Product Description

Some of the most chilling and macabre tales in the English language can be attributed to American journalist and short story writer Ambrose Bierce. His books include "Can Such Things Be: Tales of Horror and the Supernatural", as well as "The Devil's Dictionary". He has also penned scathing views of frontier life and its lawlessness, and the most caustic treatises on war.

"In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians" represents Bierce's short stories written in and around the time of the Civil War. These include "A Horseman in the Sky", "Chickamauga", "The Applicant", "A Holy Terror", "An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge"-- perhaps his most famous story of all,-- and 21 other disturbing tales. Their message about the horrors of war lives on vividly to this day.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #676411 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06-01
• Released on: 1998-08-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Customer Reviews

Terrific short stories - not for a single sitting!
Ambrose Bierce (1842 - ?) was one of the great American satirists. After taking part in the Civil War, he went out to California to become a journalist, critic and author. Now best known for his encyclopedia of venom, The Devil's Dictionary, Bierce was also a talented horror author - an inspiration to H.P. Lovecraft and others.

In the Midst of Life is a collection of some of Bierce's supernatural fiction. The bulk of the stories are also focused on the Civil War. The stories - including Bierce's most famous, The Incident at Owl Creek Bridge - are universally good and, without exception, depressing. The Civil War, much to the chagrin of separatists and re-enactionists everywhere, was a pretty miserable time. Bierce uses the supernatural merely as a means to an end - he's not interested in telling ghost stories, he's out to use whatever he can to paint a miserable and macabre picture of the realities of war. He combines the satiric voice of Mark Twain with the free-wheeling use of the macabre as a story-telling tool.


Although each story alone is very good, they lose a bit in the collection. The tragic climax varies between 'BUT HE WAS ALREADY DEAD' or 'BUT THE DEAD SOLDIER WAS HIS OWN FATHER!'. Individually, powerful and depressing. One after another, unfortunately predictable.

One of the few exceptions is one of the shorter stories, Chickamauga. A boy is out playing in the field, lost in his fantasy world, bravely fighting the forces of evil with his wooden sword. Getting lost, he stumbles into the path of the walking (or crawling) wounded from a nearby battlefield. In one of the most morbid scenes I've ever read, the naive little boy frolics alongside the shambling, dying men - even taking the opportunity to play 'horsie' on the shoulders of a crawling, leg-less man. Bierce unfortunately pushes the ending a little too far with the unnecessary addition of the "BUT THE DEAD SOLDIER WAS HIS OWN FATHER!" style climaxes. But before that point, he's treated the reader to a half-dozen pages of true horror.

Another odd inclusion in the collection is An Inhabitant of Carcosa, as, unlike the the other stories, it is not based (or trying to reflect) gritty reality. It does, however, feature a happy shepherd's god named Hastur. Hastur (and Carcosa) served as inspiration for Robert Chambers' The King in Yellow, which was in turn pirated by H.P. Lovecraft for his own mythos. The story is an allegorical fantasy in the style of Lord Dunsany, and seems out of place.

Ambrose Bierce belongs on the top shelf with the other early masters of the horror tale. In the Midst of Life is a collection of strong stories, showcasing the writer's ability to use the macabre to drive home his message. As a single, 'sit-down' read, Bierce's strength ultimately undermines the collection as a whole - although the individual stories are brilliant, In the Midst of Life is almost too morbid to be consumed as a book.

Udder pus for the soul
This is probabaly larger than the version I bought that had an afterword copyright 1961. I gave away my large collected writings volume when I wanted to impress some thinker with how many times Ambrose Bierce beat him to whatever conclusion he was looking for. The sections of the Signet Classic version I own were called:
Tales of Soldiers
Tales of Civilians
Tales From Can Such Things Be?
Extracts from The Devil's Dictionary

Rather than presenting myself as a well-rounded individual, it is my desire to establish myself as an internet expert on the intellectual use of udder pus as a metaphor. Many of the selections in the Devil's Dictionary in this volume relate to politics. I think udder pus relates to politics in ways that are best illustrated by an analysis of the first story in my copy:

A Horseman In The Sky

which takes place on a sunny afternoon in the autumn of 1861 in western Virginia. The guard by the road has joined the Union army and trying to keep Confederate forces from discovering an advance of federal forces. He shoots the horse that his father sat on at the top of a cliff. The horse dropped dramatically over the edge with the father still sitting on it: "Its motions were those of a wild gallop, but even as the officer looked they ceased, with all the legs thrown sharply forward as in the act of alighting from a leap."

People who make soy milk would like consumers to believe that somewhere there is a cow that is sick enough to produce 30 percent udder pus in the milk that Americans would drink. I looked for nutrition facts on udder pus to see if there is some indication of how much the nutritional value of milk would change. The information did not show up, as if no one would even think about drinking udder pus. I don't suppose that people who produce milk now have taste testers who are trained to see if the amount of udder pus in milk is affecting its flavor. I bought fat free half and half this year, which seemed like a much better alteration of a normal food product to put udder pus in, if a food producer actually engaged in that kind of choice, but decisions like that are certain to be a trade secret.

My father did not play a lot of secrecy games with me, but he was a German Reformed Church minister, sort of quick to become E & R to hide the German origin of his American church population, and then quick to form the United Church of Christ to become part of a larger identity. Church and government function well as godly money sponge institutions when the money which they receive is spent in a way which increases God's glory. Politics has become the udder pus portion of the population when it considered along party lines. Membership in a single party might drop to the percent level of udder pus in the milk from a sick cow when the ad startegy of a political campaign is more like udder pus than the milk of human kindness.

Ambrose Bierce had figured so many things out, it is almost surprising that he lived so long before thermonuclear weapons and children of the people who killed JFK.

Unforgettable collection
I was extremely impressed by these stories when I read them in April of 1951. The book was the best book read that year. I have selected a "best book read this year" each of the years of my reading life, and this book is the only collection of short stories which has ever won that accolade!