Sunday, September 2, 2018

Masters of Horror: Ambrose Bierce



"Bitter Bierce," as he was known for his uncompromising honesty

As part of the content-rich Resource Guide at the end of my supernatural horror short story, "It's Your Funeral," I offer five short essays on the masters of modern supernatural horror fiction—Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Aickman, Clark Ashton Smith, and Ambrose Bierce.


Here are my insights on the riveting Ambrose Bierce, one of the most neglected great American writers of the period between the Civil War and World War One. In 2014, the first season of HBO’s acclaimed True Detective miniseries reawakened interest in him because of its repeated references to his signature supernatural tales (vide the repeated references in the show to “the Lake of Hali,” "Hastur," and “Caricosa,” all Bierce’s creations.)


Bierce close to when he vanished in Mexico in 1914

Bierce is certainly an influence on my short story "It's Your Funeral," which is about a certain famed Hollywood superstar who is alleged to secretly practice Santería—to further her career.


You can order it as an ebook here on Amazon for only $.99.




Is Ambrose Bierce a greater writer than Mark Twain? Sometimes I’m inclined to think so. No one can deny Twain’s astonishing genius in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of the great American novels. But Bierce was a lot of tougher and braver than Twain, both as a writer and as a person. 

Twain paid a high price for that white suit and his genial public image: his wife consistently censored him to please Victorian propriety, hiding his true artistic self

Lieutenant Ambrose Bierce in the Civil War; he warn't no draft dodger


Where Twain dodged the Civil War by escaping West to Nevada, Bierce fought in the monstrosity known as Shiloh; and where Twain drowned in nauseating sentimentally and audience-pandering humor, Bierce never disguised his unrelenting bitterness and hatred of “the whole damned human race”; he’s much more honest and direct, as seen in his enduring monument to cynicism, The Devil's Dictionary.



In his landmark collection of supernatural fiction, Can Such Things Be?, he asserts himself as the undisputed bridge in American weird fiction between Poe, Robert W. Chambers, and H.P. Lovecraft. His renowned horror story The Damned Thing, with its invisible monster whose substance surpasses the infrared and ultraviolent spectrums, is a classic, with strong science fiction overtones. 

An artist's interpretation of the hidden appearance of The Damned Thing


The Ambrose Bierce Site captures the full range of his angry genius.

When read today, Bierce seems surprisingly modern, like Hemingway (whom he certainly influenced, through his war stories). He is undoubtedly America’s greatest writer of its greatest conflict, the Civil War; Chickamauga is unforgettable (see the brilliant Robert Enrico French film version here).

The deaf child innocently enjoying the gruesome spectacle of the battle of Chickamauga

The carnage of the real battlefield

Many are familiar with An Occurrence at Owl Creek’s Ridge, whose conceit has been copied innumerable times, from Robert Enrico’s first-rate film version televised on The Twilight Zone in 1964.

 An Occurrence at Owl Creek's Ridge: the mind escapes what it cannot stand. Its lasting influence can be seen everywhere in contemporary fiction, including the 1990 Tim Robbins' film Jacob's Ladder

But what strikes you in reading Can Such Things Be? is the hauntingly recurring theme in his short stories of soldiers from the Civil War awakening in sunny fields and not knowing where they are: because they’re dead, and their spirits are regaining consciousness temporarily on the battlefields where they lost their lives many years before.


Here Bierce points out the shattering truth that America died in the Civil War (it killed itself), but it doesn’t know it; and not all the rhetorical hot air about “progress” and vapid Gilded Age commercialism can sustain it. It’s a profound insight.


A warning: the famous “Missing Persons” stories (such as “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field,” passed off as an authentic paranormal experience by the dreadful liar Frank Edwards) can only be found in the 1919 Boni & Liveright edition. But when you read Ambrose Bierce, you’re in the room with real literature—the same experience you have with Arthur Machen and Robert Aickman.



 Bierce vanished in the wilderness of northern Mexico in 1914 chasing Pancho Villa; many thought the old man had a death wish and wanted to walk into a furnace. Ironically he vanished completely, like the characters in his famed mysterious "Missing Persons" stories

Masters of Horror: Clark Ashton Smith



Clark Ashton Smith

As part of the content-rich Resource Guide at the end of my supernatural horror short story, "It's Your Funeral," I offer five short essays on the masters of modern supernatural horror fiction—Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Aickman, Clark Ashton Smith, and Ambrose Bierce.

Perhaps Smith's best-known story, The Return of the Sorcerer, was adapted in 1972 for Rod Serling's Night Gallery, starring Vincent Price and Bill Bixby

Here are my insights on the coruscating Clark Ashton Smith, the most neglected of the great Weird Tales writers, but who has had a lasting and deep influence on American fantasy writing.

Smith's The Tale of Satampra Zeiros

Smith is certainly an influence on my short story "It's Your Funeral," which is about a certain famed Hollywood superstar who is alleged to secretly practice Santería—to further her career.


You can order it as an ebook here on Amazon for only $.99.



Masters of Classic Weird Fiction



Nobody writes about sorcery and the realm of magic like Clark Ashton Smith. With H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard), he was a member of Weird Tales’ Holy Trinity of the 1920s and ‘30s, but far lesser known. 


