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Watchers at the Strait Gate
The tales in this volume have retributive ghosts, malign magicians, blind angels, beneficent phantoms, conjuring witches, demonic possession, creatures of the twilight, divided selves. Among the manifestations, maleficent and otherwise, in Watchers at the Strait Gate, the reader will encounter all the refinements and graces of classic supernatural fiction: a masterly literary style, deftness in handling atmospheric effects, a broad background in psychology and metaphysics, a mature attitude toward life, and, above all, a narrative ability that few fantasists aside from Dr. Kirk possess. In these allegories of the diabolical and the divine, the reader once again must confront the age-old reality of evil, the darkness or the light in souls, the essential mystery of human existence.
Contents:
The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost
The Surly Sullen Bell
The Peculiar Demesne of Archvicar Gerontion
Uncle Isaiah
The Reflex-Man in Whinnymuir Close
What Shadows We Pursue
Lex Talionis
Fate's Purse
An Encounter by Mortsone Pond
Watchers at the Strait Gate
Contents:
The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost
The Surly Sullen Bell
The Peculiar Demesne of Archvicar Gerontion
Uncle Isaiah
The Reflex-Man in Whinnymuir Close
What Shadows We Pursue
Lex Talionis
Fate's Purse
An Encounter by Mortsone Pond
Watchers at the Strait Gate
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1984
74 people want to read
About the author
Russell Kirk
174 books312 followersFor more than forty years, Russell Kirk was in the thick of the intellectual controversies of his time. He is the author of some thirty-two books, hundreds of periodical essays, and many short stories. Both Time and Newsweek have described him as one of America’s leading thinkers, and The New York Times acknowledged the scale of his influence when in 1998 it wrote that Kirk’s 1953 book The Conservative Mind “gave American conservatives an identity and a genealogy and catalyzed the postwar movement.”
Dr. Kirk wrote and spoke on modern culture, political thought and practice, educational theory, literary criticism, ethical questions, and social themes. He addressed audiences on hundreds of American campuses and appeared often on television and radio.
He edited the educational quarterly journal The University Bookman and was founder and first editor of the quarterly Modern Age. He contributed articles to numerous serious periodicals on either side of the Atlantic. For a quarter of a century he wrote a page on education for National Review, and for thirteen years published, through the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, a nationally syndicated newspaper column. Over the years he contributed to more than a hundred serious periodicals in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, and Poland, among them Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Fortune, Humanitas, The Contemporary Review, The Journal of the History of Ideas, World Review, Crisis, History Today, Policy Review, Commonweal, Kenyon Review, The Review of Politics, and The World and I.
He is the only American to hold the highest arts degree (earned) of the senior Scottish university—doctor of letters of St. Andrews. He received his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and his master’s degree from Duke University. He received honorary doctorates from twelve American universities and colleges.
He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a senior fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Constitutional Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Fulbright Lecturer in Scotland. The Christopher Award was conferred upon him for his book Eliot and His Age, and he received the Ann Radcliffe Award of the Count Dracula Society for his Gothic Fiction. The Third World Fantasy Convention gave him its award for best short fiction for his short story, “There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding.” In 1984 he received the Weaver Award of the Ingersoll Prizes for his scholarly writing. For several years he was a Distinguished Scholar of the Heritage Foundation. In 1989, President Reagan conferred on him the Presidential Citizens Medal. In 1991, he was awarded the Salvatori Prize for historical writing.
More than a million copies of Kirk’s books have been sold, and several have been translated in German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Korean, and other languages. His second book, The Conservative Mind (1953), is one of the most widely reviewed and discussed studies of political ideas in this century and has gone through seven editions. Seventeen of his books are in print at present, and he has written prefaces to many other books, contributed essays to them, or edited them.
Dr. Kirk debated with such well-known speakers as Norman Thomas, Frank Mankiewicz, Carey McWilliams, John Roche, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Michael Harrington, Max Lerner, Michael Novak, Sidney Lens, William Kunstler, Hubert Humphrey, F. A. Hayek, Karl Hess, Clifford Case, Ayn Rand, Eugene McCarthy, Leonard Weinglass, Louis Lomax, Harold Taylor, Clark Kerr, Saul Alinsky, Staughton Lynd, Malcolm X, Dick Gregory, and Tom Hayden. Several of his public lectures have been broadcast nationally on C-SPAN.
Among Kirk’s literary and scholarly friends were T. S. Eliot, Roy Campbell, Wyndham Lewis, Donald Davidson, George Scott-Moncrieff, Richard Weaver, Max Picard, Ray Bradbury, Bernard Iddings Bell, Paul Roche, James McAuley, Thomas Howard, Wilhem Roepke, Robert Speaight
Dr. Kirk wrote and spoke on modern culture, political thought and practice, educational theory, literary criticism, ethical questions, and social themes. He addressed audiences on hundreds of American campuses and appeared often on television and radio.
