This is a guest post by John Bullard. I apologize for taking so long to get it posted. (Family medical issues required my attention.) Take it away, John.

I didn’t get a chance to post this article up on writer, reporter, and Civil War veteran Ambrose Bierce’s actual birthdate of June 24^th due to work, but better late than never. I had originally started what has become an unexpected series of only thinking about what appeared to me to be the obvious influence Ambrose Bierce’s writing had on two of Robert E. Howard’s horror stories. I later was struck by how much another Bierce story seems to have influenced another Howard story. As I finally got around to reading another Howard story that I haven’t read before, I immediately saw the influence of Bierce’s writings on it, too. I feel that with these 4 stories, I can show that Ambrose Bierce, being one of Howard’s favorite writers¹, definitely played a role on some of Robert E. Howard’s horror story writing.

Bierce and the Stressful Effects of Psychological Terror and Obsession

Bierce is generally remembered today for his satirical takes on humanity and for one of his great tales on the horror of war, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”. He served in the Civil War in the Union Armies in the Western Theater, and took part in many of the most horrific battles there: Shiloh, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, and Franklin. His experiences in these battles, and as a soldier and officer, allowed him to write a fantastic series of short stories examining the horror and stress of being in a battle, and serving in the military. He also wrote many stories dealing with fantastic and supernatural themes of people in everyday life encountering highly unusual, stressful situations. Most of his fictional stories can be found online at this site: Ambrose Bierce – Biography and Works. Search Texts, Read Online. Discuss. (online-literature.com)

One of the themes that Bierce liked to use in his stories was the stressful effect terror and obsession have on a person’s mind. As discussed in Parts 1 and 2 of this series, Bierce used this theme to show how men could quite literally frighten themselves to death due to their minds fixating on a thought. In the two stories “One of the Missing” and “A Tough Tussle”, the two protagonists are in different situations in battle where their minds are confronted with incredibly stressful setups that prove to be their undoing. In “One of the Missing”², a fearless soldier sent forward to reconnoiter what the Confederates are doing ends up physically trapped in a bombed-out shelter with his “loaded, cocked” rifle pointed at his head. In “A Tough Tussle”³, an officer out on picket duty finds himself sharing his concealed spot with the dead body of a Confederate soldier. The officer’s mind fixates on the body, and he then finds that although he is educated, he suddenly develops a belief in the supernatural, and begins to worry that the Confederate is either not truly dead, or will reanimate, and attack him at any moment. In the “The Man and the Snake”⁴, the protagonist of the story is an educated man who scoffs at the notion in a book he just read of snakes hypnotizing their prey into a state of paralysis that draws the prey to the snake. However, he lets this notion take over his mind when he sees a snake underneath the bed in his room, and finds himself bodily drawn against his will to the snake.

SPOILERS IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THESE STORIES:

In all three stories, the fears that each man has turn out to be only in their minds: the rifle had discharged its bullet when the shelter the man is in gets hit by a cannon shell, and is empty as it points at his head; the Confederate soldier really is and remains dead; and the snake under the bed is a harmless stuffed toy snake. Yet each man allows their fears to overtake their reason and cause all three men to die from their fears coming true. Only in the fourth and fifth stories by Bierce that I talk about, “A Baffled Ambuscade”⁵, and “The Damned Thing”⁶, do truly supernatural events occur, a soldier’s ghost doing his duty after death, and a science fictional creature wreaking havoc on a watcher/hunter.

Bierce’s Influence on Howard

Howard’s stories that I feel were influenced by Bierce’s tend to have supernatural elements combined with the horror of psychological stress affecting the protagonists. In “The Man on the Ground”⁷, the main character, Cal Reynolds, is out to finally end a long-running, deadly feud between himself and another man. They get into a shooting match using rocks for cover. The action has touches from Bierce’s “One of the Missing”, where much like that soldier using a damaged building for cover that proves his undoing, the bushwhacker also uses the cover of rocks to take his shot at his enemy which prove to be his undoing. There is even the use of the image of a rifle muzzle that Howard appears to use in his story:

From Bierce:

In surveying the mass with a view to determining that point, his attention was arrested by what seemed to be a ring of shining metal immediately in front of his eyes. It appeared to him at first to surround some perfectly black substance, and it was somewhat more than a half-inch in diameter. It suddenly occurred to his mind that the blackness was simply shadow and that the ring was in fact the muzzle of his rifle protruding from the pile of debris.

