Can Such Things Be?

What It's About

Can Such Things Be? is a collection of short stories first published in 1893, gathering some of Bierce's most unsettling tales of ghosts, hallucinations, disappearances, and unexplained deaths. Many stories are set against the backdrop of the American Civil War or the isolated rural frontier, where ordinary life is suddenly and irrevocably disrupted by the inexplicable. The collection includes some of his most anthologised supernatural fiction, such as "The Death of Halpin Frayser," "The Damned Thing," and "Moxon's Master."

Key Concepts

Running through the collection is Bierce's fascination with the thin line between sanity and madness, and his habit of framing supernatural events through a veneer of scientific or rational explanation, only to undercut it. Many stories share a preoccupation with disappearance and the failure of the physical world to account for what has happened to a person — a theme made eerier by Bierce's own unexplained vanishing two decades later. War, isolation, and the unreliability of memory and perception recur as sources of horror throughout.

About the Author

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?) was an American journalist, satirist, and short story writer. He served in the Union Army during the Civil War, an experience that left a lasting mark on his fiction, and went on to become a widely read and feared newspaper columnist in San Francisco, known for his caustic wit and bleak view of human nature. In 1913 he travelled to Mexico, reportedly to observe the Mexican Revolution firsthand, and was never heard from again.