The final image of him is ridiculous; he becomes something of an inverted Don Quixote—a seventy-one-year-old asthmatic huffing and puffing through the Mexican deserts chasing after an army whose politics, if he ever considered them, he would have deplored, more intent on putting himself in harm’s way than tilting at wind-mills, to be sure, but perversely idealistic nonetheless. But Ambrose Bierce was not a ridiculous man, and the life he lived was more interesting and more substantial than its flamboyant and perhaps imagined conclusion. Though his fiction is not autobiographical in the way that Melville’s is, Bierce’s actual life does shed light on the themes and techniques of his imaginative writing. For that reason, it is worthwhile to linger over his biography before commenting on the achievement of his short fiction.

Despite ample and fine biographical treatment of the man, Ambrose Gwinett Bierce remains, and will perhaps always remain, something of a mystery. It is not at all clear, at any rate, how much of his supposed bitterness was temperamental and how much contrived, and it is easy to overestimate the depth of his resentment. We know, for example, that, apart from his devotion to his brother Albert, Ambrose was not particularly attached to or even fond of his family. We know as well that in his Collected Works he reserved a section of one volume for stories gathered together under the title “The Parenticide Club.” Whether these two facts, taken together, make a third is less certain. Judging from the tone of the two stories from that section and included in this volume (“My Favorite Murder” and “Oil of Dog”), the thought of parenticide provided the occasion for tall tale humor and grisly fun and nothing more. And as the reader will soon discover, much of the shock and affecting pathos of his serious short fiction derives from the loss of some family member—a wife, a twin brother, a father, a mother. Bierce knew how to play to his reader’s sensitivities, even though he did not necessarily share them himself.

Though the narrator of “My Favorite Murder” is accused of murdering his mother, his legal defense is that that crime pales in comparison with the way he murdered his uncle. This is purely antic fiction, and we know, as yet another fact, that Ambrose preferred his successful and relatively worldly uncle Lucius, to his pious and bookish father, Marcus, and certainly bore his uncle no ill will. Lucius Versus Bierce had come west to Ohio from Connecticut in 1815, and his younger brother Marcus had followed him a few years later. He had almost immediately embarked on plans for self-improvement, adventure, and self-advancement. He participated in the illegal Patriot’s War to rescue Canada from British domination and thereafter was known as “General Bierce.” He escaped conviction for violating U.S. neutrality laws and, in fact, was eventually elected the mayor of Akron.

The writer’s father, Marcus Aurelius Bierce, by contrast, came west to a religious settlement known as “Horse Cave” in Meigs County, Ohio, and it was there that Ambrose was born on June 24, 1842. While the uncle enjoyed a flamboyant popularity, the father eked out an obscure living on farms, first in Ohio and, after 1846, in Indiana. It is not surprising that Ambrose might attempt to emulate the uncle and scorn the father.

Bierce attended a poor country school in Indiana and apparently from an early age rejected the dour religious conviction of his family and surrounding community. Many years later he would define faith as “belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.” However, in his youth he had neither the opportunity nor the literary sophistication to express this sort of contempt. His uncle paved the way to both, perhaps, when he sent his nephew to the Kentucky Military Institute in 1859, for the curriculum there was a demanding one and the previously recalcitrant boy proved to be an able student.

Like another supposedly rebellious spirit, Edgar Allan Poe, with whom he is so often compared, Bierce seems to have responded to—even liked—soldierly discipline and decorum. Surely it was at the military institute that he acquired the military bearing that characterized him for the remainder of his life. It appears that he also received more than adequate training in topographical engineering; the surviving maps that he made during the Civil War reveal either a natural talent for or thorough training in draftsmanship. In either case, Bierce’s alert responsiveness to natural contours and spatial relationships, so necessary to mapmaking, would serve him well in the war and also in his short fiction.

Bierce returned to Indiana from the military institute later the same year. He was eager for the sort of adventure and experience that was unavailable to him there, however, and spent his time performing odd jobs with little enthusiasm. A national emergency supplied him with a personal opportunity. When the Civil War broke out, the young man enlisted as a private in the Indiana Ninth Brigade for three months’ service, ample time, it was believed, to put down the insurrectionists to the south. His entrance into the conflict does not seem to have been prompted by a principled political interest in preserving the Union so much as by the sort of fiery idealism that motivated his uncle to “liberate” Canada. Even so, during his first brief tour of duty, which consisted mostly of skirmishes or minor battles, Bierce established his courage by risking his life to rescue a fallen comrade.

