From the fictional land of Carcosa that inspired the HBO show True Detective to H. P. Lovecraft’s accursed New England hills, this collection features some of the most legendary landscapes of the cosmic horror genre. The collection includes the following twelve stories: Edgar Allan Poe, "MS. Found in a Bottle" Bram Stoker, "The Squaw" Ambrose Bierce, "Moxon's Master" Ambrose Bierce, "The Damned Thing" Ambrose Bierce, "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" R. W. Chambers, "The Repairer of Reputations" M. P. Shiel, "The House of Sounds" Arthur Machen, "The White People" Algernon Blackwood, "The Willows" Henry James, "The Jolly Corner" Walter de la Mare, "Seaton's Aunt" H. P. Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space" “The true weird tale has something more than a secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains. An atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; a hint of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”—H. P. Lovecraft

Enter a realm where the supernatural intertwines with the eerie and the uncanny. This gripping collection of short stories plunges readers into a world filled with ghostly apparitions, unexplainable phenomena, and the macabre. Can Such Things Be? contains one of Ambrose Bierce’s most famous works, the short story »The Death of Halpin Frayser«. Among the others in this collection are »The Damned Thing«, which explores the concept of an unseen entity preying on the living, and »The Moonlit Road«, recounting a tragic murder from three perspectives, including that of the victim from beyond the grave. AMBROSE BIERCE [1842-1914] was an American author, journalist, and war veteran. He was one of the most influential journalists in the United States in the late 19th century and alongside his success as a horror writer he was hailed as a pioneer of realism. Among his most famous works are The Devil's Dictionary and the short story »An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.«

Donald T. Blume rejects the view that In the Midst of Life, the second volume of Bierce's collected works, is his most important literary work. Instead, he posits that Bierce's original 1892 collection is his most definitive and authoritative opus.

"[This collection] features all new tales in tribute to the creations of Robert W. Chambers"--P. [4] of cover.

The stories in this book evoke a tracery of evil rarely rivaled in horror writing. They represent the whole evolving trajectory of such notions as Hastur, the King in Yellow, Carcosa, the Yellow Sign, the Black Stone, Yuggoth, and the Lake of Hali. A succession of writers from Ambrose Bierce to Ramsey Campbell and Karl Edward Wagner have explored and embellished these concepts so that the sum of the tales has become an evocative tapestry of hypnotic dread and terror, a mythology distinct from yet overlapping the Cthulhu Mythos. Here for the first time is a comprehensive collection of all the relevant tales.

Twenty-four grotesque horror tales written by Ambrose Bierce, the nineteenth-century journalist known for his cynicism