From Howard:

              From among these boulders floated a thin wisp of whitish smoke. Reynold’s keen eyes, trained to sun-scorched distances, detected a small circle of dully gleaming blue steel among the rocks. That ring was the muzzle of a rifle, …

The ending is supernatural, with overtones from “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” along with “A Baffled Ambuscade”.

In “The Dead Remember”⁸, Howard writes a story of revenge from beyond the grave, with the main character, Jim Gordon, becoming more and more certain that each near fatal accident that he narrowly avoids is proof that the witch that he murdered and who cursed him with her dying breath, is stalking him until the climax. He becomes highly stressed, psychologically believing that the witch worked a fatal hex on him, as happens in most voodoo stories, but he is resigned to his eventual death and decides to face down the witch’s ghost when she comes.

In the third story of Howard’s that I discussed, “The Dream Snake”⁹, the main character, Faming tells his listeners about a recurring dream he has of being in the African veldt and being chased by a giant snake that keeps getting closer and closer to him with each dream. The story ends much the same as Bierce’s “The Man and the Snake”, with Faming falling asleep, and apparently in his dream that night, the snake catches him.

Howard had an interest in human psychology. As stated in Part 2, he wrote to his friend Clyde Smith specifically about writing “The Dream Snake” in September 1927:

“P. S. Since writing you that other letter … The subject of psychology is the one I am mainly interested in these days. The story I sold before this [“The Dream Snake”] was purely a study in psychology of dreams and this ms. deals largely in primitive psychology [The Shadow Kingdom].”¹⁰

We know that Howard is still very interested in psychology through May 1928, when he filled out an application to join a pen-pal group of “isolated intellectuals and bibliophiles”¹¹, “Contacts”, wherein he lists one of the subjects of “Chief interest” to him as “Psychology [Abnormal]”, and Howard also wrote on the form “Obsessional dementia”, and that he would “Especially like to hear from anyone having had experiences with cases of compulsory and criminal insanity,”¹². Clearly, Howard was interested in the effects psychological stress can have on a person, much as Bierce liked writing about it in his stories, and used it in creating tense plot points in some of his horror tales. Now, let’s look at these last two stories by Bierce and Howard, and see how much the psychology of terror factored in them.

Bierce’s “A Watcher By the Dead”

This story was first published in 1889, in the San Francisco Examiner. The story can be found online here: A Watcher By The Dead by Ambrose Bierce (online-literature.com) Please go read it if you haven’t as I will be discussing the ending.

SPOILERS

In this story, Bierce has a bit of fun telling about a wager that goes horribly wrong. The story opens with a man being locked into a room with a corpse under a sheet on a table at night. The man is described as being intelligent and composed, and starts the story off by calmly reading a book while sitting in the room with the corpse. He stops reading the book, and goes and examines the corpse, then blows out a candle, the only source of illumination in the room, in order to conserve it for use during the night. The story then jumps back timewise, to three gentlemen who are gambling one night, Dr. Helberson; Harper, Dr. Helberson’s medical student; and Mancher, a friend of the other two. Dr. Helberson makes the statement that all people are afraid of the dead when the conditions are right, which Harper challenges. Harper asks what the conditions would be that would bring on this fear, and Dr. Helberson lists a person sitting next to a corpse in a darkened, locked room overnight. Harper then says that he knows a man, Jarette, who boasts of having no fear of anything and is quite the gambler. Helberson and Harper agree to a wager between the Doctor and Jarette, with Mancher, who is the spitting image of Jarette, playing the “corpse”.