He edited the educational quarterly journal The University Bookman and was founder and first editor of the quarterly Modern Age. He contributed articles to numerous serious periodicals on either side of the Atlantic. For a quarter of a century he wrote a page on education for National Review, and for thirteen years published, through the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, a nationally syndicated newspaper column. Over the years he contributed to more than a hundred serious periodicals in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, and Poland, among them Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Fortune, Humanitas, The Contemporary Review, The Journal of the History of Ideas, World Review, Crisis, History Today, Policy Review, Commonweal, Kenyon Review, The Review of Politics, and The World and I.
He is the only American to hold the highest arts degree (earned) of the senior Scottish university—doctor of letters of St. Andrews. He received his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and his master’s degree from Duke University. He received honorary doctorates from twelve American universities and colleges.
He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a senior fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Constitutional Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Fulbright Lecturer in Scotland. The Christopher Award was conferred upon him for his book Eliot and His Age, and he received the Ann Radcliffe Award of the Count Dracula Society for his Gothic Fiction. The Third World Fantasy Convention gave him its award for best short fiction for his short story, “There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding.” In 1984 he received the Weaver Award of the Ingersoll Prizes for his scholarly writing. For several years he was a Distinguished Scholar of the Heritage Foundation. In 1989, President Reagan conferred on him the Presidential Citizens Medal. In 1991, he was awarded the Salvatori Prize for historical writing.
More than a million copies of Kirk’s books have been sold, and several have been translated in German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Korean, and other languages. His second book, The Conservative Mind (1953), is one of the most widely reviewed and discussed studies of political ideas in this century and has gone through seven editions. Seventeen of his books are in print at present, and he has written prefaces to many other books, contributed essays to them, or edited them.
Dr. Kirk debated with such well-known speakers as Norman Thomas, Frank Mankiewicz, Carey McWilliams, John Roche, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Michael Harrington, Max Lerner, Michael Novak, Sidney Lens, William Kunstler, Hubert Humphrey, F. A. Hayek, Karl Hess, Clifford Case, Ayn Rand, Eugene McCarthy, Leonard Weinglass, Louis Lomax, Harold Taylor, Clark Kerr, Saul Alinsky, Staughton Lynd, Malcolm X, Dick Gregory, and Tom Hayden. Several of his public lectures have been broadcast nationally on C-SPAN.
Among Kirk’s literary and scholarly friends were T. S. Eliot, Roy Campbell, Wyndham Lewis, Donald Davidson, George Scott-Moncrieff, Richard Weaver, Max Picard, Ray Bradbury, Bernard Iddings Bell, Paul Roche, James McAuley, Thomas Howard, Wilhem Roepke, Robert Speaight
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 11, 2012
Russel Kirk, aside from being an important figure in Conservative American political and social thought, is also considered one of the last great masters of the Gothic horror genre. He is often cited in the company of M. R. James, Ambrose Pierce, and Algernon Blackwood although it should be noted that Kirk live much later and could be considered the classic ghost tales' last loyalist. His fiction also tend to be moral tales. Some find him a little too preachy. Yet his ability to elicit ability to evoke terror and dread is unsurpassed. This book and its companion, The Princess Of All Lands covers the best of his stories.
May 25, 2022
Ever since I read Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales, a posthumous collection of what the editor considered Kirk's best supernatural short fiction, back in November of 2007, I had wanted to make time to read this collection, as well as the two earlier ones the author also had published in his lifetime. However, while perusing the contents note that's part of the Goodreads description for this book earlier this afternoon, I discovered that, in effect, I already have read it. Every single one of the ten stories in this book are included in Ancestral Shadows, along with some from the earlier collections. So while I'm not actually counting this as an official "review," (although many of the comments in my review of the posthumous collection, here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... , would apply), it definitely provides a piece of information that those who've already read the later book would want to know! (And I've added this title to my "read" shelf with a clear conscience.)
January 14, 2018
2.5 stars; several strong stories and competent craftsmanship can't save a collection saturated with continual editorializing, sanctimonious moralizing, and mediocre plotting.
March 23, 2011
The Doppelganger is frightening
August 21, 2024
I am a fan of literature and film that can be classified as gothic, a genre that encompasses stories of the supernatural, places inhabited by ghosts, demonic and angelic spirits, with dark, dangerous, and frightening atmospheres that human characters are caught in. To those who share similar tastes and even to those who do not, I highly recommend Russell Kirk’s collection of tales, Watchers at the Strait Gate for four reasons:
1. To experience that chilling sensation of the fearful “other.”
2. To cultivate and mature your literary taste.
3. To appreciate Kirk’s contemporary urban settings which incarnate the spiritual forces.
4. To furnish your moral imagination.
Certainly, one of the peculiar pleasures of the gothic is the thrill of being frightened. However, the sudden rise in our pulse can be easily provoked merely by someone shouting “boo” or the unexpected thump of a book hitting the floor. The fun of being frightened is fine, but the gothic can evoke a deeper, more significant experience—the eerie and uncanny, the awareness of finding oneself in the presence of an “other,” a being or force that is not us, even like us, and for good or ill threatens to undo the comfortable regularity of our quotidian life or perhaps our very soul.
