Motionless now and in absolute silence, she awaited her doom, the moments growing to hours, to years, to ages; and still those devilish eyes maintained their watch.

Seen by contemporaries as a natural successor to Edgar Allan Poe but with the added dimensions of a man who had witnessed true horror fighting in some of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War, Ambrose Bierce was one of America’s leading convention-defying writers, critics and essayists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – but still remains relatively unknown by many fans of the genre.

This new collection not only brings together some of Bierce’s best and most unusual stories (such as ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, ‘The Moonlit Road’ and ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser’) but also highlights those aspects of his life which saw him as a loner, someone who stepped aside from society and observed it as some other being. Even in death Bierce was unconventional, disappearing to join the Mexican Revolution, never to be seen again – a mystery editor Mike Ashley explores in a closing essay for the book.

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913?) was an American writer, critic and essayist, famous for works of satire and cynicism such as The Devil’s Dictionary. He wrote over 200 short, fictive stories including a number of horror stories and weird tales. His stories remain fresh and unconventional when it comes to the unraveling of strange events.

Mike Ashley is an author, anthologist and editor with a specialism for seeking out rare strange stories from the periodicals and magazines of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is an expert in the fields of weird fiction and classic mystery stories, and a leading authority on the history and development of the occult detection tale.

CONTENTS
Introduction 7
A Note from the Publisher 19

A Horseman in the Sky 21
A Tough Tussle 30
A Resumed Identity 41
One of the Missing 49
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge 65
Mrs. Dennison’s Head 78
A Jug of Sirup 82
An Inhabitant of Carcosa 91
A Watcher by the Dead 96
The Middle Toe of the Right Foot 111
The Boarded Window 123
The Damned Thing 129
Bodies of the Dead 141
The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch 153
The Death of Halpin Frayser 163
John Bartine’s Watch 184
The Eyes of the Panther 192
Staley Fleming’s Hallucination 205
The Moonlit Road 209
Beyond the Wall 222

Some Haunted Houses

The Isle of Pines 235
A Fruitless Assignment 241
The Spook House 245
The Thing at Nolan 250
At Old Man Eckert’s 256
A Vine on a House 259
The Other Lodgers 264

The Ways of Ghosts

Present at a Hanging 271
A Cold Greeting 274
A Wireless Message 277
An Arrest 280

Mysterious Disappearances

The Difficulty of Crossing a Field 285
An Unfinished Race 288
Charles Ashmore’s Trail 290

Afterword: The Fate of Ambrose Bierce 295
Story Sources 315