Russell Kirk’s ‘Old House of Fear’ More than a Gothic Tale

Russell Kirk, a mainstay of National Review during his life, was not simply a conservative. In his 1953 work The Conservative Mind, he gave us the term itself, thereafter applied to him and to the burgeoning movement of which he became an essential part. That work and that word were hardly Kirk’s only contributions to the conservative movement. He became one of the ablest exponents of the traditionalist tendency on the right. “Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator’s lust for power,” Kirk writes in The Conservative Mind.

Given Kirk’s stature, and the esteem in which conservatives hold his work, one could reasonably expect The Conservative Mind or some other Kirkian political or philosophical treatise to have been his most widely read. Not so. That honor belongs to Old House of Fear, which isn’t an academic work at all. It is, rather, a kind of gothic adventure, and a fitting read for Halloween. Those who read it will discover, moreover, that it is more consistent with Kirk’s other work than it at first appears.

About the Author

Jack Butler

Jack Butler is a former submissions editor at National Review.

Featured Tags

Manage following

Conservatism

Halloween

Russell Kirk, a mainstay of National Review during his life, was not simply a conservative. In his 1953 work The Conservative Mind, he gave us the term itself, thereafter applied to him and to the burgeoning movement of which he became an essential part. That work and that word were hardly Kirk’s only contributions to the conservative movement. He became one of the ablest exponents of the traditionalist tendency on the right. “Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator’s lust for power,” Kirk writes in The Conservative Mind.

Given Kirk’s stature, and the esteem in which conservatives hold his work, one could reasonably expect The Conservative Mind or some other Kirkian political or philosophical treatise to have been his most widely read. Not so. That honor belongs to Old House of Fear, which isn’t an academic work at all. It is, rather, a kind of gothic adventure, and a fitting read for Halloween. Those who read it will discover, moreover, that it is more consistent with Kirk’s other work than it at first appears.