©1909 CAN SUCH THINGS BE / AMBROSE BIERCE / Jonathan Cape Hardback

Description: Jonathan Cape published CAN SUCH THINGS BE by Ambrose Bierce ©1909. In blue cloth over boards with gold titling, the diminutive binding measures 5 x 7 inches. The text consumes 262 pages. From an article in "The New York Times" by Terrence Rafferty: In his ghost stories, though, these limitations turn to virtues. If there’s a genre Bierce was born to, it’s horror. He collected his supernatural tales under the title “Can Such Things Be?” — a question whose tone is cunningly ambiguous, hovering between cool skepticism and slack-jawed amazement. And that is exactly the tone of the stories themselves. Lovecraft called Bierce’s horror fiction “grim and savage,” but it isn’t, really. The style of his ghost stories is quiet, detached, oddly companionable. (That is to say, it couldn’t be more different from Lovecraft’s.) He writes as a suave raconteur of the unearthly, with just enough of the ironic in his voice to maintain his distance from appalling events while drawing his readers closer and closer to the inexplicable mysteries at their heart. The opening sentence of “One Summer Night” is typical: “The fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to him to prove that he was dead: he had always been a hard man to convince.” Poe and, later, Lovecraft, did horror in ominous, deranging close-ups; Bierce preferred the long and the medium shot, in which the nature of the terrible thing is slightly less distinct, a little harder to make out, and the more awful for it...

Price: 95 USD

Location: Bellevue, Washington

End Time: 2024-12-19T07:59:22.000Z

Shipping Cost: 3.95 USD