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Off the Sand Road: Ghost Stories
CONTENTS: Introduction—'The Ghosts of Piety Hill'—by John Pelan; The Surly Sullen Bell, Behind the Stumps, Sorworth Place, Balgrummo's Hell, There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding, Saviourgate, Off the Sand Road, Fate's Purse, The Princess of All Lands, An Encounter by Mortstone Pond; Lex Talionis; A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale.
206 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2002
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53 people want to read
About the author
Russell Kirk
169 books307 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 - 4 of 4 reviews
someday
September 1, 2023Would love to read this, but the least expensive copy I have seen is $100.00 and that is beyond the budget for one book. 😩
January 26, 2018
American writer and thinker Russell Amos Kirk (1918~1994) was the author of thirty-two books, hundreds of periodical essays, and numerous short stories. He is best known for his book The Conservative Mind, published in 1953. In addition to his scholarly historical and political works, Kirk had a relish for the uncanny and penned a number of ghost stories. Kirk grew up with the ghostly. He believed that there are 'thin places', through which we may glimpse the supernatural as though through a veil. His ancestors made regular attempts to peer through those thin places, and his great-grandmother was said to have conversed with the dead. Kirk himself was witness to an apparition at the age of eight or nine.
Off the Sand Road, published in 2002, was the first of two volumes of Russell Kirk's ghost stories issued by Ash-Tree Press; the second being What Shadows We Pursue, published the following year. The tales included are: The Surly Sullen Bell, Behind the Stumps, Sorworth Place, Balgrummo's Hell, There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding, Saviourgate, Off the Sand Road, Fate's Purse, The Princess of All Lands, An Encounter by Mortstone Pond, Lex Talionis. There's also an afterword entitled 'A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale'. It should be noted that the final four paragraphs of 'Fate's Purse' were omitted from this book. In the second volume, What Shadows We Pursue, the full story appears as an appendix, with the ending restored.
There isn't a ghost in 'The Surly Sullen Bell', but it's sinister all the same. Frank Loring is surprised to be invited to visit the St Louis home of Godfrey and Nancy Schumacher. He hasn't seen the couple for a decade, not since Nancy chose to marry Godfrey instead of him, and it's obvious that he still carries a torch for his old sweetheart. So, why is Nancy's husband so eager to have her old flame over for coffee?
'Behind the Stumps' is a seriously creepy tale. Cribben is an intolerable, over-zelous census-taker, sent to a rural backwater called Bear City to gather information about its inhabitants, 'with the majesty of Government at his back' and 'the hauteur of a censor in his mien'. Having successfully interrogated the majority of the local population within a week, Cribben sets his sights on the Gholsons of Barrens Mill, despite being warned by the local postmaster to stay well away from the place. Nobody wants to fuss with the Gholsons. Of course, Cribben won't listen to local stories and superstitious nonsense... much to his own detriment.
In 'Sorworth Place', Ralph Bain draws his pension cheques wherever he may be and travels wherever the fancy takes him. One morning he spies the fair Ann Lurlin, a young Scottish widow, the owner of Sorworth Place, and falls for her. But Mrs Lurlin's husband, though dead a year, isn't about to let go of his living wife, or let some other man get in the way of his return.
Click here to read the rest of the review...
Off the Sand Road, published in 2002, was the first of two volumes of Russell Kirk's ghost stories issued by Ash-Tree Press; the second being What Shadows We Pursue, published the following year. The tales included are: The Surly Sullen Bell, Behind the Stumps, Sorworth Place, Balgrummo's Hell, There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding, Saviourgate, Off the Sand Road, Fate's Purse, The Princess of All Lands, An Encounter by Mortstone Pond, Lex Talionis. There's also an afterword entitled 'A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale'. It should be noted that the final four paragraphs of 'Fate's Purse' were omitted from this book. In the second volume, What Shadows We Pursue, the full story appears as an appendix, with the ending restored.
There isn't a ghost in 'The Surly Sullen Bell', but it's sinister all the same. Frank Loring is surprised to be invited to visit the St Louis home of Godfrey and Nancy Schumacher. He hasn't seen the couple for a decade, not since Nancy chose to marry Godfrey instead of him, and it's obvious that he still carries a torch for his old sweetheart. So, why is Nancy's husband so eager to have her old flame over for coffee?
'Behind the Stumps' is a seriously creepy tale. Cribben is an intolerable, over-zelous census-taker, sent to a rural backwater called Bear City to gather information about its inhabitants, 'with the majesty of Government at his back' and 'the hauteur of a censor in his mien'. Having successfully interrogated the majority of the local population within a week, Cribben sets his sights on the Gholsons of Barrens Mill, despite being warned by the local postmaster to stay well away from the place. Nobody wants to fuss with the Gholsons. Of course, Cribben won't listen to local stories and superstitious nonsense... much to his own detriment.
In 'Sorworth Place', Ralph Bain draws his pension cheques wherever he may be and travels wherever the fancy takes him. One morning he spies the fair Ann Lurlin, a young Scottish widow, the owner of Sorworth Place, and falls for her. But Mrs Lurlin's husband, though dead a year, isn't about to let go of his living wife, or let some other man get in the way of his return.
Click here to read the rest of the review...
March 5, 2011
These are some of my favorite ghost stories. Dr. Kirk told stories with a redemptive quality that is totally missing in most writing. They are not for children (the language can be strong) but are excellent tales. While he was noted as a conservative thinker, Dr. Kirk was a good craftsman when it came to storytelling. This collection is great (in addition to the brief essay included by Kirk in the end about ghost stories themselves, a great bonus).
April 4, 2018
I have to admit that I was a bit hesitant to begin this book thinking perhaps the stories would be of the stuffy old variety, perhaps stilted language and unsatisfying denouements. Turns out I was (mostly) wrong. Russell Kirk was a fine writer of ghost stories. Though his politics, as you will perceive in his stories, are of the conservative variety, they seem to be of the sort that would actually be embarrassed regarding where modern conservatism now treads. That's not to say that politics are a primary feature of his stories at all. But in his view of the living and the dead, life and death hold meaning only insofar as the afterlife is defined by God's Grace and/or by Hell.
The takeaway, then, from Kirk's phantasmagorical point-of-view is that even in a post-modern society, ghosts are not obsolete. They are not even truly "dead," though they may be all around us, especially on those dark and stormy nights.
The takeaway, then, from Kirk's phantasmagorical point-of-view is that even in a post-modern society, ghosts are not obsolete. They are not even truly "dead," though they may be all around us, especially on those dark and stormy nights.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews