"The Night-Doings at 'Deadman's'" (1874)

This story by Ambrose Bierce is only about seven printed pages. But that's long for him and it feels long, partly because it is unusually packed with incident and partly, I suspect, because Bierce was closer to the start of his career, in his early 30s, and not yet entirely comfortable with the genre work. The language is clear and precise as usual in his compressed journalistic style but feels somewhat labored. It's almost clunky, chiefly intended to be humorous in a sardonic way, sending up what were already cliches of stories of the supernatural. The result is something that feels close to the busy-busy style of director Sam Raimi's original Evil Dead movie (also something of a lampoon, remember, even at that point in the franchise). So we have Bierce's dry title along with the subtitle, "A Story That Is Untrue," tipping us off from the start. Deadman's Gulch, the setting, is an alpine region in the depths of winter—the Northern California Cascades, I believe. Shanties and even trestles are buried in snow. It is storming on this night. An isolated mountain man, Hiram Beeson, hears a knock on the door of his tiny cabin late one night. His visitor is a man who says nothing. He might be a hallucination. Beeson begins talking to him. He has a story about a Chinaman who died in the winter when the ground was too frozen to bury him and the corpse had to be stored under the floorboards of the cabin until spring. Beeson says he also cut off the Chinaman's pigtail and attached it to a beam in the ceiling, which he points out to his visitor. There it swings, firmly fastened. Why he cut off the pigtail is not clear and perhaps was a mistake, because "According to the Chinese faith, a man is like a kite: he cannot go to heaven without a tail." There's quite a bit of setup going on here as you might see but the payoff is practically inspired. The corpse under the cabin keeps raising the door in the floor, looking for its opportunity to snag the pigtail. This floorboard business is one of the things that reminds me of The Evil Dead. After Beeson and his silent guest go to bed (the guest with his revolver conspicuously handy) things start to happen. The animated corpse makes its move for the pigtail. A fourth character shows up, with a dramatic sparkling entrance down the chimney out of the fire. "From San Francisco, evidently," Beeson thinks. A brief interlude of mayhem occurs and some explanation follows. It's a little scary but mainly it's funny, as the po-faced absurdities pile high. It's full of nice effects too, a bunch of great scare strategies, but it never quite takes itself all the way seriously. You wonder whether Bierce was maybe struggling with himself about writing horror in this earlier part of his career. Most of his best stuff wouldn't even start for another 15 years or more.

The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce
Read story online.

"Madame de Mauves" (1874)

This long story by Henry James finds key beginnings of many of James's most familiar themes, starting with relations between New World and Old. Madame de Mauves is an American woman of wealth who has married a dissolute, fortune-hunting Frenchman. She has been married to him awhile when Longmore enters her life. Longmore, by the way, is easily found in the dictionary of painfully obvious names. He is also an American, soon falls in love with the madame, and spends the rest of the story longing more for her than her husband or anyone else. The Americans are all Calvinists hemmed in by moral imperatives, so a simple affair is not the answer, even though Mme. de Mauves's French husband has indulged a series of them over the course of their marriage. She is trapped in an impossible situation, arguably over her own moral making. Longmore loves her, and though less troubled by the morals of Madame, understands and respects her right to the decision. This felt to me like an early dry-run version of The Portrait of  a Lady. It's not the same story—the marriage is already an accomplished fact here, and fully half of the novel—but the pieces are similar: the corrupt and knowing European husband, the principled and unhappy American wife, and the dithering American fifth wheel. By this point in his career James was in his early 40s and the grooves of his writing are established. "Interlocutor" is now in the house, signaling that the maddening aspects of his writing are there too, such as pronoun imprecision and the convenient slippery ability of the omniscient third-person narrator to dart in and around the points of view of different characters at will. But I also enjoyed reading it a lot too. There's enough lucidity, and James is often plainly engaged by these characters and their worlds, which is infectious. As always (in fact, I seem to be noticing it more and more), his plots are built around coincidences and unbelievable chance encounters. That's a little annoying, but you just roll your eyes and keep reading for the sake of getting on with it. If people happen to keep bumping into one another in places like the metropolis of Paris, well, there's not much I can do about it. With the marriage issues already settled, all the focus is on the interior lives and motivations of these characters. It's what James can be very good at, so I have no problem—even if ultimately the resolutions are preposterous. Fixing that is something he gets to later in his career.

"interlocutor" count = 1 / 40 pages

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)