Can Such Things Be‪?‬

Figuring somewhere between Poe and Lovecraft in the canon of American horror, Ambrose Bierce (a Civil War veteran known for bringing the battlefield to his literary foes) was a fierce skeptic whose paradoxical interest in the supernatural and the occult drove him to pen some of the finest tales in the history of the genre.

In this pioneering 1893 collection, set against a bleak frontier landscape, the laws of nature are defied to uncanny effect—in "The Moonlit Road", the details of a woman’s murder are revealed through several fragmented points of view—including the victim’s own; in "Moxon's Master", a chess-playing automaton (one of the first robots to appear in English literature) lashes out against its creator; and in "The Damned Thing", an otherworldly creature lurks beyond the bounds of human perception—leaving us to wonder: Can Such Things Be?

This Pseudoscorpion digital edition includes all 24 stories of the original collection, along with two additional masterworks: "The Eyes of the Panther" and "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (considered by many to be the greatest American short story ever written). In addition, a lengthy introduction by Bertha Clark Pope sheds light on the life, work, and mysterious fate of the author.