This experience of the other depends largely upon atmosphere, whether in life or literature, and Kirk’s Watchers delivers atmosphere in spades. He does this in two ways: detailed descriptions of the characters and places employing expertly a highly literary vocabulary and often placing these gothic, even horror, stories in a contemporary urban setting. The reader will find in Watchers a dark fortress-like Romanesque building in the midst of evil urban decadence (“The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost”), a wife’s room filled by her wicked husband with “prints of those exquisitely horrid Flemish and German and Italian medieval-renaissance hells, their multitudinous tiny insect-devils flaying their innumerable little damned souls” (“The Sullen Surly Bell,” 58), a derelict house of a wealthy miser in incredibly squalid conditions (“Fate’s Purse”), and the old rectory of a priest at 3:00 in the morning hearing noises in the midst of a winter’s storm (“Watchers at the Strait Gate”). One even encounters a doppelgänger and a young woman with the second sight in Kirk’s charming tribute to Sir Walter Scott, one of his favorites, “The Reflex-Man in Whinnymuir Close.” The story captures the flavor and the antiquated dialect of Scott’s novels while challenging the modern reader’s understanding but also leads to the fun of discovering unfamiliar words.
Looking up words. Plowing through descriptions. Where’s the action? Doesn’t this hold up the story? Such a reaction reveals the immaturity of the impatient reader. There is the need to develop the literary palate just as there is with the gustatory palette. Wolfing down an open-faced peanut butter and jelly sandwich (one of my favorites, much to my wife’s dismay) is a delight, but it would be a shame and not particularly good for our health to limit our diet to it. There is immense pleasure and value in learning to appreciate fine foods savored slowly in an elegant setting with engaging conversation.
The development of taste in literature allows us to enjoy excellent prose of carefully delineated scenes and characters. More than that, we learn that those descriptions enable us to understand the action in the context of the whole story. This is especially true in Kirk’s ghostly tales in which the settings incarnate the spiritual forces of good and evil.
As I mentioned before, one feature of several of Kirk’s stories is to place them in contemporary urban America rather than in English graveyards and castles. These urban settings and often their architecture display a decadence that seems to incarnate evil spirits and in which individual souls follow a path to damnation or struggle for redemption. They also highlight the strongly moral cast of his fiction.
The moral cast of Kirk’s fiction should remind us that he was one of the chief architects of the renaissance of post-World War II conservative thought and that one of his major contributions was to bring to the fore Edmund Burke’s concept of the moral imagination. Here the imagination is not understood to be a faculty that makes up things that do not exist. Rather, the imagination is the vehicle for our ideals, both of individual virtue and a healthy society. These ideals are not the fruit of arid speculative reason but come clothed in images that have shaped us.
The crucial role of images means that literature is important in forming the imagination. Kirk’s gothic stories grip us with images of good and evil spirits that inhabit a place or a person. The subtitle of the collection “Geister-dämmerung” or “spirits of the twilight” reveals not only Kirk’s erudition but also the character of these stories. The twilight is a time of change, whether to light or darkness. In that ambiguous twilight time with spirits present the individuals in these stories make choices that place them squarely on a path to salvation or judgment, both temporal and eternal. Whether the spirits are evil working to violate a young maiden or corrupt a struggling priest or good ones acting to destroy a gang (“The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost”), save individuals from financial ruin by mobsters (“Uncle Isaiah”), or even helping someone grappling with who he is and was as a boy and then as an old man (“An Encounter by Mortstone Pond”), we are led to consider our times and ourselves.
Unfortunately, Watchers at the Strait Gate is out of print and hard to come by, but it can be purchased second hand or perhaps obtained through interlibrary loan. Someone really should publish a new collection of Kirk’s stories. In spite of these difficulties, I encourage you to find a copy, enjoy some creepiness, get that feeling that you need to look over your shoulder, but, above all, begin to see the possibilities of this world and even yourself as a twilight place in which we must and do make decisions that shape ours and others’ lives and destinies.
1. To experience that chilling sensation of the fearful “other.”
2. To cultivate and mature your literary taste.
3. To appreciate Kirk’s contemporary urban settings which incarnate the spiritual forces.
4. To furnish your moral imagination.
Certainly, one of the peculiar pleasures of the gothic is the thrill of being frightened. However, the sudden rise in our pulse can be easily provoked merely by someone shouting “boo” or the unexpected thump of a book hitting the floor. The fun of being frightened is fine, but the gothic can evoke a deeper, more significant experience—the eerie and uncanny, the awareness of finding oneself in the presence of an “other,” a being or force that is not us, even like us, and for good or ill threatens to undo the comfortable regularity of our quotidian life or perhaps our very soul.
