SOURCE: Person, James E., Jr. “Horror and Redemption: Kirk's Short Stories and Lord of the Hollow Dark” and “Novels Gothic to Baroque: Old House of Fear and A Creature of the Twilight.” In Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind, pp. 109-35, 136-50. Lanham: Madison Books, 1999.

In the following essays, Person discusses Kirk's short stories and novels, tracing the extent and manner in which they are permeated with the author's moral vision and elements of Christian faith.

The locale was to me … just the sort of mindless, mundane place where the horrors of a Hitchcock or a Polanski might have been inspired. There was horror in the very vegetation spreading under the hazy sun—an everyday buzz of nothing that bred the violent and bizarre. Those old woods, fields, shacks, sparse people—all ticking and withering in the sun—their stories clamped my heart in cold...