After the three-month term had expired, the Ninth Brigade was reorganized for a three-year tour of duty (the revised estimate of the time necessary to end the war) and Bierce reenlisted as a sergeant. His brigade returned to the Cheat Mountains of western Virginia, where he again saw minor action. When his brigade was assigned to the Army of the Ohio, Bierce was destined to experience the horror of battle on a grand scale. The Army of the Ohio, under the command of Gen. Don Carlos Buell, was ordered to join Grant’s Army of the Tennessee for assault on the Confederate railroad center in Corinth, Mississippi. However, the Confederate General A. S. Johnston launched his own offensive against Grant on April 6 at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, a day before the Army of the Ohio arrived. The engagement became known as the Battle of Shiloh, after the name of a small chapel in the area. In an essay, “What I Saw of Shiloh,” Bierce remarks upon the irony: “The fact of a Christian church . . . giving name to a wholesale cutting of Christian throats by Christian hands need not be dwelt on here; the frequency of its recurrence in the history of our species has somewhat abated the moral interest that would otherwise attach to it.”

As the war progressed, Bierce rose through the ranks, eventually to first lieutenant, and he was present at many of the fiercest engagements of the war. In the Battle of Shiloh, the Ninth Indiana alone lost 170 men. The total figures are staggering: Federal soldiers killed or wounded, 13,047; Confederates, 10,694. Other engagements in which Bierce saw action were at least as brutal. The Battle of Stones River ( January 1863): Federal soldiers killed or wounded, 9,532; Confederates, 9,239. The Battle of Chickamauga (September 1863): Federal soldiers killed or wounded, 16,170; Confederates, 18,454. He was also present at other bloody encounters, as violent if not so epic: Missionary Ridge; Pickett’s Mill (which he later described as “criminal” for its mismanagement); much of Sherman’s campaign for Atlanta, which, as the army moved southward, produced a steady torrent of death (in a single month, over twenty thousand men from both sides were killed); a skirmish at Kennesaw Mountain (where Bierce himself received a near fatal injury from a sniper’s bullet requiring three months’ convalescence); and the Battles of Franklin and Nashville.

Bierce had entered the war a boy of nineteen. When it was over he was still young; though, as his Civil War memoirs repeatedly lament, he had also left his youth somewhere behind him. He had witnessed the grotesqueries of war, but he had also observed the fear, spite, arrogance, and stupidity of human conduct, alongside transcendent acts of valor and self-sacrifice. He had dutifully followed orders from on high, though he at times privately thought them ill informed or misguided. He had been seriously wounded, and, briefly, he had been a prisoner of war. He acquired a lifelong respect for Generals Buell and William Hazen, under whom he had served and who in Bierce’s estimation had been unfairly rebuked, and something less than respect for Generals Sherman and Grant, who enjoyed the nation’s favor.

And he had experienced the unthinkable. In the Cheat Mountains of western Virginia, for example, he witnessed an event that would find its way into the disturbing tale “The Coup de Grâce.” One day his column passed the repulsive bodies of fallen soldiers, “their blank, staring eyes, their teeth uncovered by the contraction of lips.” The next day, they passed the same bodies, which seemed to have altered their positions, to have shed part of their clothing, and to have lost their faces. They had been eaten by pigs. In the fiction, Bierce describes the scene this way: “Fifty yards away, on the crest of a low, thinly wooded hill, [Captain Madwell] saw several dark objects moving about the fallen men—a herd of swine. One stood with its back to him, its shoulders sharply elevated. Its forefeet were upon a human body, its head was depressed and invisible. The bristly ridge of its chine showed black against the red west. Captain Madwell drew away his eyes and fixed them again upon the thing which had been his friend.” The point to be made here is that the macabre quality of Bierce’s imagination often consisted in humanizing the unimaginable, not in adding contrived or ghastly detail to his fictions.

After the war, Bierce found employment but he remained without occupation. It would be years before he resolved to become a writer, but he seems to have already acquired one of the indispensable requirements, which he would declare in his essay “To Train a Writer” (1899): To the aspiring writer “a continent should not seem wide, nor a century long. And it would be needful that he know and have an ever present consciousness that this is a world of fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions— frothing mad!” The peace at Appomattox, it would appear, had not abolished the depravity of his species.