This experience of the other depends largely upon atmosphere, whether in life or literature, and Kirk’s Watchers delivers atmosphere in spades. He does this in two ways: detailed descriptions of the characters and places employing expertly a highly literary vocabulary and often placing these gothic, even horror, stories in a contemporary urban setting. The reader will find in Watchers a dark fortress-like Romanesque building in the midst of evil urban decadence (“The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost”), a wife’s room filled by her wicked husband with “prints of those exquisitely horrid Flemish and German and Italian medieval-renaissance hells, their multitudinous tiny insect-devils flaying their innumerable little damned souls” (“The Sullen Surly Bell,” 58), a derelict house of a wealthy miser in incredibly squalid conditions (“Fate’s Purse”), and the old rectory of a priest at 3:00 in the morning hearing noises in the midst of a winter’s storm (“Watchers at the Strait Gate”). One even encounters a doppelgänger and a young woman with the second sight in Kirk’s charming tribute to Sir Walter Scott, one of his favorites, “The Reflex-Man in Whinnymuir Close.” The story captures the flavor and the antiquated dialect of Scott’s novels while challenging the modern reader’s understanding but also leads to the fun of discovering unfamiliar words.
Looking up words. Plowing through descriptions. Where’s the action? Doesn’t this hold up the story? Such a reaction reveals the immaturity of the impatient reader. There is the need to develop the literary palate just as there is with the gustatory palette. Wolfing down an open-faced peanut butter and jelly sandwich (one of my favorites, much to my wife’s dismay) is a delight, but it would be a shame and not particularly good for our health to limit our diet to it. There is immense pleasure and value in learning to appreciate fine foods savored slowly in an elegant setting with engaging conversation.
The development of taste in literature allows us to enjoy excellent prose of carefully delineated scenes and characters. More than that, we learn that those descriptions enable us to understand the action in the context of the whole story. This is especially true in Kirk’s ghostly tales in which the settings incarnate the spiritual forces of good and evil.
As I mentioned before, one feature of several of Kirk’s stories is to place them in contemporary urban America rather than in English graveyards and castles. These urban settings and often their architecture display a decadence that seems to incarnate evil spirits and in which individual souls follow a path to damnation or struggle for redemption. They also highlight the strongly moral cast of his fiction.
The moral cast of Kirk’s fiction should remind us that he was one of the chief architects of the renaissance of post-World War II conservative thought and that one of his major contributions was to bring to the fore Edmund Burke’s concept of the moral imagination. Here the imagination is not understood to be a faculty that makes up things that do not exist. Rather, the imagination is the vehicle for our ideals, both of individual virtue and a healthy society. These ideals are not the fruit of arid speculative reason but come clothed in images that have shaped us.
The crucial role of images means that literature is important in forming the imagination. Kirk’s gothic stories grip us with images of good and evil spirits that inhabit a place or a person. The subtitle of the collection “Geister-dämmerung” or “spirits of the twilight” reveals not only Kirk’s erudition but also the character of these stories. The twilight is a time of change, whether to light or darkness. In that ambiguous twilight time with spirits present the individuals in these stories make choices that place them squarely on a path to salvation or judgment, both temporal and eternal. Whether the spirits are evil working to violate a young maiden or corrupt a struggling priest or good ones acting to destroy a gang (“The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost”), save individuals from financial ruin by mobsters (“Uncle Isaiah”), or even helping someone grappling with who he is and was as a boy and then as an old man (“An Encounter by Mortstone Pond”), we are led to consider our times and ourselves.
Unfortunately, Watchers at the Strait Gate is out of print and hard to come by, but it can be purchased second hand or perhaps obtained through interlibrary loan. Someone really should publish a new collection of Kirk’s stories. In spite of these difficulties, I encourage you to find a copy, enjoy some creepiness, get that feeling that you need to look over your shoulder, but, above all, begin to see the possibilities of this world and even yourself as a twilight place in which we must and do make decisions that shape ours and others’ lives and destinies.
June 15, 2019
Russell Kirk was one of the stalwarts of mid-twentieth century American conservatism. He also wrote some ghost stories that are collected here. It is curious that the book was published by Arkham House, the publishing company that was founded to preserve the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. Ghost stories these are, but they have nothing in common with the works of Lovecraft. Rather, they are more akin to the spiritual novels of Charles Williams or the adult fantasies of George MacDonald. There is a profoundly Christian character to these stories, though of a decidedly Anglo-Catholic bent. Well worth reading.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews