Secret Life of Russell Kirk

OLD HOUSE OF FEAR (256 pp.)--Russell Kirk--Fleet Publishing ($3.95).

In an ancient, canopied bed lies corpselike old Lady MacAskival. Birds screech outside the window, ghosts roam the castle's corridors, haunted eyes gleam in the dark. In a pit beneath the trap door in the cellar lies a mysteriously deformed skeleton. "This Gothick tale," says Author Russell Kirk, is "in unblushing line of direct descent from The Castle of Otranto." He is wrong. Historian Kirk (The Conservative Mind) has expertly stuffed his book with all the claptrappings of the Gothic romance, but what he has actually achieved is a political morality tale. For all the apparent ectoplasm floating about it, the Old House of Fear is haunted not by ghosts but by the shadow of the welfare state.

Demon Ideology. The island of Carnglass, in the Outer Islands of the Hebrides, turns out to be merely "the microcosm of modern existence." The book's hero is an American lawyer, Hugh Logan, who accepts a commission from a wealthy, Scots-born industrialist to travel to Carnglass and buy the island and Lady MacAskival's ancient castle. In the Kirk microcosm, he obviously represents beneficial U.S. power and the rule of law, just as Lady MacAskival represents an old order that a modern conservative may mourn but cannot hope to restore. Lawyer Logan's allies--and the dream of every conservative--are simple force of character and strength of soul. These qualities are embodied by the chatelaine's niece, in whose veins "the fierce old blood of the chieftains" still flows, and a group of MacAskival clansmen, who have made no "decadent concession to modern civilization." But by far the most fascinating character in the book is Logan's chief enemy, one Dr. Jackman, "the hypnotically evil man with the third eye," a kind of Marxist warlock.

His third eye, he explains, is the result of a bullet he caught while fighting in Spain ("Now there's a bit of plastic set into my poor skull"). Jackman and his men "might have commenced full of humanitarian sentimentality. And then, perhaps, demon ideology, with its imperatives and its inexorable dogmas, its sobersided caricature of religion, had swept them on to horrors." They are forever talking "of the sufferings of the working classes," but people in general are merely "that scum."

Political Exorcist. Although he is far better known as the eloquent spokesman of American conservatism, Author Kirk has been writing ghost stories for years. He worked on Old House of Fear, his first novel, in the high, narrow Victorian house in Mecosta, Mich. (pop. 300), built by his great-grandfather. Kirk, a bachelor, occupies the house with an unmarried great-aunt, spends much of his time studying the family ghosts, whose personalities he claims to be able to distinguish.

It is probably bad public relations for a conservative to admit that he believes in ghosts--liberals are always accusing conservatives of that very thing--but as a political exorcist, Russell Kirk has undeniable talents. The ending he has constructed for his tale may be incredible, but it is both compact and inspiring: Hero Logan dispatches Jackman and his fellow Marxists, in the process also saving several nearby missile sites, the life of Lady MacAskival and the virginity of her niece.

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