Tradition never died. Despite the complacent triumph of Modernity, it lurks, like a never-rotting Gothic revenant, just beneath the surface of our materially bloated and spiritually empty world. In these 16 essays, James J. O"Meara uses the Traditionalism of Julius Evola and Rene Guenon to bring to light the spiritual and philosophical dimensions of the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, Henry James, Mickey Spillaine, Olaf Stapledon, Owen Wister, and Andy Nowicki; the music of Richard Wagner, Harry Partch, and Scott Walker; and the lives and works of architect Ralph Adams Cram and economist Thorstein Veblen. In O"Meara"s lens, the doomed WASP gentry in the weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft and Henry James are on Sufi-inspired vision quests, while Mickey Spillane"s brutal but equally doomed Mike Hammer is an occult detective in the Atom Age. Hobo and microtonal composer Harry Partch is a Dionysian shaman for mid-century America, while the transatlantic Scott Walker enacts Aryan musical...