Status Updates From Collected Fiction Volume 1:...

The Appendix here isn’t nearly as useful as the appendices of the Clark Ashton Smith stories, presumably because Bierce supervised a more or less definitive collection of his works. The first Appendix is, uh, single versions of the ghost stories found in the early-middle of this volume. I don’t get a lot of value over the minor differences.

“An Untitled Tale”

Oh wow. This is a short sketch that describes a man who may be hallucinating but may also be a man’s repeated brushes with some kind of cosmic horror, bridging the gulf between dimensions with experiences that are beyond any describable human emotion. I don’t know if this story was available to Smith or Lovecraft but it is uncanny how this relates to what other authors danced around.

“The Stranger”

The core of the story is similar to “Two Lives” but it’s very clear to the reader, if not the genre-ignorant soldiers, that the dude they are talking to is a ghost. It’s a miserable story on his part, with the four prospectors opting for a suicide pact rather than give way to the siege on the cave.

“Beyond the Wall”

This is a tragic romance with just a shade of a ghost story thrown into the ending. The Bierce format is in full effect, here. The narrator, visiting an old friend, hears a supernatural knock on the wall, after which he hears the story behind the knock. It’s bittersweet and a bit too weighted with age to be maudlin.

“The Moonlit Road”

This is the first Bierce that I know for sure I read before, collected in B&N’s Classic Ghost Stories collection. This story is awesome and it’s mostly due to Julia Hetman’s testimony from beyond the veil, because the point of view of the ghost is incredibly well-written. Bierce’s format, as expressed through the son, the father, and the spirit of the wife, feels quite organic.

“John Mortonson’s Funeral”

WHAT

A DUDE HAS AN OSTENTATIOUS FUNERAL IN A GLASS COFFIN AND RIGHT BEFORE HE IS SUPPOSED TO BE BURIED HIS WEEPING WIFE DISCOVERS THAT HIS CAT IS IN THS COFFIN, EATING THE BODY?????!?

What the HELL Bierce

“One Summer Night”

More grotesque, dark humor from Bierce. A man is buried alive but dug up by two medical students and their hired labor, resurrection men. When they open the coffin, he sits up, scaring the students away. The laborer ensures that he gets his pay for the body.

“An Arrest”

Another anecdote. This time a murderer kills his jailer in order to escape but gets turned back by the man’s ghost, who “arrests” him, basically cowing the criminal into returning to the jail with no additional malfeasance.

“A Wireless Message”

This is one of those supernatural anecdote-type stories. A man gets a bizarre vision while he is out walking and it’s some kind of psychic link between himself and his wife, who is - unbeknownst to him at the time - in mortal peril from a fire along with their child.

“A Man With Two Lives”

Supernatural, and something of a tall tale because it breaks so many basic rules of Bierce’s fictions that it’s hard to take seriously. An army courier is ambushed by Native Americans and can’t remember how the fight ended. He ends up unscathed but completely naked in the wilderness, and when he finally makes it to his destination it appears that he has already been buried…

“A Vine On a House”

So, this is a grotesque story that sounds more like a Junji Ito work. A husband is probably cheating on his wife with his sister in law. When his wife - who is conspicuously short a foot - disappears, apparently visiting her parents, no one cares to look into it. Two years later her husband and family vanish and as the house falls into ruins, it’s dominated by a singular vine…

“A Diagnosis of Death”

This is darkly humorous. A man forms the opinion that ghosts are psychic echoes, more or less, and is of the opinion that “hauntings” can occur without the individual in question being dead.
Then he tells the story that inspired this reasoning, only for his friends to tell him that, no, you’re wrong and also, by the way, you’re screwed.

“At Old Man Eckhart’s”

Basically a short haunted house story, but the real question is whether it was Eckhart’s house that was haunted. The idea of a house having enough of an influence that it could basically pull Palmer from his OWN place and through the door whereafter he was lost forever… that’s some cosmic-horror type stuff.

“Moxon’s Master”

In this science-fiction story, a dude visits his eccentric inventor friend who has a supposition that all matter has some level of intelligence that dictates how it behaves on the microscopic and perhaps even quantum level. Without giving it away, Moxon is putting this consciousness to the test and, surprise, it’s pretty petty.

“The Eyes of the Panther”

One of Bierce’s more esoteric supernatural stories. A woman refuses her suitor under the grounds that she is insane. She tells her story, to which the hopeful man is incredulous, but she doesn’t hit on the most important part, her “possession”. Whether it’s nature vs nurture, an impression of an animal spirit on an unborn child, the end result is the same.

