Can Such Things Be?

A collection of twenty-four tales that prove the impossible is closer than you think. Ambrose Bierce, writing from the shadow of the Civil War, populates his stories with phantoms, hauntings, and phenomena that resist every attempt at rational explanation. His narrators encounter the uncanny but refuse to accept it, leaving readers in the same unbearable position - uncertain whether what they've witnessed is real or imagined. The Civil War stories carry particular weight: battlefields become spaces where the dead do not stay buried, and soldiers face something far more terrifying than enemy fire. Other tales drift to remote farmhouses, quiet towns, and the edges of consciousness itself. Bierce's prose is surgical - spare, controlled, never overwrought - which makes the horror land harder because it arrives in plain language. These are not gothic excesses but precisely constructed episodes of dread, each one a small machine for producing unease.