Books: 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...

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