Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914, probably; more on that later) wrote about a million short stories in his life. I have just read 51 of them, collected in Terror by Night: Classic Ghost & Horror Stories, published in 2006 by Wordsworth Editions.
Bierce was mostly known in his lifetime as a journalist and satirist, but he was also a prolific writer of short ghost stories, and it was in that capacity that I first encountered him. There’s a long strange pedigree of horror that starts with Bierce, and I first decided to read him to track it to its source.
In two Bierce short stories, Haïta the Shepherd (1891) and An Inhabitant of Carcosa (1886), Bierce coined a few words that later found their way into the broader Cthulhu Mythos. Haïta mentions a shepherd-god named Hastur, and Inhabitant mentions a mystic named “Hali” and features the ruined city of Carcosa. Prolific hack-writer Robert W. Chambers—who is really only famous today for writing The King in Yellow (1895)—borrowed all of those names for The King in Yellow, though in different contexts and with no particular connection to the Bierce stories. “Hastur” is a shepherd-god in Bierce, but is a person in one The King in Yellow story and a place in another; Hali is a person in Bierce but a lake in The King in Yellow; and Carcosa is a city in both. Later, Lovecraft would recycle some of these names (and other ideas from Chambers), mentioning Hastur, Lake Hali, and “The Yellow Sign” in The Whisperer in Darkness (1931).
Things exploded from there. Although “Carcosa” was not directly mentioned by Lovecraft, to my knowledge, it has since become associated with the Cthulhu Mythos in tabletop games, movies, and videogames. (As an example, “Lost Carcosa” is one of the Other Dimensions you can go to in an expansion to Fantasy Flight’s Arkham Horror game.) The word “Carcosa” creeps up in a lot of other places, too: it’s a very minor planet in Mass Effect 3; there’s a city called “Carcosa” on the edge of Essos in A Song of Ice and Fire, ruled by a “Yellow Emperor;” “Carcosa” is the hidden temple where the badguys in the first season of True Detective do their terrible things, presided over by a “Yellow King;” etc.1
All of this has relatively little to do with Bierce himself, of course, who was dead before most of this stuff happened. But it’s how I picked up this book. I think it’s fascinating as a study in memetic evolution. A guy writes a couple of short stories; another guy steals a few made-up words from those short stories for his own stories; another guy references those; and now, here we are, 140 years from the original story, where a few words have completely transcended their original context.2 Bierce himself has been the subject of a number of stories, given that he disappeared in Mexico in 1914 while trying to cover the Mexican Revolution. He presumably died of mundane causes—like dysentery, heart failure, or a bullet wound—and was presumably not captured and transported by some eldritch creature into an alternate dimension. But, given his above-mentioned connection to the Weird as a whole, people have had a lot of fun with his disappearance.
Bierce’s work (as collected in this volume) has little in common with the squidgy tentacles and occult volumes that appear in Lovecraft and later writers of his ilk. Of these 51 stories, most are straightforward ghost stories, a few are realist Civil War stories (Bierce fought in the Civil War and wrote a lot about it), and only one or two take place in Other Worlds or feature Strange Monsters Beyond Human Ken. Nearly all of them are very short. There are 51 stories in this book, but it’s only 292 pages long, so most of them are two to four pages long; the longest is about3 12. Most of the ghost stories are variations on the same few themes: most commonly, there is a house, it is haunted, somebody checks it out, sees something spooky, and dies of fear. None of those is very likely to stick with me.
Bierce’s prose is generally enjoyable; he’s got a wry sense of humor even (especially) when describing macabre events. One of his characters is described as being regarded by his family as “an intellectual black sheep who was likely at any moment to disgrace the flock by bleating in metre,” which I really enjoyed. The word I see most commonly applied to Bierce’s work is “misanthropic,” and that’s certainly reflected in these stories; the guy didn’t like people very much. He is also fond of addressing the reader directly by telling them that he’s skipping parts of the story that aren’t really interesting or relevant, which I’m a sucker for.
