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The recent movie _The Blair Witch Project_ has brought scary stories back into vogue. After reading this book, I realized you can make a direct connection from this film to Ambrose Bierce. The connection would pass through Stephen King and H.P.Lovecraft along the way. I've seen things in both of these writers that could have been lifted directly out of one of Bierce's stories. In Bierce's story, "The Damned Thing", with its talk about colors that can and can't be seen, I could have sworn I was reading Lovecraft. Bierce is a master at quick twists and shocking violence, and delivers scares fast and furious. I got chills with several of these short stories, which certainly makes for good horror reading.
The book gives the reader a sample of Bierce's short stories. Most of the stories are tied around American Civil War themes, which is no surprise as Bierce served in the Union army during that conflict. His experiences gave him the necessary frame of reference to write these dark stories. And when I say dark, I mean DARK! Some of these tales will make your jaw drop. The violence in them is extremely unsettling. Chickamauga and Oil of Dog are sickening, describing blown open heads and dead babies in graphic detail.
Did I mention Bierce's prose? Some of the best you'll read. His prose is so amazing that I found myself rereading some of his passages just so I could make sure I was getting the full meaning. It is that rich and textured. It's also extremely funny in places. In the introduction it is written that Bierce lived in England for several years and was embraced by the English, who are masters not only of the language, but also insults. I'm not surprised when I look at how he writes. He can pen an insult that would bring tears of joy to an Englishman's eyes.
Finally, Bierce's stories show incredible depth for the short story format. He ridicules false courage, irony, lawyers, and even unions in the story, "The Revolt of the Gods". I highly recommend that anyone not familiar with Ambrose Bierce give this book a read. It reads fast and you'll laugh and be shocked within the space of one page. Good stuff.
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Bierce was a short story writer and biting satirist who wrote newspaper columns and generally made a public nuisance of himself in the latter half of the 19th century. A Civil War veteran, his writings on the war anticipate much of the disillusionment and despair that characterizes later writings by Viet Nam veterans. He also wrote a considerable body of horror and ghost stories that are more modern than you might expect. He disappeared in the Mexican Civil War in 1914, and his fate has never been determined reliably. The movie Old Gringo speculated on this, and others have done so. One theory had it that he'd written The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which anyone who'd read Bierce would know was highly unlikely. He despised novels.
So here we have the second of a series of novels about him. In the first there was motivation for him to get involved in the mystery, but here there isn't. Instead we have a missing Hawaiian princess, a dying Hawaiian king, and Bierce looking for said princess. There's no explanation of why Bierce is doing the looking, and no explanation of why his friend Tom Redmond decides to help. They just do. And there's also no suspense: it becomes obvious that she's gone of her own volition, and a friend tells them she's safe. Half of the book slides by before we finally get to some suspense.
An elderly Hawaiian judge is killed, and his rooms set on fire. Bierce and Redmond three-quarters of the book insisting they aren't interested in who killed him, and then are reluctantly drawn into figuring it out. It's mildly entertaining, but no where near as suspenseful or intricate as the first book.
Redmond, meanwhile, has recently lost his wife to illness, and romances a half-Hawaiian lady of considerable stature (over 6') who apparently likes him, but is determined to marry someone prosperous (Redmond's a mere reporter). Redmond accepts this, and it somehow robs the romance of whatever fire it would otherwise have.
There are scenes in restaurants, bars, houses, and the city jail, and all read believably, and interestingly. Bierce and the other characters are well-drawn, and interesting, and I enjoyed the character and atmosphere of the book. Unfortunately, there isn't much of a plot.
Old Hawaiian customs, sensitive issues of race and color, and America's imperialism all directly affect this plot, and Hall takes great care to depict these issues accurately. Unfortunately, the book gets bogged down in its own minutiae. Well over two dozen characters play roles here, some with similar names, and the reader, not knowing who may eventually become important in all the plots and subplots, must keep track of them all in order to understand the action. Additionally, the main plots regarding succession to the Hawaiian throne involve complex genealogies and political motivation, and there are innumerable subplots and digressions. These include the disappearance of a princess, mysterious and unavenged deaths from the past, blackmail and extortion, Haunani Brown's various love affairs, her search for information on her parentage, the women's suffrage movement, spiritualism and voodoo, white slavery, the introduction of leprosy and other diseases to the islands, and even a gay love connection in San Francisco, certainly enough to keep any reader fully occupied.