For a time Bierce served as an aide for the Treasury Department in Alabama, having the unenviable duty of seizing and protecting southern cotton that the government had decided was federal property. Though evidently blameless himself, Bierce saw several instances of roguery, opportunism, and venality among his northern colleagues, and he continually faced the possibility of retributive justice of one sort or another from resentful and frustrated southerners.

Along with a deepening cynicism, he acquired at this time the asthmatic condition that plagued him for the rest of his life. For these and other reasons, Bierce may have welcomed the unexpected opportunity to join General Hazen in Omaha for a fact-finding expedition of the west. Besides, the offer carried with it the promise of a captaincy. Through no fault of Hazen’s, the commission eventually offered him was for a second lieutenancy, but by the time Bierce received this news he was in San Francisco. Bierce indignantly refused the commission and left the army for good, but he was to remain in California for many years.

He took a job as a night watchman at the Sub-Treasury building in 1867, and it was about this time that he undertook to transform himself into a professional writer. Bierce approached the project with the sort of discipline he would years later advise in “To Train a Writer”—reading widely, especially in the classics, sharpening his perceptions and attempting to think clearly, and, if any were left to him, “dispelling his illusions and destroying his ideals.” His literary debut was the publication of a poem in the Californian. Though he continued to write poetry for the rest of his life and published two volumes of satirical verse, Black Beetles in Amber (1892) and Shapes of Clay (1903), he concluded early that his métier was not as a poet and directed his energies toward the writing of prose.

Apart from the novel, which Bierce considered a “short story padded,” he proved to be capable in a variety of genres—the essay, the sketch, the fable, the satire, the tall tale, and of course the short story. He was soon publishing pieces in local periodicals, and when he was offered the opportunity to edit The San Francisco News Letter he gave up his job at the Treasury and began to write the “Town Crier” column. Later, he offered Bret Harte some of his essays that were rather more serious than the satiric journalism he was contributing to the News Letter. They were published in The Overland Monthly, and it was in that periodical that Bierce published his first piece of short fiction in 1871. It was in that year, too, that he married Mollie Day, the daughter of a prosperous miner.

In a relatively brief time, Ambrose Bierce had found his calling, trained himself as a writer, infiltrated San Francisco literary circles, and married above his station. For a man who, by all odds, should have lived out his days as the village atheist of Elkhart, Indiana, Bierce had succeeded mightily. His “Town Crier” column had acquired some reputation as far east as New York and London, his popularity in Britain rivaling that of Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller. This was propitious, for the bride’s father promised to send the newlyweds to England as a wedding present. Bierce resigned from the News Letter and the couple left the city in the early spring of 1872.

He instantly became so fond of the mother country, and perhaps of the English fondness for him as well, that he remained there for three years. Often using the pen name “Dod Grile,” he wrote for Figaro and Fun. Bierce began to socialize with the Fleet Street crowd and established a close friendship with the humorist Tom Hood. Bierce’s first three books were published in England—The Fiend’s Delight (1873), Nuggets and Dust (1873), and Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874)—and the first two of his three children were born there. His expatriation, in other words, was altogether agreeable, and he might have remained in England indefinitely, but his wife, who had returned home for a visit, wired him that she was pregnant with their third child. Somewhat reluctantly, he sailed for America in September 1875.

Now a father with three children, Bierce was faced with beginning to build a career once again, and he seems to have taken a more calculated interest in the project than he had when he first arrived in San Francisco. He became the associate editor of the Argonaut, a periodical with a definite political agenda in mind, and to write his “Prattle” column, which sometimes contradicted the purposes of the owners. Under the pseudonym “William Herman,” Bierce and T. A. Harcourt published The Dance of Death (1877), which purported to condemn the waltz on moral grounds, but did so in suggestive, almost lurid detail. Whether this literary hoax was intended to succeed in commercial as well as antic terms is unclear, but it became something of a best-seller, and Bierce himself helped sales along by damning the book in the Argonaut.

