Motionless now and in absolute silence, she awaited her doom, the moments growing to hours, to years, to ages; and still those devilish eyes maintained their watch.

Seen by contemporaries as a natural successor to Edgar Allan Poe but with the added dimensions of a man who had witnessed true horror fighting in some of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War, Ambrose Bierce was one of America’s leading convention-defying writers, critics and essayists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – but still remains relatively unknown by many fans of the genre.

This new collection not only brings together some of Bierce’s best and most unusual stories (such as ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, ‘The Moonlit Road’ and ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser’) but also highlights those aspects of his life which saw him as a loner, someone who stepped aside from society and observed it as some other being. Even in death Bierce was unconventional, disappearing to join the Mexican Revolution, never to be seen again – a mystery editor Mike Ashley explores in a closing essay for the book.