Can Such Things Be? was published by Cassell Publishing Company in New York in 1893. Where Tales of Soldiers and Civilians drew primarily on Bierce’s war experiences, this collection moves into the territory of the supernatural and the psychologically uncanny — though Bierce’s technique remains the same: compressed, ironic, clinical, and devastatingly precise.
The stories include “The Damned Thing,” in which a creature invisible to the human eye kills a man in the California hills (Bierce anticipates H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror by decades); “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” a complex narrative of a dead man’s ghost wandering through a forest that may or may not be purgatory; “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” a brief, haunting piece about a man who discovers he is a ghost walking through the ruins of a civilization — a story that directly influenced Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow (1895) and, through Chambers, the entire tradition of weird fiction.
Bierce does not explain his supernatural events. Unlike later horror writers who provide mechanisms (curses, science gone wrong, ancient evils), Bierce presents the inexplicable as simply inexplicable: things happen that should not be possible, and the narrators (those who survive) are left without understanding. This refusal of explanation is itself the horror: the universe, in Bierce’s fiction, is not hostile but indifferent, and its indifference occasionally manifests in ways that destroy human beings who assumed they understood the rules.
Collecting Can Such Things Be?
First edition (Cassell Publishing, New York, 1893): Cloth, decorated cover.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $500–$1,500
- Very good: $200–$500