The story-from the title onwards-seems to delight in foiling the reader's attempts to do the same. The characters, despite the evidence, choose the former and label the death due to a mountain lion. By the end of the narrative, the characters and readers are left in the classic situation that monsters cause: we must rely on known events and classifications that do not quite fit the facts or accept the presence of something outside our ken based on imperfect evidence. Bierce gives us just enough detail to believe in the existence of the creature, but not enough to picture it in our mind's eye. The mystery is never solved, and the ending of the story is not the ending of the creature (if it is, indeed, a creature at all). Here, we never know just what the invisible thing is. However, Bierce brings a depth to the story that had been lacking before. Following a documentary approach (like that in Frankenstein and Dracula), Bierce begins his story at the end of the action and works backward, slowly filling in gaps and details as he goes: what starts as a typical mystery slowly reveals itself to be a science-fiction/horror tale.īierce was not the first to incorporate an invisible adversary: Fitz James O’Brien included one in “What Was It?” in 1859. Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?) was an American journalist and fiction writer best known for the satirical Devil's Dictionary and the short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Twenty years before he mysteriously disappeared in 1913, he published a science-fiction/horror story that rivals the work of Jules Verne or Edgar Allan Poe.
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