Bierce also makes a number of contributions to the genre of what I call “wouldn’t it be fucked up if” stories. A “wouldn’t it be fucked up if” story posits a strange situation and then wanders off into the sunset, its mission accomplished, having done nothing else in the way of plot or character work. My favorite example of this is Fitz-James O’Brien’s What Was It? (1859), which boils down to “wouldn’t it be fucked up if there was an invisible monster?” and never does anything else with the premise. Bierce has three separate stories in this book (The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, An Unfinished Race, and Charles Ashmore’s Trail) that amount to “wouldn’t it be fucked up if a guy just disappeared?”
He is not, in short, likely to be high on my list of favorite short story authors. But there are a few stories in here that either rise above the rest or are otherwise noteworthy, so I’ll talk about those.
The Damned Thing is not a particularly good story, but its conceit caught my eye: there is a monster whose color is outside of the normal spectrum of light that a human being can process, so it appears invisible to the human eye. This is not a terribly inspired premise (also, why would it be invisible? Wouldn’t it just look, like, grey?) but it struck me as another Lovecraft connection, as it seems to presage The Colour Out of Space, Lovecraft’s best story. Lovecraft definitely read Bierce: he praised him for his realistic depictions of Civil War horrors and described him as “a leading element in America's fund of weird literature,” quoting The Damned Thing at least once in the process. Is The Damned Thing part of the genesis of that frightful messenger, the Colour Out of Space?
Moxon’s Master is a surprisingly early “robot rebels and kills its master” story, as it features a man who has made a machine that can think and play chess (badly), and which kills its master when he beats it at chess one too many times. It’s not exactly science fiction, as the artificer seems to think that all machines can think, and it’s not clear what drives the machine, but it’s still interesting to see a version of that story from this long before the proper sci-fi boom of the 20th Century.4
I should probably mention An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, which is probably Bierce’s most famous short story, and was taught in high schools for a very long time. Kurt Vonnegut apparently once said that it was the “greatest American short story,” but I must confess that I’ve read the darn thing several times over the last decade and, while I understand its historical importance, it mostly doesn’t do much for me. Alas, that I am a Philistine.
But one of his other most famous short stories, Chickamauga, is excellent. Chickamauga chronicles a little boy who wanders off from home, fighting imaginary monsters and running away from rabbits, who stumbles upon a line of wounded soldiers crawling on their hands and knees to get to a river. The little boy (who we later learn is deaf-mute, and thus can't hear all the noise of the battle and the presumably wailing soldiers) doesn’t understand what he’s seeing, and thinks they’re playing a game, until he follows them home and suddenly learns that his home has been burnt to the ground in the battle. Nothing overtly supernatural happens in this story, but it’s definitely the capital-W Weirdest story in the book, and its eerie depiction of this little boy wandering around all these dead and dying men is incredible. Bierce isn’t writing in the boy’s voice, but he is describing everything as the boy perceives it, so it takes a moment for the reader to understand what has actually happened.5 I'll leave you with a passage from this story:
“Some, pausing, made strange gestures with their hands, erected their arms and lowered them again, clasped their heads; spread their palms upward, as men are sometimes seen to do in public prayer.
Not all of this did the child note; it is what would have been noted by an elder observer; he saw little but that these were men, yet crept like babes. Being men, they were not terrible, though unfamiliarly clad. He moved among them freely, going from one to another and peering into their faces with childish curiosity. All their faces were singularly white and many were streaked and gouted with red. Something in this - something, too, perhaps in their grotesque attitudes and movements - reminded him of the painted clown whom he had seen last summer in the circus, and he laughed as he watched them.”
True Detective’s decision to repeatedly reference The King in Yellow is one of the wildest decisions I’ve ever seen a TV show make, but that’s a whole ‘nother Substack post.
One of my two published short stories is a King in Yellow story, so I have done my part to keep the evolution going.
I say “about” because the table of contents is frequently incorrect about how long the stories are, for some reason, and I’m not going to go through and count all the pages of all the stories. I am sorry to be such a disappointment to you all.
“I suppose it’s also a precursor to Object-Oriented Ontology,” he said, making a reference that exactly no one else will appreciate.
Presumably contemporary readers, for whom “Chickamauga” would be understood immediately as a reference to a very bloody Civil War battle, picked up on it before I did.