Russell Kirk’s Conservative Gothic

The Wizard of Mecosta: Russell Kirk, Gothic Fiction, and the Moral Imagination, by Camilo Peralta (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.