The group of stories classified above as “non-supernatural” includes a dozen “straight” war tales, two of which — “The Mocking Bird” and “The Story of a Conscience” — show Bierce to be actually human and almost sympathetic. Another, “The Major’s Tale,” gives humor free reign. A couple unusual stories are entirely unlike Bierce’s other works: “The Lady [or Heiress] from Redhorse” and “The Man Out of the Nose” (reminiscent, in part, of Fitz-James O’Brien’s “From Hand to Mouth”). Two final stories, “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” and “Ha ta the Shepherd,” rank as Bierce’s only fantasies and provided elements later co-opted by developers of the so-called Cthulhu Mythos.
The short fiction of Ambrose Bierce is characterized by subtlety, abruptness, and meticulous detail. E. J. Hopkins has noted that a great many of his horror tales are less than 3000 words in length; several are less than 1000. Bierce himself recommended that, in successful writing, each word should do the work of four. Such measured brevity is perhaps natural for a journalist, although Bierce was never a reporter per se. Plot is granted the major part of each story, to the virtual neglect of mood (except in the two fantasies). In this Bierce contrasts sharply with such other masters of the macabre as Poe, Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith. Lovecraft, in his celebrated essay Supernatural Horror in Literature and in several of his published letters, discussed the importance of plot as opposed to mood; a reading of any of his stories (”The Outsider” is a good one to begin with) reveals a strong preference for atmosphere. Poe is known for his verbosity and his works present detailed studies of feelings and moods (e.g., “The Fall of the House of Usher”). Smith — the least known of the writers here named — indulged in flowing prose of otherworldly descriptions and was even more practiced in creating terrifying and alien moods (e.g., “Xeethra”).
In relation to the comparisons with Poe, it has been said that Bierce “followed Poe in most of his stories” but was “less literary and more observant.” This is true considering the complexity of Poe’s sentence structures compared to the great detail so succinctly presented in such Bierce pieces as “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” H. L. Mencken, one of Bierce’s most successful and well-known understudies, wrote that Bierce’s “own style was extraordinarily tight and unresilient, and his fear of rhetoric often took all the life out of his works.”
Whatever the outstanding characteristics of Bierce’s stories and the style of his writing, Bierce has an assured place in the history of the weird tale. As Bleiler has argued, he followed Poe in transporting Gothic and Victorian ghost stories to realms of the mind, finding in the human psyche “the ultimate source of horror.” His contributions were epoch-making; they influenced such writers as Blackwood, Arthur Machen, M. R. James, W. C. Morrow, Robert W. Chambers, Lord Dunsany, and Lovecraft; and the tidal wave that swept through these authors was in time felt by such modern writers of the weird as Carl Jacobi, Charles Beaumont, Rod Serling, among many others. His total influence can hardly be computed, for he wrote in that era when the horror tale was undergoing great development in the hands of a dozen well-known authors, so that his integral and cooperative part of the whole cannot be estimated today other than to say that his importance was indeed great, as was his satanic skill.
The 1960s saw something of a resurgence of interest in Bierce. In 1964 Dover issued a collection of ghost stories; in 1966 the Collected Works were reprinted in facsimile by the Gordian Press of New York; in 1967 a biography by Richard O’Connor appeared and Carey McWilliams’s 1929 biography was reprinted, as was Letters; and Ernest J. Hopkins engineered three Doubleday publications: The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary (1967), The Ambrose Bierce Satanic Reader (1968), and The Complete Short Stories (1970; reissued in 1971 as a two-volume paperback by Ballantine Books.)
In 1980, poet and noted Clark Ashton Smith scholar Donald Sidney-Fryer edited a volume of Bierce’s selected poems, unfortunately now out of print. Current efforts are underway on the part of S.T. Joshi and David Schultz, noted Lovecraft scholars, to bring most — if not all — of the writings of Bierce back into print. This includes his complete fiction, his collected fables, his autobiographical writings, the corrected complete Devil’s Dictionary, and his massive amounts of journalism.
Today, Bierce’s “complete” short stories are available on the World Wide Web, along with several versions of his most famous work, The Devil’s Dictionary.
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Bibliography
Bierce, Ambrose. A Vision of Doom. Edited D. Sidney-Fryer. West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1980.
—–. Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce. Edited by E. F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, 1964.
—–. The Complete Short Stories. Edited E. J. Hopkins. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970; New York: Ballantine Books, 1971 (paperback, two volumes).
Bleiler, E. F. “Introduction,” Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce. New York: Dover, 1964.
Joshi, S. T. “Ambrose Bierce: Horror as Satire.” In The Weird Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.
Lovecraft, H. P. Selected Letters. Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1965-1976, in five volumes.
Lovecraft, H. P. Supernatural Horror in Literature. New York: Dover, 1973.
McWilliams, Carey. Ambrose Bierce, A Biography. New York: A. & C. Boni, 1929; Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1967.
O’Conner, Richard. Ambrose Bierce, A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1967.