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The Ape, the Idiot & Other People

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First published: 1897
Pages: 188

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About this book

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.

About the author

W. C. Morrow

William Chambers Morrow (1854-1923) was an American writer born in Selma, Alabama, who moved to California in 1879 and built his career in San Francisco journalism and fiction. He sold stories to The Argonaut, where Ambrose Bierce then worked, and several of his most notable tales appeared in the San Francisco Examiner.

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