"The Suitable Surroundings" (1889)

Ambrose Bierce serves up another puzzle story, with nice little self-aware clues and meta details. It’s a short story but perhaps on the long side for Bierce at seven or so pages. The sections appear in this order and are labeled: The Night, The Day Before, The Day After, The Manuscript, and From “The Times.” I note also (thanks to ISFDB) that the story was originally published on July 14 in the San Francisco Examiner and, in the story, July 15 is a key date. An important character in the story, Colston, is a writer whose horror stories appear in a newspaper. He complains that people read his stories the wrong way, in the wrong conditions. The title emphasizes the writer’s point—he says his new story should be read after dark, alone, by candlelight. The opening scene (The Night) shows a boy prowling the woods after midnight who comes upon an abandoned house with a reputation for being haunted. He sees a man in it reading by candlelight. The boy believes he is dead, though the scene is ambiguous. The next day (The Day After) he leads a group of skeptical townsmen to the house and there indeed they find a corpse. It’s not identified by name but is likely Marsh, the man challenged by the writer Colston to read his new story in [story title]. The section called The Manuscript is really where all the action in this story takes place, and the fact that it is practically illegible is exactly what makes it work. The manuscript is a letter written by Colston, basically an open suicide letter addressed to Marsh. One of the townsmen reads it aloud. But he doesn’t read all of it and when he is finished he burns it to ash, against the objections of the others. When this man’s identity is revealed his motivations are more understandable, but he can never be compelled to disclose the full contents of the letter. The last section (From “The Times”) is a newspaper notice that Colston has been incarcerated in a facility for the criminally insane. It’s not clear how Marsh died—presumably of fright, but it’s not even entirely clear the corpse is Marsh. The implication is that something in the part of the letter the townsman refused to read aloud scared him to death. It’s also possible “the suitable surroundings” was a trap and Colston was merely a murderer. Either will do, though there’s no apparent evidence of foul play. Both interpretations are unsettling and mysterious in different ways and there could be more interpretations as well. Pretty neat. I think I like this one at least as much as Bierce’s puzzler from nearly 20 years later, “The Moonlit Road.”

The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce
Read story online.