The Boarded Window

America’s long and celebrated tradition of horror writing got fully under way early in the 19th century with the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. His tales of mystery and terror captivated large audiences. One of his most chilling stories, “The Premature Burial,” describes the precise sensations of being buried alive.

Ambrose Bierce’s “The Boarded Window,” first published in 1891, also addresses the terrifying possibility of being given up for dead while still alive. Bierce, though, approaches this ideal from a different angle: a loved one fails to guard a body believed dead until fate enlists a grim reaper in the form of a predator to finish it off.

A journalist and writer of fiction, Bierce was an officer in the Union Army during the US Civil War; he fought in at least 20 battles and witnessed enough carnage to overwhelm any soldier. During his late 40s, Bierce suddenly became a font of storytelling, publishing volume after volume of shorts. By the time of his death, he had written nearly 1,400 stories.

His writing pulls few punches, brutally describing wartime calamities. His cynical attitude toward the so-called glories of battle darkens the moral viewpoints of his stories. In Bierce’s world, the horror of human conflict is unrelieved by some higher purpose; humans die largely without honor, their lives wasted in futile causes.