Spirit world.

Off the Sand Road: Ghost Stories, Volume One, by Russell Kirk (Ash-Tree, 206 pp., $45)

What Shadows We Pursue: Ghost Stories, Volume Two, by Russell Kirk (Ash-Tree, 254 pp., $45)

FOR millions of moviegoers, it seems, Freddy vs. Jason represents the summit of the horror genre; those looking for scary narratives of a more intellectually and spiritually stimulating kind would do well to seek out the tales of Russell Kirk. One of the intellectual founding fathers of the postwar conservative movement, Kirk was a versatile man of letters who penned some of the best uncanny tales of all time. Over three decades, his stories appeared in such periodicals as Fantasy and Science Fiction, London Mystery Magazine, and Queen's Quarterly. The tales were collected in three volumes, The Surly Sullen Bell (1962), The Princess of All Lands (1979), and Watchers at the Strait Gate (1984); unfortunately, these fell out of print and are hard to find. But now Kirk's stories have returned, thanks to a small press in British Columbia that specializes in classic supernatural fiction.

For Kirk, who died in 1994, ghost stories were not mere exercises in gore or terror. A 20th century infested with gulags and gas chambers provided demonic fright enough. Through the eerie fun of his scary tales, he was trying to reawaken a sense of a greater reality, a world that touches but is not bounded by the physical, in an age smothered by materialism and suffering from the decay of traditional religion. As for ghosts, he thought them very real and claimed ghostly folk lived right alongside his family at his home, Piety Hill, in rural Mecosta, Mich. "Have I ever seen a ghost?" he asked. "Why I am one, and so are you--a geist, a spirit, in a mortal envelope."

The traditional religious imagery--demons, damned souls, heaven, purgatory, and hell--that animates his work is neither window dressing, nor a useful convention around which to stretch a yarn. "I venture to suggest that the more orthodox is a writer's theology," Kirk maintained, "the more convincing, as symbols and allegories, his uncanny tales will be." His stories, however, are by no means simply sermons accented with ghouls and creepy houses. Kirk combined Christian orthodoxy with first-rate storytelling. In "The Surly Sullen Bell," a traveling book salesman comes face-to-face with the reality of hell and survives only because--for once--he dares to love, dares to blow hot or cold. In "The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost," an Anglo-Catholic priest maintains orthodoxy in a decaying and dangerous district of an unnamed city--and in the face of his bishop, who "spends his days comminating the president of the United States and ordaining lesbians." Maintaining the faith isn't Father Montrose's only chore: He finds himself engaged in spiritual battle with demons that desire to possess him. The demons tempt the chaste priest with a beautiful and trusting young woman. And in "Saviourgate," Mark Findlay, whose life has crumbled, contemplates suicide. He checks into a hotel where he finds a foretaste of heaven.

These stories, Kirk himself wrote, "may impart some arcane truths about good and evil; as Chesterton put it, all life is an allegory, and we can understand it only in parable." While they can be enjoyed independently, many of the stories, as well as Kirk's novel, Lord of the Hollow Dark, share some of the same characters. He wove plots and characters into a tapestry of redemption and damnation, and of timeless truths set in those peculiarly "thin places," as Kirk called them, where the supernatural encroaches upon the natural.

Mr. Newman's work has appeared in Modern Age and Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity.