Curious about Bierce? This is not the place to start. I would recommend Library of America’s Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs or Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce.

Bierce fans will want this. It has journalistic pieces and satires published anonymously but probably by Bierce. Bierce has many pieces that were blended and reworked to become “Ashes of the Beacon”, Bierce’s best satire. It and his other major satire, “For the Ahkoond”, are in the Library of America volume too, but here we see them in a more informative context, a context that becomes tedious at times.

Most of Bierce’s satire just aren’t that funny, and his satirical points are often more concisely and effectively made in his non-fiction pieces. Not-so funny journeys to imaginary lands are the feature of his “The Land Beyond the Blow” series which owes a strong debt to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The Annals of the Future Historian series is not as successful as “Ashes of the Beacon” because it skimps on the imaginative futuristic framing of the stories and has little drama in its plots. Given that it often use quite similar language to his editorials on similar topics, I suspect he wrote them for two reasons: money and because they provide the opportunities to make jokes with his favorite punchline – death.

The usual Bierce editorial themes are here: labor unions, capital punishment, anarchists, railroad safety, insurance companies, and, of course, dogs. Bierce, at times, is an elegant, effective wielder of a literary scalpel even if you disagree with him.

And there are some delights. Bierce’s attack on “cynolatry” (dog worship) is fun. I also enjoyed two pieces that raked Theodore Roosevelt over the coals.

As for me, I read it to complete my survey of anything Bierce wrote that could remotely be termed science fiction, and it met that requirement.

As with their effort regarding Lovecraft, Lord of Visible World: Autobiography in Letters, and Clark Ashton Smith’s poetry, the editors’ notes and introduction are informative. I even got an answer to my question as to why Bierce feared women would start murdering with impunity. ( )