Old House of Fear
Old House of Fear
Russell Kirk
Introduction by James Panero
| CriterionBooks |
Copyright © The Russell Kirk Legacy, LLC
Introduction copyright © by James Panero
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Criterion Books, 900 Broadway, Suite 602, New York, NY 10003.
First edition published by Fleet Publishing Corporation in 1961. This edition published in 2019 by Criterion Books, an imprint of Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax-exempt corporation. www.newcriterion.com/books
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLIC ATION DATA
Names: Names: Kirk, Russell, author.
Title: Old house of fear / Russell Kirk.
Description: New York : Criterion Books, 2019. |
Summary: “A founding father of the American conservative movement, Russell Kirk (1918–1994) was also a renowned and bestselling writer of fiction. Kirk's focus was the ghost story, or “ghostly tale”—a “decayed art” of which he considered himself a “last remaining master.” Old House of Fear, Kirk's first novel, revealed this mastery at work. Its 1961 publication was a sensation, outselling all of Kirk's other books combined, including The Conservative Mind, his iconic study of American conservative thought. A native of Michigan, Kirk set Old House of Fear in the haunted isles of the Outer Hebrides, drawing on his time in Scotland as the first American to earn a doctorate of letters from the University of St. Andrews. The story concerns Hugh Logan, an attorney sent by an aging American industrialist to Carnglass to purchase his ancestral island and its castle called the Old House of Fear. On the island, Logan meets Mary MacAskival, a red-haired ingenue and love interest, and the two face off against Dr. Edmund Jackman, a mystic who has the island under his own mysterious control. This new edition features an introduction by James Panero, Executive Editor of The New Criterion”— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019028861 (print) | LCCN 2019028862 (ebook) | ISBN 9780985905286 (paperback) | ISBN 9780985905224 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Americans—Scotland—Fiction. | GSAFD: Gothic fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3521.1665 043 2019 (print) | LCC PS3521.1665 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028861
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028862
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Old House of Fear, the thrilling novel by Russell Kirk you now hold in your hands, became a surprise bestseller when it was first published in 1961. But perhaps its runaway success should not have been a surprise at all. Like its hero, Hugh Logan, you too won’t want to return to present realities once Kirk takes you away on his trip to the haunted Hebrides.
First issued in hardcover by a small publishing house called Fleet, Old House quickly went through multiple paperback reprintings by Avon Books. Mary MacAskival, Logan’s red-haired love interest, made an increasingly tantalizing appearance on Avon’s succession of cheesecake covers – a history we have sought to reflect in this new edition by Criterion Books. “Rich in atmosphere and intimations of impending doom … from the first muffled cry to the final midnight scream,” declared one Avon cover, quoting a review from The New Yorker. Here Mary is seen sneaking around a gothic portal in her pink pajamas. “Wild excitement, sadistic violence. An ‘unblushing Gothick tale’ and a good one,” declared another cover, quoting Saturday Review. This time a henchman grabs Mary’s wrist and chokes her neck.
At just fifty cents a pop, how could you not toss a copy of this “Gothick” tale onto the conveyor belt at Safeway along with your weekly supply of Instant Coffee, Jell-O, and Tang? Many did. Old House of Fear outsold all of Kirk’s other books combined, including The Conservative Mind of 1953; its royalties provided financial buoyancy to the Kirk family for years after publication. Even in the new world of the streamlined Sixties, America could still be haunted by tales of the old.
The subject of ghosts, both their literary and spectral forms, was a lifelong fascination for Kirk. He was a scholar of speculative fiction, also called “genre” fiction. These days, as in Kirk’s own time, stories of horror and the supernatural are often disparaged against the “quality literature” of modern realism. Yet Kirk saw realism as “dreary baggage,” the “art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads.” For a “writer who struggles to express moral truth,” wrote Kirk, “‘realism’ has become in our time a dead-end street.” In addition to his deep political understanding, Kirk could be clairvoyant when it came to the fate of the modern American novel.
So Kirk appreciated what he called the “fearful joy” of ghostly tales. Such tales – which do not need to feature floating white sheets to be “ghostly” – formed their own literary tradition, one that Kirk traced from Horace Walpole to L. P. Hartley. Kirk was sure to distinguish his ghost stories from the more recent “flood of ‘scientific’ and ‘futuristic’ fantasies,” which he called “banal and meaningless.” “For symbol and allegory,” Kirk wrote, “the shadow-world is a far better realm than the hard, false ‘realism’ of science-fiction.”
Kirk did not fear ghosts. He feared the death of