The Ape, the Idiot & Other People
Fourteen stories of cruelty, dread and odd tenderness make up W. C. Morrow’s best known collection, published by J. B. Lippincott in 1897. It opens with “The Resurrection of Little Wang Tai,” in which an anthropoid ape escaped from a circus train falls in with Moses, a gentle inmate of an asylum, and the pair come upon a child’s freshly dug grave. The stories that follow are just as unsettling. “His Unconquerable Enemy,” Morrow’s most anthologized tale, tracks a servant’s revenge after a rajah orders him mutilated. “The Permanent Stiletto” leaves a blade lodged in a man’s chest because removing it would kill him, and “The Monster-Maker” hands a surgeon the power to rebuild a living body. Morrow wrote in Ambrose Bierce’s San Francisco, and Bierce praised his taste for the shadow side of life.
