Can Such Things Be?

Twenty-three tales of themacabre, each one a small engine of dread. Ambrose Bierce writes the way a surgeon operates: precisely, without sentiment, and always aware that beneath the skin of the world lies something cold and unknowable. These are not ghost stories in the decorative sense. They are investigations into what happens when the boundary between the living and the dead becomes thin enough to tear. A man wakes in a forest with no memory, pursued by the spectral image of a woman he cannot name. A soldier cheats the noose only to find himself in a slower, stranger hell. A dying philosopher debates God with his doctor and loses, somehow, either way. Bierce's prose is lean as a blade, his humor black as pitch, and his conclusions arrive like sudden doors slamming shut in empty rooms. The collection assembles his finest supernatural work into something that feels less like entertainment than like being shown a crack in the universe and invited to peer through. It is short fiction at its most concentrated: a single reading session might leave you afraid to turn off the light.