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Literature Pick of the Week - 10/30/2006
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The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce Read The Damned Thing in the Horror Classics Library When I first heard that the first episode of Masters of Horror was going to be based on the Ambrose Bierce story, The Damned Thing, it seemed like a perfect story to kick off with.  Granted the music section features a Track of the Day and I'll also be exploring a Movie of the Day and plenty of articles about television, so it doesn't seem fair that I limit my literature highlight to one week.  The main reason is time.  As we move along, hopefully I or someone else, can tackle a piece of work a day, but until then...  I only have so much time to write. With that out of the way, let's talk about The Damned Thing.  As I mentioned above, Masters of Horror grabbed the story and ran with it.  I thought I would be writing this before the actual show aired, but alas workloads got heavy and I had to launch the site a bit later than planned.  At any rate, the show has aired, I sat through it and we'll talk about that in the television section later.  For now, let's talk about the original story by Bierce. The most interesting thing about this tale is how Lovecraftian it is, which is really remarkable because it would be another ten or so years before Lovecraft would start publishing his stories.  It doesn't take long reading Bierce's work to see the influence he would later have on Lovecraft. The other thing that stands out is Bierce's twisted sense of humor, which is always a delight to read; after all, this is the man who wrote The Devil's Dictionary.  The first chapter is titled, "One Does Not Always Eat What Is On the Table," which concerns an inquest into the death of a man who just so happens to be lying on the table.  Even the second paragraph is delivered with a smirk: "The man with the book was not reading aloud, and no one spoke; all seemed to be waiting for something to occur; the dead man only was without expectation." I've always had this impression that if I were given the opportunity to sit down and have a beer with Ambrose Bierce, I would be wildly entertained by his stories and wit, but probably would end up leaving rather infuriated at something he said in the long run. The story itself is a short little tale and is delivered in and almost backwards fashion.  We start with the inquest into the death of a man and then are told about the events behind his death by his friend who happened to witness the horrible events.  Finally, we are taken back, by way of the dead man's journal to the events that led to his death.  This last little bit is what intrigues me the most, since I have this ongoing interest in horror told in first person as they unfold.  In fact, I'll be revisiting that theme quite a bit in the future. The Damned Thing is a simple story.  It concerns a man whom lives in an isolated location and firmly believes that something evil is lurking about, something he cannot see.  Ultimately, when he decides to take a shot at that something, it comes back to haunt him in a big way. Pretty simple enough, but Bierce drops various suggestions that the man was not the only one to meet that fate.  Having seen bodies in that shape before and finally given a firsthand account of what happened, the jurors decide it best to label his death at the claws of a mountain lion, rather than accept the horrifying truth that something that was invisible to the human eye might have caused it.  In the end, we're left to question which is worse: the possibility of some creature out there, or that there are people who would rather ignore the truth than face it, possibly at the cost of more human lives. This entry was edited on November 8, 2006, 9:58 pm.
Filed under: Literature, Literature Pick of the Week	October 31, 2006, 1:33 am | Permalink | 0 Comments
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