First published in 1893, Can Such Things Be? is Ambrose Bierce's great collection of supernatural and weird fiction — the companion to the war-and-horror tales of In the Midst of Life, and the book in which America's master ironist turned his cold, exacting eye on the inexplicable. Bierce (1842–1914?) was a Civil War veteran who had seen death wholesale at Shiloh and Chickamauga, and his ghosts carry none of the gothic comfort of his predecessors: there is no heaven behind them, only a darkness with movement in it.

The collection gathers two dozen tales of hauntings, monstrous presences, and unexplained death. “The Damned Thing” narrates a coroner's inquest into a killing no jury can credit, resolved with the chilling argument that there are colors the eye cannot see — and that the creature was of just such a color. “Moxon's Master” imagines a chess-playing automaton that, losing a game, rises and strangles its inventor — one of the earliest thinking-machine stories in English, a true ancestor of science fiction. “The Moonlit Road” tells one murder three times and lets the accounts fail to meet; “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” “The Middle Toe of the Right Foot,” “A Tough Tussle,” and the dread-soaked “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” complete a gallery of small, perfect terrors.

Bierce writes the uncanny in the flat, verified tone of a battlefield dispatch, building his horror on a frame of perfect rationality and letting that frame break. The unseen is always worse than the seen. Standing between Poe and the modern age, he shaped the weird tale that Lovecraft would inherit — borrowing Bierce's Carcosa along the way — and pointed, through his murderous automaton, toward the machine-haunted fears of science fiction.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text in a clean, readable setting with an editor's foreword on Bierce's life, range, and technique, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.