The tale works on many levels because we bring our own perceptions to the table. Bierce uses locals and farmers to dumb the story down to make the events seem somehow otherworldly.
We later learn that the book the man is reading is in fact a dead man’s diary, and the man reading is a coroner. The main ingredient of the tale is a a man named William Harker, a reporter who arrives late at the inquest. There is an inquest inside the candlelit room, and one of the nine men recounts what has happened to the corpse, drawing us further inwards. This allows the characters in the story to barely interpret anything, aiding the suspense.įurther into the tale, we learn what is truly happening. The tale also sometimes feels like the first Predator movie, in the idea that this invisible force is involved, and we humans cannot seem to filter it through the casual eye. in The Damned Thing’s effect on isolation and cabin fever. This gives the tale an existential essence, leading to the absurd.Īt times, I drew close connections to John Carpenter’s The Thing or to the novella Who Goes There? by John W. We, the reader, are thrown into the aftermath of what has happened and why it has happened. One can almost feel the flicking of a light switch upon each of the nine men gathered in the room – one of which happens to be a corpse, adding further to the mystery and suspense.
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