard the wisdom or the mystery of our ancestral past, you’re dead wrong. Quoting another prominent conservative: “there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know?’ In the present day more than ever, there is much that we don’t care to know we don’t know, and do everything in our power to avoid pondering: moral responsibility, death, what comes after death, and all those punishments that—whether or not we do receive them—we may richly deserve.
The release of Ancestral Shadows coincides with the rerelease, by Penguin Classics, of Jorge Luis Borges’s Universal History of Iniquity—another collection of complex and morally instructive tales masquerading as what Graham Greene famously called “entertainments.” Perhaps the success of these books will be a prelude to renewed interest in questions of morality, and in simple, unpretentious narrative as a vehicle for those questions. Whatever the