The story then jumps back to Jarette in the room. By this time, Jarette is beginning to know what fear is, as he imagines the corpse coming to life. He begins to berate himself for allowing this fear to grow in his mind. He continues to fantasize about the corpse becoming reanimated. He lights his candle to check, and realizes that he will use the candle up long before daylight returns. As his growing psychological terror at being alone in the dark with a potentially undead person grows, he hears the sounds of footfalls behind him.

The story then jumps ahead a few hours to Dr. Helberson and Harper returning to the apartment to find a great commotion. Police and neighbors are there, and as they force their way to the apartment door, a man breaks out, and fights his way through the crowd and runs away. The two go into the room and find Jarette dead, with his face hideously fixed in a look of fear. They decide to leave town before tough questions are asked, and years later, run in to Mancher who tells them that he decided to have a bit of fun with Jarette as Jarette was falling to pieces from the fear of being alone with a corpse, by coming to life. Jarette, of course, falls dead in terror. Bierce has fun showing how a man who doesn’t know the meaning of fear succumbs so easily to it to his own destruction.

“The Touch of Death”, by Robert E. Howard

You can find the online version of this story here: The Fearsome Touch of Death (gutenberg.net.au)

Please go read the story if you haven’t, as I will be discussing spoilers for it.

SPOILERS

This story was first published in Weird Tales, February 1930. Howard originally titled it as “The Touch of Death’, but apparently Farnsworth Wright decided to change the title to “The Fearsome Touch of Death” when he published it in the pulp. Howard appears to have written this story sometime in 1927 or 1928, as it was accepted by Weird Tales in the Fall of 1928¹³.

The story opens with a man named Falred being asked by a Dr. Stein to spend the night watching over  the recently deceased body of a miserly recluse, Adam Farrel, in Farrel’s home. Falred agrees, and when the Doctor offers to send someone over to give Falred a break, Falred declines and says he isn’t superstitious. He then sits down and begins reading a book by the only light in the room, a lamp. He stops reading from time to time, and looks at Farrel’s corpse on his bed, covered by a sheet. As the night wears on, Falred finds his mind beginning to turn more and more into thoughts about the dead coming back as reanimated monsters. He goes to sleep, only to awaken from a dream of Farrel’s corpse getting up and walking towards him. The room was pitch black because the lamp went out, and Falred was too scared to light the lamp for fear of seeing Farrel walking towards him. Falred gets up and tries to back his way out of the room to escape by keeping the bed with Farrel’s body hopefully on it in front of him, but terrified in the thought that Farrel may be waiting behind him for Falred to walk into his clutches. Falred reaches out his hands for the doorknob, and touches “Something slick, cold and clammy—like the touch of death,” and screams and falls dead from fear. His mind was so fixated on the terror of a walking corpse waiting for him in the dark, that Falred failed to realize that he was only touching the discarded rubber gloves of Dr. Stein, and not the fingers of Farrel’s walking corpse. It is an ending much in line with Bierce’s ending to his “The Man and the Snake” story, where the protagonist imbues an inanimate object with life for ironic effect.

Bierce and Howard’s Use of the Psychology of Terror and Obsession

As stated, Bierce liked to use the effects of psychological stress driving the mind to act in unchangeable ways that ultimately would lead the sufferer to death. In “One of the Missing”, the protagonist only knows that the loaded and cocked rifle is pointed right at his head, and he has to try and figure out a way to escape. Realizing that his escape won’t happen, he decides to press the rifle’s trigger to end the stress of waiting, knowing that at any moment the gun will go off and kill him. He psychologically causes his own death by pressing the trigger of the previously discharged and empty rifle, and dying as if he was shot by a bullet. In “A Tough Tussle”, the officer has worked himself up to the state that he knows the dead Rebel is going to attack him so he attacks the corpse first, and in his frenzy kills himself to escape death at the hands of the unkillable Confederate. In “The Man and the Snake”, Brayton slowly drags himself to the stuffed snake under the false impression he has been hypnotized by the toy snake and can’t break free, until in his mind he reaches the serpent and dies from fright. In “A Watcher by the Dead”, Jarette, a man who scoffs at the idea of fear, slowly talks himself into the notion that the corpse he is sitting with will get up and come to him. His terror grows and grows while trying to talk himself out of his fears, but only making them worse. Finally, the corpse, played by a very alive jokester, does get up and walk to him as a prank, causing Jarette to fall dead from his overwhelming terror that he has “psyched” himself into. Another thing that appears in all of these tales by Bierce is that all the protagonists are described as being fearless, and educated to not believe in superstitions, yet they all fall into states of high fear from superstitious beliefs, which causes their deaths.

