with her mother in a decaying house where they
are barely able to survive and are shunned by the
rest of the community. That changes when they
venture into a store and are spotted by Ran, a dull-
witted but powerfully built young man who imme-
diately becomes obsessed with Bianca’s hands.
Ran rents a room in Bianca’s house and even-
tually convinces her mother to let him marry
Bianca. He and the hands have an odd relation-
ship, and the hands now become flirtatious. On
their wedding night he prepares everything in ad-
vance, then lies down with Bianca and allows her
hands to move up over his body to his throat. In
the morning Ran is dead, strangled, and Bianca’s
mother is arrested for the crime, since it would
have been impossible for the girl to have done the
deed. Her hands have lost their vitality and are
now withered and paralyzed.
Sturgeon was famous for his ability to create
multidimensional characters with a very economi-
cal use of words, and the three principal characters
here are excellent examples. But the most interest-
ing characters are the hands themselves, whose an-
tics remain in the reader’s mind long after the
others have faded away.
Bierce, Ambrose (1842–1914?)
Ambrose Bierce is one of those writers whose life
was so colorful and eccentric that he might well
have been one of the characters in his own stories.
He served in the military during the American
Civil War, which left a deep impression on him and
which is the setting for a great many of his short
stories, became a journalist, spent a considerable
period of time in Europe, and then disappeared in
Mexico during its civil war in 1914.
Most collections of Bierce’s short fiction mix
supernatural and mundane fiction indiscriminately,
but it is his stories of the fantastic and macabre for
which he is most remembered. His most popular
story is “AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE,”
in which a man experiences an entire sequence of
imagined adventures in the split second that pre-
cedes his death. “THE DAMNED THING” describes
efforts to identify and capture an invisible creature.
“Moxon’s Master” is a very early story of a device
that would later be called a robot.
“A Tough Tussle” is more ambiguous. A Union
soldier horrified by the dead is forced to man a posi-
tion near the body of a Confederate, and in the
morning he has been killed and mutilated in a simi-
lar fashion. “AN INHABITANT OF CARCOSA” features
a man wandering a desolate land who finds his own
grave and realizes that he is dead. Revenge from
beyond the grave is also the theme of “The Middle
Toe of the Right Foot.” “The Eyes of the Panther”
involves a woman who changes into the form of a
panther. Several of Bierce’s other stories are tradi-
tional, though unremarkable, ghost stories, and
others end ambiguously, leaving it to the reader to
decide whether the supernatural was involved.
Bierce also wrote some fantasies, mostly in the
form of fables and allegories, the best of which can
be found in Cobwebs from an Empty Skull(1874)
and Fantastic Fables(1899). The Devil’s Dictionary
(1911) is an excellent nonfantastic satire. Al-
though only a few of his individual short stories are
outstanding, the lesser work remains interesting
because of its authentic depiction of life during the
Civil War.“The Black Cat”Edgar Allan Poe(1843)
Edgar Allan POEwas the first major American hor-
ror writer, and several of his stories, including this
one, are acknowledged classics of the supernatural.
This particular story begins with a statement by
the narrator, who professes to have been a gentle
man all of his life and one who loved animals al-
most as much as he did his human companions.
His marriage was a happy one and, since his wife
shared his fondness for animals, they had several
pets, including a jet black cat named Pluto, who
was the narrator’s particular favorite.
As the years passed the narrator fell prey to al-
coholism and became increasingly abusive to his
wife and the animals, until finally in one drunken fit
he cut out one of Pluto’s eyes. Although remorseful
the following day, he soon succumbs to the tempta-
tions of drink once again. Eventually, he gives in to
a perverse impulse—a recurring theme in Poe’s fic-
tion—and hangs the cat from a tree. Shortly there-
after his house burns to the ground, and among the
ruins is a burnt patch that accurately depicts a cat
hanging by a noose around its neck.“The Black Cat” 23