In 1879, Bierce abruptly retired from the literary life and removed to the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory. Perhaps his move can be explained because he did not get along with Frank Pix ley, the founder of the Argonaut; perhaps it was because the San Francisco of the 1870s had become in the words of his biographer Carey McWilliams “magnificent, dull and empty”; or perhaps it was because Bierce, with three young children to support, was seeking a more stable financial future. In any case, he served as a mining engineer in Rockerville and planned to have his family join him there in the not-too-distant future. This undertaking ought to have been immensely profitable to Bierce and to the company for which he worked, but ineptitude, spite, and knavery worked together to spoil the venture. Despite charges of corruption and mismanagement, Bierce, as he had done in Alabama after the war, performed his duties honestly and honorably. According to Paul Fatout, who has exhaustively charted Bierce’s experience in the Dakotas, he was the ablest businessman and miner in the entire company. For a man whose motto was “Nothing matters,” it is nevertheless apparent that his personal sense of integrity mattered deeply to him. Whether Bierce’s conduct proceeded from principled idealism or from a feeling for what he owed himself is not clear.

Back in San Francisco, or rather nearby, since his asthma troubled him there more than at higher elevations, the journalist worked five years for the Wasp, where he resumed his “Prattle” column. By 1886 he was out of work once again, however. The entrance into his life of the young publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, William Randolph Hearst, was fortuitous. Bierce suddenly had a regular income, a certain autonomy that allowed him to work out of the city, and, though the two men were often in decided disagreement, considerable freedom from editorial intervention. From 1887 until 1899, when he left to live in the east, Bierce worked for Hearst in, if not absolute contentment, at least productive stability.

Unfortunately, it was during this period also that his domestic life disintegrated. He separated from his wife in 1888; the next year his son Day was killed in a gun duel. How much or little the combination of hard-won professional success and personal disappointment and grief installed within him the productive tensions necessary for his art is impossible to say. Regardless, it is a fact that these same years saw the creation of much of his best work. He continued to fashion what would become his notorious The Devil’s Dictionary (1911), though it first appeared as The Cynic’s Word Book (1906). More pertinent to this volume, Bierce wrote a remarkable number of short stories in a relatively brief time, enough, in fact, to publish two volumes in successive years. Tales of Soldiers and Civilians was published simultaneously in England as In the Midst of Life in 1892; his tales of the supernatural, Can Such Things Be?, was published in 1893.

The titles of these two collections are perhaps indicative of the high literary ambitions the author had for them. No doubt a British audience for his volume of Civil War stories would possess neither the fund of fairly recent memories of a national conflict nor a casual acquaintance with the place, occasion, or seriousness (both political and symbolic) of the war. It was likely for that reason that the English edition was published under the title In the Midst of Life, though it is unclear whether the change was the decision of Bierce or his publishers, Chatto and Windus. In any event, the phrase is taken from the funeral service in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer: “In the midst of life, we are in death.” The change in title gave his volume of tales the force of spiritual parable and freed it from the historical associations it would have had for an American audience. His collection of supernatural tales, on the other hand, took its title from Macbeth. Shortly after the appearance of Ban quo’s ghost, Macbeth exclaims to Lady Macbeth:

Circumstances did not immediately conspire in favor of the author’s ambitions, however. Though both collections of short fiction were favorably reviewed in America and England, the failures of publishing houses deferred at least in financial terms the success he may have anticipated. The reissue of an enlarged edition of In the Midst of Life in 1898 did something to correct the imbalance. Meantime, he enjoyed being the center of San Francisco literary circles. He gave a great deal of time and energy to aspiring young writers without compromising his severe critical standards; in return he typically received unqualified admiration from his pupils. In rather altered terms, Bierce occupied the position of a Dr. Johnson, whom he respected and admired, or a William Dean Howells, whom he did not. Still, the satisfaction he had once taken in the San Francisco literary life had diminished considerably by the end of the century. Bierce seemed to welcome the change Hearst provided by sending him east. He moved to Washington, where prior experience had demonstrated to him that he was relatively free from his asthmatic condition.