Howard, as previously said, loved Bierce as a writer. In addition, Howard had also developed a keen interest in the psychology of the human mind as it is affected by “Obsessional dementia” and “Compulsory … insanity” in the late 1920’s, when he wrote “The Dream Snake”, and “The Touch of Death”. Obsessional dementia and compulsory insanity are very strong plot triggers in the four stories discussed. In “The Man on the Ground”, Cal Reynolds is out to end the feud once and for all, and will obsessively do what is needed to achieve his goal, even fighting as a ghost. In “The Dead Remember”, Jim Gordon becomes obsessed knowing his end is coming, and prepares for it by cleaning his guns every night to be ready for the showdown, thereby enabling his antagonist her ghostly revenge. In the “The Dream Snake”, Faming becomes possessed by a dream that he has nightly of his impending doom, until he reaches the end point in his dream, and in his life. And finally, in “The Touch of Death”, Falred, like Jarette in “A Watcher by the Dead”, also becomes gripped by the thought of a dead man rising and stalking him, until he too, causes his own death by mistaking a non-living object that he has seen and felt before as the dead man waiting, reaching for him.

Bierce enjoyed writing about how the human mind was not the supreme seat of logic and reason and could easily cause its owner’s death when conditions and stress were right. Howard picked up on this aspect of Bierce’s stories, and used it to craft some effective little stories of horror. In these last two stories discussed, Howard takes Bierce’s theme of the psychological terror of sitting with a dead person and puts his spin on it for a fun yarn.

NOTES

1. To H.P. Lovecraft, Dec. 1932
2. Online story here: One Of The Missing by Ambrose Bierce (online-literature.com)
3. Online story here: A Tough Tussle by Ambrose Bierce (online-literature.com)
4. Online story here: The Man and the Snake by Ambrose Bierce (online-literature.com)
5. Online story here: A Baffled Ambuscade by Ambrose Bierce (online-literature.com)
6. Online story here: The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce (online-literature.com)
7. “The Man on the Ground”, The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, Del Rey, 2008
8. “The Dead Remember”, ibid.
9. “The Dream Snake”, ibid.
10. To Tevis Clyde Smith, ca. mid- to late-September, 1927.
11. To Merlin Wand, May 26^th, 1928, note 1
12. Ibid.
13. “Robert E. Howard Fiction and Verse Timeline”, by Rusty Burke

SOURCES

Bierce, Ambrose. “A Watcher By The Dead”. 1889.

A Watcher By The Dead by Ambrose Bierce (online-literature.com)

Howard, Robert E., “The Fearsome Touch of Death”. 1930. The Fearsome Touch of Death (gutenberg.net.au)

Howard, Robert E. The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard. 2008. Del Rey

“Robert E. Howard Fiction and Verse Timeline”, compiled by Rusty Burke, http://www.rehupa.com/OLDWEB/fiction_timeline.htm

Roehm, R., Bullard, J. (Eds.) (2021), The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard Volume One: 1930-1932, (2^nd edition), REHFP

John Bullard is a retired attorney who lives in Texas, and has updated The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard for The Robert E Howard Foundation Press, which will soon be available for purchase. He became a life-long Howard fan upon reading his first Howard story in an anthology of horror stories in 1974. While working on the Letters, he started seeing the subject matter of this post and has written it up for the education and edification of other Howard-ophiles. John is currently working on several projects for The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press.