Like his other major published collection of short stories, Bierce updated and modified his stories for each new edition. Words, so simple that one would be prone to ascribe them to the limitations of a literary hack, take on an unholy horror, a new and unguessed transformation.â Lovecraft discusses Bierce in his essay âSupernatural Horror in Literature,â quoting Samuel Loveman: âIn Bierce, the evocation of horror becomes for the first time, not so much the prescription or perversion of Poe and Maupassant, but an atmosphere definite and uncannily precise. Bierce also plays with the idea of holes in reality in the various âMysterious Disappearancesâ stories, portals to horrifying locations in âThe Spook House,â and parallel dimensions or altered states in âA Psychological Shipwreckâ and âThe Realm of the Unreal.â Not all stories in the collection are strictly âghost storiesâââMoxonâs Masterâ is one of the first examples in English literature to describe a robotic thinking machine (and the fate of its master), and âHaÃ¯ta the Shepherdâ is a tale of a young manâs search for meaning in his life. âThe Moonlit Roadâ is a strong example, providing three distinct vantage points of the same events, and both âThe Death of Halpin Frayserâ and âThe Damned Thingâ are frequently anthologized as pioneers in the genre.

He must be credentialed by nudityâand that regardless of temperature or who may happen to be present.âĭespite his personal skepticism, Bierce was able to capture the essence of the supernatural horror story. Standard EbooksĨ1,444 words (4 hours 57 minutes) with a reading ease of 67.69 (average difficulty)Īmbrose Bierceâs second major short story collection, Can Such Things Be? collected nearly all of Bierceâs supernatural horror stories.īierce himself was a skeptic of the supernatural, having once written a satirical essay âThe Clothing of Ghosts,â in which he insisted that âThe materialized spook appealing to our senses for recognition of his ghostly character must authenticate himself otherwise than by familiar and remembered habiliments.

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Can Such Things Be? by Ambrose Bierce