The Damned Thing

A man is killed by something no one can see, and at the inquest a strange diary suggests the existence of a creature colored beyond the range of human sight. Bierce’s chilling tale reasons its way toward cosmic horror with the cold logic of a scientist, anticipating later weird fiction. Spare, ironic, and genuinely unsettling, it is one of the finest short horror stories of the nineteenth century. A masterwork of dread from a writer whose bleak wit and gift for terror earned him the nickname ‘Bitter Bierce,’ it leaves its unseen menace all the more frightening for remaining just out of view.