Lord of the Hollow Dark

At Balgrummo Lodging, a great decaying house near Edinburgh, gather the grotesque members, old and young, of a curious society. Given names from the poems of T. S. Eliot, they are the disciples of Mr. Apollinax, possessor of occult powers. He has promised his followers an intensity of experience they never had known before—a kind of immortality to be attained in a mystical "timeless moment" of transcendant sensation. This rite is to be performed on Ash Wednesday, in the "Purgatory" that lives beneath Balgrummo Lodging: a pre-Christian and medieval maze sealed at the Pope's order in the sixteenth century. In this subterranean realm, to which ancient legends of diabolism cling, Apollinax will proclaim himself Lord of Time—with attendant horrors. Yet has Apollinax underestimated the sardonic old being called Archvicar Gerontion, once "a brutal and licentious soldier," who is present at the Lodging as Apollinax's necromancer? Has Apollinax left out of his reckoning a dead man of power, the last Lord Balgrummo, perhaps lingering with his murderous axe in the hollow dark? More than a yarn of occult adventure, LORD OF THE HOLLOW DARK is a parable, in which the actors shift from the world of the flesh to the world of the spirit—from infernal time to purgatorial time, and then to salvation—within the space of a few nights. The book,s characters—the innocent Marina and her baby, the hard-bitten blunderer Sweeney, the obliging genteel tramp called Coriolan—are not puppets but real and deeply engaging people. This "mystical romance" penetrates into the terror of Time and into the greater mystery of what we call the Soul. Those brave ones who wind through the purgatorial labyrinth have baffled Time the Devourer. The author of twenty-two books, Russell Kirk is a scholar in several fields, and has received national awards for his ghostly tales, as well as for his historical and theoretical writings. His knowledge of a wide range of subjects, from the poems of T. S. Eliot to the history of sixteenth-century Scotland, contributes subtly to the peculiar sensibility that enlivens this startling novel. "LORD OF THE HOLLOW DARK is a dramatic synthesis of terror and spiritual transcendence, in which Russell Kirk writes at novel-length on those themes central to his highly-praised ghostly stories... The book moves with tightly-paced escapes and encounters. An erudite, eerie, and exciting new novel." --Don Herron, co-editor, The Romantist "Most contemporary thrillers involve spies or detectives; Russell Kirk has written a spiritual thriller, a tale of 'Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts.' But also of Hope. In short the old-fashioned Romantic (and hence, Christian) mixture." --William F. Buckley, Jr. "LORD OF THE HOLLOW DARK is an immense spiritual and social allegory of our epoch, when 'repressed evil things creep out of their old prison,' and when Antichrist himself can proclaim to his rabble (and how justly!) that 'modern science sustains our truths.' Occult themes are difficult, say what you will, to extend to full length novels. This book succeeds by virtue of the moral fire and very wide knowledge that sustain it." --Robert Aickman * Jacket painting by Michael Mariano