Ambrose Bierce spent a lifetime perfecting the art of the controlled detonation. His stories are short, structurally exact, and designed to end badly — for the characters, and sometimes for the reader’s composure. Over the next few weeks we’ll be adding seven of his best to Great Tales.
The selection spans both sides of what Bierce did best. Four of the stories — “A Horseman in the Sky,” “Chickamauga,” “The Affair at Coulter’s Notch,” and “The Coup de Grâce” — draw on his own service in the Civil War, and they are as unsparing about it as anything in American literature. Bierce had no interest in heroism as consolation. His soldiers are caught in situations where duty, love, and survival pull in incompatible directions, and the prose gives no quarter to any of them.
The other three — “A Diagnosis of Death,” “The Story of a Conscience,” and “The Middle Toe of the Right Foot” — show the gothic Bierce, the writer who understood that horror works best when administered in a dry, almost clinical tone. These are ghost stories written by a man who didn’t entirely believe in ghosts but knew exactly how to make you forget that.
Taken together, they make the case for Bierce as one of the essential American short story writers: difficult, precise, and impossible to shake.
The first story, “A Horseman in the Sky,” is up now.