Whether wittingly or unwittingly, Lovecraft cultivated wide public appeal with his fascinating personal mythopoetic world-building in the Cthulhu Mythos (to the degree that Cthulhu has become a catchword for universal evil), and Robert E. Howard, of course, created a stirringly heroic character—and unmistakable wish-fulfillment figure—in Conan the Barbarian


One of Frank Frazetta's classic covers for the 1960s Lancer Books Conan series

(What a strange twist of fate it is that Robert E. Howard is the reason why Arnold Schwarzenegger became Governor of California!) 


A Frazetta painting come to life

And it’s very clear from his writing that unlike Lovecraft and Howard, Smith knew women and had loved them.


But as Ray Bradbury observed, Smith was a master of the English language, with one of the most amazing vocabularies of the twentieth century; entirely self-taught, he read an entire encyclopedia from beginning to end as a child. His hypnotic, incantatory prose embodies the mystery and the power of magic. 







Read the online PDF version of his astonishing 1970 Ballantine Adult Fantasy collection, Zothique, about Earth in the Last Days before the sun burns out, a masterpiece of neo-French Decadence when everything is permitted because no one has anything to lose anymore. (Baudelaire, anyone?) His sorcerers are unforgettable. (Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories are practically stolen from Smith’s Zothique tales—and Vance happily admitted it.) 

 A Clark Ashton Smith vista

His collected fantasies have been assembled in five volumes, and Amazon’s webpage for The End of the Story: The Collected Fantasies, Vol. 1 (The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith), will lead you to the whole set; they are the easiest introduction to his masterful work you can obtain today. 

Vincent Price is anxiously awaiting The Return of the Sorcerer

But if you’ve got money to spare, nothing beats his classic Arkham House collections (check out abebooks), and his wonderful one-volume best-of collection, The Emperor of Dreams, is still available on Amazon and abebooks.

The frog god Tsathoggua, whom Smith contributed to Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos

Smith the handsome young neo-Romantic poet at the dawn of his promising literary career: no wonder he was a successful ladies' man

Fascinatingly enough, Smith had a direct connection to our next master, Ambrose Bierce; both lived in the San Francisco Bay area, and Smith, who started out as a serious and very well-regarded young neo-Romantic poet (“Behold, I am the emperor of dreams…”), was a close friend of noted West Coast bohemian poet George Sterling, who in turn was an intimate personal and literary friend of Bierce’s.

Smith's mentor George Sterling, who tragically committed suicide

Smith was an accomplished artist



Smith spent most of his life in isolation in rural California with little money, caring for his parents and supporting himself with menial physical labor; as a result of his neglected genius, he was also reputedly an alcoholic. What a heartbreaker

Masters of Horror: Robert Aickman


As part of the content-rich Resource Guide at the end of my supernatural horror short story, "It's Your Funeral," I offer five short essays on the masters of modern supernatural horror fiction—Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Aickman, Clark Ashton Smith, and Ambrose Bierce.

 Edward Gorey's memorable cover of Painted Devils

Here are my insights on the astonishing Robert Aickman, whom I first discovered when I was living in Japan in 1995. His masterpiece “Ringing the Changes” was featured in a Roald Dahl ghost story anthology, and I knew immediately I had encountered Lovecraft’s only possible successor.

Another Gorey cover: what a brilliant title!

Aickman is certainly an influence on my short story "It's Your Funeral," which is about a certain famed Hollywood superstar who is alleged to secretly practice Santería—to further her career.


You can order it as an ebook here on Amazon for only $.99.


Aickman walking the towpath of St. Helens Canal with his dog




In the second half of the twentieth century, Robert Aickman became Lovecraft’s only worthy successor as the undisputed master of supernatural fiction of his age. Not by imitating Lovecraft (like so many luckless souls did), but by doing something completely different. 


As a result of his mysterious “strange stories,” he’s been called the master of inconclusive ghost story and the lord of ambiguity, but he understood that when something strange, terrifying, and inexplicable happens to us (whether it’s the death of a loved one, a world war, or the ascension of a raging tyrant to national power), we don’t always get a full explanation; all we know is, our universe has been shattered.


He admitted his amazing story Ringing the Changes has an echo of inspiration from The Shadow Over Innsmouth, but for that matter, so does Koji Suzuki’s stunning Japanese horror novel Ring, yet the influence is so oblique, I challenge you to tell me where Lovecraft touched them; the authors had to point them out to me explicitly in printed interviews.

Aickman with his first wife and collaborator, the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard

Again, thanks to Tartarus Press to keeping his works in print, and now Faber & Faber is bringing him out in paperback to a wider audience. 


Peter Straub called him “this century's most profound writer of what we call horror stories.” I agree with him. Like Machen’s, Aickman’s stories are works of art—authentic literature—but they’re so deeply disturbing, you can only read one at a time. His tales reverberate with Freudian and Jungian overtones—and reek of the void of the unknown.



Watch the first-rate 1987 British TV adaptation of Aickman's creepy and profound classic The Hospicestarring the beautiful Marte Keller

Aickman's brilliant tale The Swords was adapted for the 1997 Showtime horror anthology series The Hunger, starring Balthazar Getty; the Freudian aspects are unmistakable