Still, if you are fascinated by Gay Nineties San Francisco and by Hawaiian history, this unusual mystery with its careful rendering of the atmosphere of the period should provide you with hours of pleasure. It is not quick or easy reading, but it is intriguing.
From the start, it is clear that there is more than a missing person. Bierce and Redmond run into the woman's sufferage movement, spiritualism, and the powerful force of Hawaiian magic. When a Hawaiian judge is found murdered, Redmond finds himself under attack from Hawaiian magic.
Author Oakley Hall has created a delightful view of America at the turn of an earlier century. Bierce, with his cynical, yet somehow optimistic, view of the world, makes an effective sleuth, doomed to be disappointed by those he attempts to save. Negative historical attitudes toward women and persons of color are integrated into the story without apology yet without any sense of approval either.
As Bierce explains near the end of the novel, all of the clues are available to the reader. Even those mystery readers who guess the killer will enjoy Hall's smooth writing, the depth of historical detail, and the insights into an important historical/literary figure in Ambrose Bierce, turn of the 19th century America, and the end of the history of Hawaii as an independent country.
A well written and completely enjoyable novel.
Goodbye, if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico--ah, that is euthanasia!
With that, he disappeared into Mexico and was never heard from again, fueling wild speculation about his fate (i.e., Carols Fuentes' novel The Old Gringo). A fitting end for an author whose works combined a bleak view of life with elements of mystery.
Bierce's Civil War stories are bleak little tales of death and destruction. There's one here that nicely captures his cynical world view--most of us saw a film version of it in grade school--An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. Peyton Farquhar is a Southern planter captured behind Union lines on a spy mission. As the story opens, he stands upon Owl Creek Bridge with a noose around his neck thinking of the wife and children he will never see again. But when the Union soldiers try to hang him, the noose slips and he swims off downstream. He flees across country until he finally reaches home and as he approaches his open armed wife...the rope snaps tight and we realize that he had imagined the whole episode on his way down. Here in one tidy package is the brutality of war, the futility of life and the bitter wit that characterizes his work.
He's not for all tastes, and I'm not generally big on short stories, but I like him.
GRADE: B
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The two authors reacted in very different ways. Bierce apparently made an instant decision to hate the human race, and held that course for the rest of his days, while Tolkien apparently realized that the question of Evil had been raised for him, in terms for which his culture provided no sufficent answer. Tolkien's response was more interesting than Bierce's.
Bierce was a very witty and intelligent man, but he did devote most of his remaining years to venomous journalism of the worst sort, becoming widely known as the most fearsome Acid Pen in San Francisco. He had a disastrous marriage, was an extremely poor parent, and suffered the unimaginable pain of learning that his son had committed suicide at a very young age in a quarrel over a girl. His literary production was highly uneven (as was Mark Twain's) and it seems likely that he will go down in history for "The Devil's Dictionary" (where you will find that his definition for the word "alone" was "in bad company."
Quite a piece of work, this Ambrose Bierce. The biography is a good one.
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The story searches for the Morton Street Slasher, but the reader who wants a plot similar to the Alienist (which follows the trail of the killer) will be disappointed to learn that this book is more about mining and railroad politics than the search for a killer. If you are interested in the backroom politics of San Francisco in the 1870's or really love the wit of Ambrose Bierce, then you'll probably love this book ... if you're like me, and you like Ambrose Bierce's dark humor but could do without the smoke-filled rooms, then you'll just find it an interesting diversion.
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The stories are short and do not go into intense detail and background. These are compact and complete enough to be told around the campfire or just around the living room with the lights turned out. Bierce knows his reader and will often give the ending an unexpected twist.
All of the stories you find in this book are told with the tight, economical style of Bierce and many have an O'Henry or Sterling twist at the end. They are told in the frank and bloody prose that Bierce witnessed (and physically experienced) first hand as an Officer in the Union Army. As one reads these stories you can clearly see the basis for Bierce's caustic and acidulous writing style that stayed with him throughout his life including as a columnist for William Randolph Hearst at the San Francisco Examiner and until he walked away into the Mexican desert in 1913. His demise is the source of great conjecture (as he would have wanted it) but that is for other books about the man and his writing.