An author's fears may have spurred a major innovation in horror fiction...and anticipated his own later disappearance
I’m hardly surprised that horror is associated with various locales and settings. Some places simply scare u s more than others. But I’m intrigued by the geographical pattern of these settings. One might imagine that horror knows no boundaries, but in practice it tends to observe them with scrupulous care.
The European horror story usually finds its home at an ancient castle. The Castle of Otranto , Horace Walpole’s clumsy (but influential) novel published in 1764, set the tone for countless subsequent gothic horror stories. We find another such a castle at both the opening and conclusion of Bram Stoker’s Dracula , and even though Mary Shelley neglected to include one in her novel Frankenstein , Hollywood stepped in to rectify the omission —indeed, many will go further and claim that an actual Frankenstein castle near Darmstadt in Germany inspired her 1818 book.
In the United States, we have no cursed castles. But horror novels set in the South or Northeast invariably involved a haunted house or mansion. Maine stands out as an especially popular setting for this kind of books, most famously in novels by Stephen King, but also in stories by Richard Matheson , Jack Ketchum and others. Perhaps the state should consider changing its Latin motto from Dirigo (I lead) to Deterreo (I frighten).
But out West a different type of horror was required—the kind that takes place outdoors, perhaps around the campfire, in a secluded gulch or ravine, or at a deserted cemetery. No author did more to define and refine this archetypal scary story of the Far West than Ambrose Bierce. As even the titles of his horror stories indicate—tales such as "The Haunted Valley," "The Moonlit Road," "The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch," "The Difficulty of Crossing a Field"—Bierce may even have suffered from agoraphobia.
In the latter story, a man disappears suddenly from view while crossing a large open space. Bierce uses this exact same plot device in "An Unfinished Race." And he returns to it once more in "Charles Ashmore’s Trail." The nature of the 'horror' in these tales corresponds with exactitude to the clinical accounts of agoraphobics, who often describe their anxiety in crossing an open space as a fear that they won’t reach the other side. This is the precise fate of Bierce’s disappearing characters.
Bierce, too, could write a classic haunted house story, but it is striking how often, even in these cases, that the haunting takes place outside of the house. In "At Old Man Eckert’s," the horror assails visitors the moment they walk out the front door. In another story, Bierce reflects on the apprehension of spending the night in a house with an open doorway. The epicenter of fear is located not inside the house, but in the empty landscape that surrounds it.
Even Freud, the connoisseur of irrational neuroses, admitted that he suffered from a fear of open spaces. Robert Burton had described this phenomenon as early as 1621, but medical science didn’t accept the clinical diagnosis of agoraphobia until the 1860s. Some have seen it as a kind of existential displacement, others as a response to consumerist society, or as a manifestation of a displaced Oedipal complex. But in assessing Bierce, I prefer to draw on the concepts of scholar Paul Carter, who sees it as an aesthetic stance, a kind of poetics of rebellion against the dehumanization of modern urban life. Carter doesn’t cite Ambrose Bierce in his book Repressed Spaces: The Poetics of Agoraphobia , but this acerbic critic of American manners—whose telling nickname was "Bitter Bierce"—practiced precisely that kind of rebellion in his life and works. For my part, I find it revealing that Bierce, in his famous Devil’s Dictionary , defines the word ghost as "the outward and visible sign of an inward fear."
Yet perhaps a different explanation, biographical rather than psychological, underlies Bierce ' s aversion to open spaces. Around a third of this author’s published short stories deal with war, and draw on Bierce’s experiences on the battlefield. He served in the infantry for the North, and fought at the battle of Shiloh, where Ulysses Grant secured a victory but at the cost of more than 10,000 Union casualties. Here Bierce led his soldiers into an ambush and watched a dozen of them fall in the ensuing gunfire. During Sherman’s march to Atlanta, Bierce was involved in a disastrous attack on Pickett’s Mill that led to the death of almost a third of the men in his brigade in less than an hour. A few days later, at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, Bierce got shot in the head. He survived— although the bullet was permanently embedded behind his left ear. Who can be surprised that Bierce, in later life, wrote about the anxieties of standing exposed in an open space? We need no Freudian schemas to explain this phobia.
The editors of Bierce’s short fiction tend to combine them into three broad categories: horror stories, war stories and tall tales. But these writings are more diverse than such a categorization might suggest. For example, Bierce anticipates many of the themes of 20th century science fiction in his tales. "Moxon’s Master" deals with the provocative question of whether machines can think. Published in 1893, it predates the Turing test by more than a half century. The story also represents one of the first appearances of a robot (although that term didn’t exist at the time) in literature. In "The Damned Thing," first published in that same year, Bierce introduces an invisible creature, and instead of relying on magical or whimsical explanation for the phenomenon, he suggests a scientific theory based on the existence of colors beyond the capacity of the human eye to perceive. H.G. Wells would not publish his The Invisible Man for another four years.
And how should we classify Bierce’s most famous story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"? The editor of Bierce’s collected tales classifies it as a war story, but the suspense and terror infused into this narrative have no relationship to battlefield heroics or the dangers of combat. Instead, Bierce mixes quasi-magical fantasy, beguiling memory, and intense realism into a new formula, more akin to Borges and Kafka than to anything in nineteenth century American literature.
But Bierce’s most provocative story was his first, "The Haunted Valley," published in 1871. This tale demands attention as one of the most significant works of nineteenth century West Coast fiction—and perhaps the most prescient. It includes a searing critique of racism, exploring the hostility towards immigrants at a time when almost every resident of California had been born somewhere else. The story also involves cross-dressing and a complex love story involving ambiguous gender roles—which are described with remarkable sensitivity given the attitudes of the time. And the story is sufficiently open-ended as to invite multiple interpretations, some of them very rich in psychological implications.
Bierce’s own story is as mysterious as any of those he left behind in his books. And readers of his tales may find unintended irony in them when compared with the concluding chapter of the writer 's biography. Indeed, his fictions foreshadow Bierce’s own death. In late 1913, the author traveled to Mexico, where he accompanied Pancho Villa's army as an observer. His last letter talks about an imminent departure to an unknown destination. He was never heard from again, and rumors and conflicting theories still circulate about the reasons for his disappearance.
Yet how strange that the author who documented, in numerous stories, the dangers of traversing open spaces should vanish while doing just that! In this spirit, allow me suggest an epitaph for the grave that Ambrose Bierce never had. It is drawn from his influential story "An Inhabitant of Carcosa": "For there be diverse sorts of death," Bierce writes, "some wherein the body remaineth; and in some it quite vanisheth away with the spirit."
But though the body vanisheth, the work remains, and if anything it grows stronger. In the century after Bierce’s death, the West Coast of the United States would come to dominate the world of genre fiction. Anyone tracing the lineage of this marvelous blossoming of horror, fantasy and suspense would find almost every path links back to the originator of West Coast genre fiction and still one of its greatest masters, the estimable Ambrose Bierce.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from Basic Books.