Bierce’s duties there were not onerous, and he made several short trips to nearby cities, including New York where his remaining son lived. He moved in military circles now, and he visited more than once the Civil War battlefields he had known in an earlier life. The quality of feeling he experienced there is perhaps suggested in this volume by “A Bivouac of the Dead.” When Bierce indulged himself in the memoir, and in dramatic contrast to his war fiction, he could become romantic. He concludes “What I Saw of Shiloh” in a tone of dismay and nostalgic grace: “Is it not strange that the phantoms of a blood-stained period have so airy a grace and look with so tender eyes?—that I recall with difficulty the danger and deaths and horrors of the time, and without effort all that was gracious and picturesque? Ah Youth, there is no such wizard as thou! Give me but one touch of thine artist hand upon the dull canvas of the Present . . . and I will willingly surrender an other life than the one that I should have thrown away at Shiloh.” It is not so very surprising that Bierce should seek out one last battlefield, this time in Mexico, to throw away his life.

No doubt the debate about whether Bierce was suicidal will continue. It is rather more certain that in the beginning years of the new century he was contemplating final things. He was several times seriously ill and, it seemed, surrounded by death and sickness. His remaining son, Leigh, died of pneumonia in 1901; soon after, his daughter, Helen, contracted typhoid fever and nearly died herself; and his estranged wife, Mollie, died the same year. As for Ambrose Bierce, he was busily tying up loose ends. Thanks to the admiring support of the publisher Walter Neale, Bierce was able to bequeath to anyone who remained interested a handsome edition of The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce. For four years, from 1908 to 1912, he worked diligently on what eventually became a twelve-volume set. He transferred his cemetery plot in California to his daughter in 1913 and soon thereafter announced to a friend in a letter, “I’d hate to die between two sheets, and, God willing, I won’t.” In October 1913 he left Washington. Once again he toured the battle sites of his youth and then moved on to New Orleans, San An tonio, Laredo, and finally El Paso. Apparently he acquired in Juarez the necessary papers that would permit him to accompany Pancho Villa’s army (though this is by no means certain), and by late December he was in Mexico. He was never heard from again; this much is certain.

Ambrose Bierce was such a deliberate maverick that other distinctions that may not at first seem momentous or even real are also in order. As a critic, he was not critical but opinionated (as the title of Volume X of the Collected Works, The Opinionator, clearly indicates). In his essay “On Literary Criticism,” he demonstrates just how little patience he has for those critics who “read between the lines,” discover in this vacancy the author’s true “purpose,” and present it as a “problem” that the author has attempted to “solve.” He had labels for such critics—“microcephalous bibliopomps,” “strabismic ataxiates,” and the like. (Is it any wonder that H. L. Mencken should find the man so appealing?) Bierce was not a humorist, either, but a satirist (though he freely acknowledged that a republican form of government could not sustain or encourage satire). He was not a comedian, but a wit (though his tall tales are sometimes extremely funny and his wit often more wry than biting). “Wit,” he wrote, “may make us smile, or make us wince, but laughter—that is the cheaper price that we pay for an inferior entertainment, namely humor.” So self-defined, he proclaims his superiority over and prohibits comparisons to men he knew and more or less liked—Bret Harte and Mark Twain.

Bierce professed to despise the novel and novelists. Following Poe, he argued that because a novel could not be read at a single sitting it could not achieve a single, unified aesthetic effect. Curiously, he held the romances of Scott and Hawthorne to no such standard. As for the novel, however, he believed that the legitimacy of the form died (depending on his mood) with Fielding and Richardson and surely survived no later than Thackeray. (By fiat, down go Howells and James.) More specifically, he had no use for realism and realists. He defined realism in The Devil’s Dictionary: “The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring worm.” (Nevertheless, Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway responded to the disturbing realism of Bierce’s war stories.) He was neither regionalist nor local colorist, though he sometimes acted as apologist for California writers and was capable of at least competent dialect writing. Still, he objected to the “corn-fed enthusiasm of the prairies” and thus dismissed Hamlin Garland with finality.

Bierce was American to his fingertips and trafficked in that national identity when he was in England, but he also announced that a “ ‘distinctively American literature’ has not materialized, excepting in the works of Americans distinctively illiterate.” He scoffed at the idea of originality and exalted excellence in established forms, but his own fiction is often rightly described as experimental, and he rang some interesting changes on familiar genres. Like so many other writers of his day, Bierce was not above indulging in the formulaic plot twists of O. Henry or the fantastic but dramatic dilemmas of Frank Stockton. But he claimed to despise popular magazine fiction and thought its highest function was to “stir up from the shallows of its readers’ understanding the sediment which they are pleased to call sentiment, murking all their mental pool and effacing the reflected images of their natural environment.” He also objected to the didactic in fiction, but this was easy for someone to say who had at his disposal for most of his writing life a column in which he could be as vituperative and as didactic as he pleased.

