In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 Scared to Death: Tales of Terror from In the Midst of Life In the midst of life we are in death. —Book of Common Prayer lthough much evidence ties Bierce’s personal life with his use of the gothic and macabre, conscious manipulation of his readers is also at work in tales such as “The Death of Halpin Frayser” and The Parenticide Club. In the words of Gary Hoppenstand, “Bierce knew that morbid tales depicting family violence was [sic] one among many types of exploitative journalism that attracted and held his readers’ interest” (224). He also found this mode of writing conducive to his interest in joining the seemingly disparate modes of the realistic and the romantic. Whether inciting his readers’ interest with bizarrely romantic scenes of familial violence, ghostly encounters, scientific phenomena, or ironic twists of fate, Bierce favored a realistic narrative style. The common factor that made it possible for him to join the two modes of realism and romance was the focus on death. Adhering to Edgar Allan Poe’s theory of the concentrated special effect, Bierce’s gothic tales are economically structured and create atmosphere most effectively by emphasizing the psychological distress experienced by his protagonists as a result of their often irrational fears, rather than by focusing on the supernatural in the Old World European settings of crumbling castles and abbeys as was the common practice in the expansive gothic novels of earlier British writers. One of the reasons that Bierce’s gothic tales have been undervalued is that because of their organization they typically require close reading to discern the interpretive ambiguities and innovations that underlie the surface plot. Scared to Death 30 The most successful stories, which often incorporate grim humor, are usually divided into subsections that are presented out of chronological order, requiring the reader to reconstruct the sequence of events and carefully consider the credibility of the incomplete and disconnected perspectives they present. “Often the sum of the fragmentary views argues for the presence of the supernatural”; however ,carefulreadersrealizethatthisargumentisrarelyconclusive(Thomson63). Of Bierce’s canon, “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” though an extreme example, is far from unique in this regard. An examination of four representative tales from the “Civilians” section of Bierce’s 1898 collection In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians confirms the author’s affinity with such techniques and his preoccupation with death in probing the human response to fear.1 When it first appeared in the 14 July 1889 edition of the Examiner, “The Suitable Surroundings” carried the subtitle “Instruction by Example in the Art of Reading a Ghost Story.” Although the tale can be read as an anti-ghost story, it is more “important for its exposé of reason as being not only fallible but also potentially lethal to its possessor” (Joshi, Berkove, and Schultz 682). Bierce subdivides the story into five sections, labeling them with titles to help the reader sort out their disordered sequence. Reminiscent of his depiction of his own nightmares in “Visions of the Night,” the first section of the tale, which is called “The Night,” stimulates the reader’s appetite for what at first appears to be a typical ghost story. A young boy, who is lost and alone “near midnight,” follows “a bridle path throughadenseanddarkforest”asheattemptstofindhiswayhome.Atlengthhe notices a mysterious light shining and then comes upon its source, a long abandoned house—which he recollects as being “[t]he old Breede house” (SF 677). Recalling the house’s “evil reputation of being haunted” and his own hand in vandalizing it long ago, “[h]e half expected to be set upon by all the unworldly and bodiless malevolences whom he had outraged by assisting to break alike their windows and their peace” (677, 678). Nevertheless, he pauses to look in “the blank window space and saw a strange and terrifying sight,—the figure of a man seated in the center of the room, at a table upon which lay some loose sheets of paper.” Although horrified at the sight of the man, whom the boy presumes to be dead, he stares with fascination, discerning that “[t]he face showed dead-yellow in the light of a single candle” and that the “eyes were fixed upon the blank window space with a stare . . . which seemed to the lad altogether soulless.” However, as the sound of a screech-owl pierces the night air, the man jumps “to his feet, overturning the table and extinguishing the candle” (678). Terrified at what...

Share