“A Jug of Sirup”

A ghost story, but not really a horror story. This is a humorous satire where the ghost of a shopkeeper with an inhuman work ethic resumes his business. It could have been worse. Silas has it out with the people who try to mob his store in his own way, but no one is killed, or at least Bierce does not write as such, and the town is forced to allow him to work if he so desires.

“The Damned Thing”

Okay, this is a good one. Bierce does sci-fi where a country man is plagued by an invisible thing, like The Predator, and we get an account of the man’s death from an observer whose life was curiously spared. The story comes across as a cautionary tale about xenophobia as only the man who shot the creature was harmed by it. That and the proverb-like section titles.

“John Bartine’s Watch”

A story of a cursed object tied to the American Revolutionary War. The conceits of the tale tie into whether you can inherit the death of a relative and whether the spirits of people are passed down to their descendants as a kind of direct resurrection. It’s interesting to see a story where George Washington is implicated in political assassinations.

“The Applicant”

I would not classify this as horror except for the fact that the opening moments has a child find what is almost certainly a body in the snow. This is some kind of satire about the cruelty of society where a philanthropist sets up a home for old men and then, when he arrives as an applicant much later in life, is denied access and essentially sentenced to death.

“An Adventure at Brownville”

This is a sort of supernatural story with what I can only assume is some sort of hypnotist villain. I think that the most subtle plot twist of this one is that the narrator is only being courted by Eva so that he can be a witness to her death by “suicide” when she is more or less commanded to jump.

“The Death of Halpin Frayser”

A very dense horror story whose highlight is the dream-imagery that Halpin sees right before his death. As a Gothic horror story there are some squicky beats - like Halpin and his mother barely averting their incest - but the tragedy of the piece is poignant. The inference is that, after death, his mom continued to look for him, but as a revenant, all she could do is kill.

“A Baby Tramp”

This is kind of a ghost story but mostly a tragedy about an orphan whose family had once been the wealthiest of its town. A lot of stuff happens, including some bizarre Biblical plague-type stuff. It’s one of Bierce’s most maudlin tales. Thus far, at least.

“The Thing at Nolan”

Well, this is another one of those anecdotes, this one about a ghost. The gist is that a son probably murdered his father but his father was sighted miles away, walking around with a head wound. It’s pretty obvious here, but the man seen in Nolan was obviously some sort of ghost, whose appearance manages to get his son acquitted… before they find his dad’s body some months later.

“The Secret of Macarger Gulch”

A ghost story with some other psychic phenomena. Dude wonders why the gulch has its name and then spends the night in a cabin there. He has a bizarre dream of a married couple, has random flashes of… insight, and then witnesses one of those hauntings where a brutal act is repeated. In Bierce fashion, a later social call ties the seemingly unrelated elements together.

“The Boarded Window”

This is ostensibly a ghost story but it is actually a retelling of one of Bierce’s anecdotes contained within “Bodies of the Dead”. It’s a considerably younger woman and a wife, here, and it’s not a house cat but a BLACK PANTHER that tries to DRAG the corpse away.

“A Lady From Redhorse”

This is a straight up romance with some occult trappings. Bierce namedrops Madame Blavatsky of the Theosophistical society, which is a weird direction, and it hints at a lot of unsavory stuff, but the entire thing is basically… well, this is a rare happy ending for Bierce.

“Haïta the Shepherd”

This is a prose-poem and parable about happiness, told from the simple life of a shepherd. This story’s main claim to fame would be the origin of Hastur, a name that has been cribbed for cosmic horror for about 150 years since. Here, he’s just a sort of Abrahamic deity. It’s baffling that Hastur exploded into something so much bigger in the wake of this very short fable.

“The Middle Toe of the Right Foot”

This one is a ghost story with a haunted house and a lot of moving parts as befits Bierce. The house has been haunted since its owner murdered his wife and two kids and then ran away. It is chosen as the site of a knife duel to the death. I’m not sure what happened to Rosser, but the twist is very much in Bierce’s serendipity of death.

“The Realm of the Unreal”

Bierce deals with a hypnotist, here, who - once again - has it out with a disbelieving skeptic. Dr. Dorrimore has two encounters with the narrator, five years apart, and both of them leave him something worse for the wear, but at least he isn’t rendered insane or, well, dead.