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Russell Kirk is known primarily as a 20th-century American political philosopher who wrote extensively on the role of virtue in politics. He's less well known as a writer of gripping--and terrifying--ghost stories. Kirk's collection Ancestral Shadows recounts tales of ghosts, demons, angels, and unwitting undead who find themselves trapped in grim limbo between life and death. The stories themselves provide many a cool shiver up the spine, especially crime thrillers like The Princess of All Lands, and the possession story The Peculiar Demesne of of Archvicar Gerontion. But the real horror comes from Kirk's letter to the reader, where he writes that each and every story is based to some extent on real facts, experienced either by himself at various haunted places, or by close friends. Kirk's unwavering belief in the reality of the supernatural and its frequent imposition on the world we live in gives even his most fantastic ghost stories a rare urgency. The reader may close the book and go his own way, but these ancestral shadows will follow him out into even the brightest sunlight.