What are we to make of these snarled and snarling convictions, and what is left standing once this freewheeling iconoclast is done smashing the false idols of his day and of the next? Not much, I suppose, but some awfully interesting fiction, interesting and distinctive enough to make the adjective “Biercean” meaningful. Besides, many of the idiosyncrasies of the man are not so very perplexing. Like many, perhaps most, autodidacts, his self-education was disciplined but not systematic, and he wears his erudition a bit too gaudily at times. Having achieved such an exacting style through severe training and determination, he could be as unforgiving as the recruit who has just made it through boot camp. His mature prose is stately and polished to an almost Augustan sheen. For that reason, perhaps, he could not resist publishing a minutely prescriptive book of usage, intended mostly for journalists and editors and rather indignantly called Write It Right (1909). At all events, the verbal precision he eventually acquired was brought into the service of the grotesque, the unreal, and the unthinkable, and the combination frequently resulted in superb fiction.

In his essay “The Short Story,” Bierce rebels against the laws of realism, the laws “Cato Howells has given his little senate.” Among those laws is that of probability. In point of fact, he insisted, life itself is improbable—motives are impenetrable, occurrences unpredictable and strange, moral imperatives perversely insufficient to human emergencies: “It is to him of widest knowledge, of deepest feeling, of sharpest observation and insight, that life is most crowded with figures of heroic stature, with spirits of dream, with demons of the pit, with graves that yawn in pathways leading to the light, with existences not of earth, both malign and benign—ministers of grace and ministers of doom.” The fiction writer has no use for probability “except to make what is related seem probable in the reading—seem true.” This essay was published under the heading “The Controversialist.” Of course Bierce’s position here is deliberately contrary and, if nothing more, serves to authorize what he had already achieved in his short fiction.

Part of the author’s special competence in creating the seemingly true probably derives from his training in topological engineering, in mapmaking, for he was capable of the dramatic rendering of spatial relations in ways that few writers of much greater talent would even attempt. The suspense and terror of “One of the Missing” or “The Man and the Snake,” for example, are built up out of analogous situations. In both instances, the setting is soon organized around the fearful consciousness of a single (and supposedly fatal) focal point—the barrel of a rifle and eyes of a snake. Whether the protagonist is pinned down, as in the first instance, or transfixed, as in the second, the relation of hands, feet, furniture, and the like are depicted with the sort of minute precision that have led some critics, quite mistakenly, to label Bierce a realist. His imagination was vivid, but it was not realistic. He located the figures of his fiction in remarkably different environments with exacting attention, and he moved effortlessly from broad expanses to constricting human predicaments in ways that took the gothic out of doors or made suspense out of the stuff of sometimes accidental, sometimes providential operations.

In an autobiographical sketch that recounts his early experience of the war entitled “On a Mountain,” Bierce wrote of his aesthetic appreciation of the Cheat Mountains of western Virginia. For a “flatlander” such as himself, who had grown up on the plains of Ohio and Indiana, “a mountain region was a perpetual miracle. Space seemed to have taken on a new dimension; areas to have not only length and breadth, but thickness.” This same territory became the site for one of his most popular stories, “A Horseman in the Sky,” and likewise depends on a talent for topographical rendering:

Bierce’s talents for mapping the territory of the imagination were combined with others. Those talents, too, perhaps derived from his experience in the war. The landscape he antiseptically charts with the detachment of an surveyor often takes a subjective turn and is typically colored by the limits of perception or invested with fear and dread. The war, at least as he remembered it when he came to write short fiction, was a world apart. “How curiously we had regarded everything! how odd it all had seemed!” he wrote in “A Son of the Gods.” “Nothing had appeared quite familiar; the most commonplace objects—an old saddle, a splintered wheel, a forgotten canteen—everything had related something of the mysterious personality of those strange men who had been killing us.” In “A Tough Tussle,” he put it another way: In the soldier’s nighttime vigil, “There are sounds without a name, forms without substance, translations in space of objects which have not been seen to move, movements wherein nothing is observed to change its place. Ah, children of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in which you live!”

