Can Such Things Be?
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Read this book to experience masterfully crafted tales of horror that probe the darkest corners of the human psyche and the supernatural.
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Book Summary
Ambrose Bierce's 'Can Such Things Be?' is a collection of chilling supernatural tales exploring death, madness, and the uncanny. Through ghostly apparitions, mysterious disappearances, and psychological unraveling, Bierce blurs the line between reality and nightmare, revealing a world where guilt and fate inescapably haunt the living.
The collection opens with 'The Death of Halpin Frayser,' where a man dreams of being strangled by a malevolent apparition resembling his mother, only to be found dead in a forest graveyard. 'The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch' recounts a hunter's fearful night in a cabin later revealed as a murder site. In 'One Summer Night,' a buried man sits up in his coffin, terrifying grave robbers. 'The Moonlit Road' presents conflicting testimonies about a mother's murder, blurring guilt and memory. 'The Mystery of Charles Farquharson' involves a corpse appearing in a locked room, later identified as a man who died overseas. 'Dead and “Gone”' tells of a body that vanishes from its deathbed. 'A Cold Night' and 'A Creature of Habit' depict eerie post-mortem movements. The 'Mysterious Disappearances' section includes vanishings like a man crossing a field, a runner disappearing mid-stride, and footprints ending abruptly in snow. Throughout, Bierce explores themes of death, madness, guilt, identity, and the grotesque, often leaving readers with unsettling ambiguity.
Reading guide
Go deeper in Can Such Things Be?
Character guides, themes, chapter companions — plus Character Web, narrative arc, and theme heatmap teasers that unlock fully beside the text in BetterReads.
Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
Halpin Frayser
Halpin Frayser is the spoiled youngest of a well-to-do Nashville family, a reluctant law student whose maternal great-grandfather was a Colonial poet and whose mother secretly dotes on that same tainted inheritance. His father, a politician, ignores him; his relatives dismiss him as an intellectual black sheep likely to disgrace the flock by bleating in meter. Dreamy, indolent, and romantic, Halpin drifts toward a haunted wood where his one thought becomes a written appeal to benign powers—until his own mother's corpse-face stares back at him from the dark.
Haïta
Haïta lives alone in a valley cave, faithful to his sheep and to the god Hastur, dutiful even toward a feeble hermit he feeds with ewe's milk and oat cake. When a beautiful maiden appears beside him and offers companionship, he ruins it by wishing she were a man so they could wrestle and race—and she vanishes, leaving flood and danger behind. Thrice she returns, thrice he fails to accept her as she is, and his longing to know her name becomes the very thing that keeps her away.
Moxon
Moxon is a mechanician whose chess-playing automaton draws visitors curious to see a machine outplay men—and to hear its maker defend it with a strange, proprietary tenderness. He insists the thing has a mind of its own, and his talk slides from engineering into something closer to metaphysics or obsession. The tension lies in whether Moxon controls his creation or has quietly surrendered something to it, and that ambiguity is what makes every game at his table feel like a wager with consequences.
Brainerd Byring
Brainerd Byring rides with a detachment ordered into hazardous, silent country, where a missing vidette named Dunning has already broken orders and ridden forward alone. When the major halts at the cedar forest's edge and sees Dunning standing motionless over a dead horse and a dead man, the expedition's discipline begins to fray. Byring's world is one of sabers drawn, forbidden conversation, and men whose fear shows in small disobediences—and it is in that charged dark that his own fate closes in.
Jo Dunfer
Jo Dunfer—Gopher to those who know him—is a little man with a wagon, a bitten finger, and a tongue he keeps for reasons of his own. He narrates the ruin of Whisky and Ah Wee with a sardonic performer's relish, then turns on his listener with an accusation that reframes the whole story: nine years of madness, a woman he loved and followed from San Francisco, and a grave he has refused to visit. His grief and his venom are inseparable, and both drive the tale toward its reckoning.
Hiram Beeson
Hiram Beeson dies on the sixteenth of July, 1863, known to every man, woman, and grown child in his village, and is buried two days later with a funeral the local paper cannot ignore. Around his death gather the ordinary rituals of a small town—mourners, newspaper notices, the slow work of settling a life—but the narrative refuses to let him rest. What matters is the pull his absence exerts on the living, and the suspicion that Beeson's business with them is not finished.
Death and the Supernatural
The book is saturated with ghostly apparitions, revenants, and the blurring of life and death, as seen in stories like 'The Death of Halpin Frayser' and 'The Middle Toe of the Right Foot,' where the dead return with malevolent intent or unresolved trauma.
Madness and Perception
Characters frequently experience hallucinations, unreliable memories, and psychological unraveling, such as the narrator in 'An Inhabitant of Carcosa' or the protagonist in 'The Damned Thing,' questioning the boundary between sanity and supernatural reality.
Guilt and Retribution
A pervasive theme of inescapable guilt and cosmic punishment, exemplified by the husband in 'The Watcher by the Dead' who reenacts his wife's murder, and the vengeful spirits that haunt the living for past sins.
Identity and Self
The fragility of personal identity is explored through amnesia, doppelgängers, and lost memories, as in 'The Death of Halpin Frayser' where the protagonist confronts his own mother as a corpse, and 'The Moonlit Road' where a ghost struggles to communicate.