Russell Kirk’s Conservative Gothic

A review of Camilo Peralta’s The Wizard of Mecosta: Russell Kirk, Gothic Fiction, and the Moral Imagination (Vernon, 222 pages, $78).

Russell Kirk is known today principally as one of the founders of the American conservative movement, but in his lifetime he found considerable success also through his imaginative writing, especially ghost stories. Other masters of the craft, including Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and Madeleine L’Engle, have hailed the Michigander as one of the genre’s greatest writers. Each of his stories (some of the best were most recently collected in a volume titled “Ancestral Shadows”) are deeply atmospheric and suffused with enough of the eerie and spooky to make for excellent fun reading aloud at Halloween with a group of friends.

Kirk’s fiction, however, offers much more than mere chills and thrills. In The Wizard of Mecosta, Camilo Peralta, a professor at Joliet Junior College, uncovers the deep relationship between Kirk’s ghostly tales and his conservative philosophy. Kirk’s literary efforts were an expression of what he called the “moral imagination” or an appreciation of the “permanent things.” Through these stories, he casts a kind of spell on his readers — not to deceive them but rather to arm them with a new vision, a better way of understanding reality.

While Kirk’s life and thought have been assessed by scholars in numerous books, Peralta’s is the first focused primarily on his output of creative writing. Earlier works such as Gerald Russello’s study The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk and Bradley Birzer’s magisterial biography Russell Kirk: American Conservative tend to focus more on the man’s political ideas and influence. The Wizard of Mecosta seeks to understand Kirk’s conservatism through the ghosts and supernatural forces in his fiction.

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