At his best, Bierce is able to synthesize these two worlds—the precisely measurable and the uncertain and unnameable—with stylistic grace. A single, clear image sometimes conveys the tension: “This night was bright enough to bite like a serpent.” More often, he establishes an atmospheric apprehension. In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” the Confederate spy about to be hanged is invested with especially acute senses, so keen that they “made record of things never before perceived”: “He noted the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass. The humming of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragon-flies’ wings, the strokes of the water-spiders’ legs, like oars which had lifted their boat—all these made audible music.”

By contrast, for the child in “Chickamauga,” the “haunted landscape” is vivid with light and color but eerily silent as well: “Through the belt of trees beyond the brook shone a strange red light, the trunks and branches of the trees making a black lacework against it. It struck the creeping figures and gave them monstrous shadows, which caricatured their movements on the lit grass. . . . It sparkled on buttons and bits of metal in their clothing.” “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “Chickamauga” are very nearly perfect tales, and these descriptive passages, along with many others, serve simultaneously as clues to the final narrative disclosure and as evocations of a mental world so vividly pictured that its mysterious reality is strangely compelling.

Bierce is masterfully adroit in his management of point of view as well and carefully circumscribes how much or little he will or can share with the reader. In “One Kind of Officer,” the noise of battle makes communication nearly impossible, and when a lieutenant tries to convey some urgent information to his captain, we are told in a unnervingly formal narrative voice: “His gestures, if coolly noted by an actor, would have been pronounced to be those of protestation.” “A Son of the Gods” is subtitled “A Study in the Present Tense” and takes a rather different narrative tack. It quickly becomes a form of on-the-spot reporting, the narrative perspective on a distant rider limited by his field glasses and a general uncertainty: “One moment only and he wheels right about and is speeding like the wind straight down the slope—toward his friends, toward his death! . . . [H]e is down. No, he recovers his seat; he has but pulled his horse upon its haunches. They are up and away! . . . They are down at last. But look again—the man has detached himself from the dead animal. He stands erect, motionless, holding his sabre in his right hand straight above his head. . . . It is a sign to us, to the world, to posterity. It is a hero’s salute to death and history.” In the voice of a ringside radio announcer (though such an analogy would necessarily be obscure to the author), Bierce has given a blow-by-blow narration in the present tense and yet before our very eyes he has converted the momentary bravery of a “military Christ” into a tale of the “pitiless perfection of the divine, eternal plan.”

Bierce had a seemingly endless variety of points of view at his disposal—one narrator has received his story secondhand; another suffers from a lack of memory; another apologizes that he is “no storyteller”; others, for one reason or another, cannot hear or see. He sometimes prolongs moments and compresses eons. In “One of the Missing,” we learn that “it was decreed from the beginning of time that Private Searing was not to murder anybody that bright summer morning. . . . For countless ages events had been so matching themselves together . . . that the acts which he had in will would have marred the harmony of the pattern.” A few pages later, we are immersed in Searing’s perilous present. He is trapped beneath a collapsed building, his own rifle barrel staring him in the face, the reader held tight to the figure’s tortured consciousness: “Here in this confusion of timbers and boards is the sole universe. Here is immortality in time—each pain an everlasting life. The throbs tick off eternities.”

For Bierce, the world of war is a disturbing mix of the chaotic, random, and destructive events confronted by the ordered arrangements of military rank, decorum, and protocol. The combination provides ample opportunity for irony. In many of his short stories, for example, there is the drama of a conflict of duty, and in every instance the observance of duty has its destructive consequences. In “The Story of a Conscience,” Captain Hartroy orders the immediate execution of a man who had once saved his life and then quietly commits suicide. In “A Horseman in the Sky,” the father commands his son to “do what you conceive to be your duty”; his duty, it so happens, requires him to kill the father. In “An Affair of Out posts,” Captain Armisted saves the life of the man who has made him a cuckold, and as a consequence loses his own. Most affecting of all, in “The Affair at Coulter’s Notch,” the artillery officer Captain Coulter complies with the command to fire upon his own house; within are his wife and child. Related to these are stories of false pride: of the witty stoic, Parker Adderson, who borrows his courage from what he takes to be strict military observance; of Lieutenant Brayle in “Killed at Resaca,” a man “vain of his courage”; or of Captain Ransome, whose wounded pride causes him to knowingly fire upon his own men, in “One Kind of Officer.” These are rank offenses against the law of probability, to be sure, but they do not feel that way in the course of reading.

