Halloween is my favorite time of year for literature. For the last week, I’ve been reading horror stories to my kids before bedtime: “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” by Richard Matheson (made into a Twilight Zone episode starring William Shatner), “The Statement of Randolph Carter” by H. P. Lovecraft, etc.

Over the years, I’ve written quite a bit about the literature of horror (go here for a quick compendium). I’ve also wondered why I like the genre so much. It may be as simple as what Edith Wharton called “the fun of the shudder.” But there may be something else at work as well: Horror is a fundamentally conservative genre.

It’s of course a huge and diverse field, so it’s a little silly to slap it with a label. Yet so many of its stories involve a rupture in the social order and conclude with its restoration. They are also full of warnings about not messing with things you can’t understand, which is a sublte plea for respecting tradition. Finally, this is the one genre that aggressively questions the assumptions of materialism and gets away with it. Russell Kirk’s fondness for ghost stories — as a reader as well as a writer of them — was no coincidence.