A Very Literary Halloween, Part 2 - Can Such Things Be?

For this year's celebration of the macabre, I'm journeying through American horror fiction by revisiting some of its greatest writers. This entry focuses on "Can Such Things Be?", a classic collection of supernatural horror stories by Ambrose Bierce.

If you've ever read "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," you know it ends in the oldest horror cheat in the book. (Spoiler alert! - the protagonist's incredible escape from the noose turns out to be a hallucination, imagined in the moments before death). Bierce's twist seems hackneyed now, of course, but it was pretty bold in its time.

In comparison, the ghostly tales collected in Can Such Things Be? have held up nicely. Many of them interleave multiple points of view, gradually building in weirdness as the story progresses. "The Secret of Macarger's Gulch" is an early example; its narrator's terror at being haunted by mysterious beings in a dark house is bad enough, but the real horror comes "[s]ome years afterward," when an explanation of the secret is finally provided.

Dawning realization is also the theme of "The Moonlit Road," but this time, it's on the part of the reader. The three narrators in the story each have their own perspective on how a ghost of a strangled woman came to stalk a man on a moonlit road, but even the ghost does not know the whole truth. "The Moonlit Road" is a clear precursor to "In a Grove," on which Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon" is based, but the end result in Ambrose Bierce's story is decidedly more bitter and cynical.

My favorite in the collection is probably "The Death of Halpin Frayser," a daring take on the traditional ghost story. The setup is pretty traditional (a drifter comes face to face with his dead mother in a dark wood), but Bierce spins it into a far more ambiguous tale. The unlikely climax, provided by two detectives investigating the drifter's death, takes place in broad daylight and yet is utterly disturbing.