Bierce’s tales of the supernatural, as well as his tall tale humor, are in this sense continuous, both tonally and morally, with his war fiction, and he sometimes bent existing comic forms to match his cynicism. More than once, he wrote in the mode of the condensed novel popular among the San Francisco Bohemians, including Bret Harte and Mark Twain. By reducing their “novels” to 500 to 2,500 words, complete with chapter titles, intricate plots, and thwarted love affairs, these humorists meant to burlesque the sentimental romance. Bierce used the same form, but he was not very much interested in parodic comedy. Instead he used chapter titles to deepen the irony of the events or to give them the effect of sinister parable. One chapter title reads, “How to Play the Cannon without Notes”; another advises, “When You Have Lost Your Life Consult a Physician”; yet another observes, “One Does Not Always Eat What Is on the Table,” followed by a description of the local coroner examining a corpse.

Nor was Bierce the only California writer known for irreverence and verbal assault. Western journalism was notoriously fierce and coarsely comic, but his invective had little of the mischievous or the antic in it, and his comedy was so outlandishly grotesque (as in “Oil of Dog” or “A Revolt of the Gods”) that it makes one a little bit ashamed to laugh. Bierce seemed intent on outdoing the competition, if only to maintain a cranky independence from the rest. He did not altogether succeed in keeping his admirers at bay, however. He disdained the role of humorist, but Mark Twain included several of his animal fables in his Library of American Humor (1888). He pilloried William Dean Howells, and when he learned that Howells had declared him one of America’s three greatest writers, Bierce’s acceptance of the compliment was less than gracious: “I am sure Mr. Howells is the other two.” Nevertheless, Howells saw fit to include “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” in his Great Modern American Stories (1920).

At times Bierce even distanced himself from the terms of his own fiction, and of his own experience. In the 1870s, Bierce and Tom Hood made a pact, probably as a gesture of the depth their friendship, that the first to die should attempt to contact the other. Shortly after Hood died in 1875, Bierce reported that he met the spirit of his old friend and had the “evidence of my own senses” as affirmation of the fact. A few years later, in the Arognaut he dismissed the experience by saying that “the senses fool one another,” that “sight is translated into sound, or sudden and strong mental impressions are mistaken for tactual ones.”

This brush with the world beyond would provide the basis for his story “The Damned Thing.” However, there he gave yet another account of the presence of a spirit—the malevolent presence was of a color that the human eye is unable to discern. Bierce was fond of explaining his mysteries away by scientific or quasi-scientific theory, only to repudiate that explanation in its turn. In “A Tough Tussle,” Second-Lieutenant Byring decides that his fear of the supernatural is not unusual; superstitious dread has been passed on generation after generation since the beginning of the human race and will require yet another ten thousand years to outgrow. But the final disclosure in the tale casts doubt on this view. In “Moxon’s Master,” Bierce uses Herbert Spencer’s mechanistic definition of “Life” as the intellectual rationale for the creation of an automaton chess player, but that theory cannot quite explain why the machine is a sore loser.

Ambrose Bierce may have deserved every epithet applied to him—“wicked,” “bitter,” “cynical,” and the like. I rather suspect he enjoyed his reputation, however; notoriety is for certain temperaments more fun than fame. He seemed to seize upon every opportunity for an irony, at any rate, as if it were some delicious morsel to be savored. He seemed to delight in his ability to make us squirm. If he preferred wit to humor, it was because he preferred to make his readers wince, not laugh. Of the pieces gathered together in this volume, only “Haïta the Shepherd” and “A Bivouac of the Dead” can be described as poignant. The others are shocking, horrifying, or unnerving; they are sometimes moving, but on the author’s terms, not our own.

Despite all the disconcerting grotesqueries in his short fiction, composed it would appear with malice aforethought, I doubt we are ever tempted to think of Bierce as despairing. There is too much self-evident care and attention given to the style and cadence of his prose to really believe that nothing mattered to him, and there is too much fierce indignation for us to really believe he was beyond being morally offended. In keeping with his cynical persona, Bierce once defined happiness as “An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.” Given the world he knew, or thought he knew, and the myriad ways he so vividly pictured that world for his readers, I suppose Bierce must have had his share of happiness.