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“Oil of Dog”

UHHHHHHH

The kid’s father boils dogs to make oil and his mother “disposed of unwelcome babes”. The kid throws the bodies of the babies in the river, but while being tailed by the police, he decides to throw his current bundle of remains in with the dog oil. The result is the best oil produced yet, and calamity ensues.

I thought that I’d read Darkest Bierce but I was horribly mistaken.

“Burbank’s Crime: The Last Words of a Political Parricide”

“A CAMPAIGN STRATAGEM DEFEATED: A Flattened Father—A Fat Office In Dispute—The Night Before Burbank Was Stretched.”

Something about the political grotesques brings out the inflated subtitles. The most remarkable element of this story is not that he kills his father or what he kills him for; it’s HOW he kills his father.

“His Waterloo: Why He Is Not to Be Commissioner of Dead Dogs.”

“Holobom In the Cave of Adullam”

“The Inside History of the Late Convention—The Knife as a Political Power”

Wow! That’s a lot of subtitle. Anyway, this is a sketch about a man trying to get into a worthless political position who is annihilated via character assassination in the Examiner but who is biding his time to return.

“The City of the Gone Away”

🤨

Putting all of these super-macabre stories at the end hits a bit different. Bierce is sort of ragging on doctors, but the excess of the narrator’s crimes as he reveals what has happened to the bodies following the fruitless excavation of his cemetery is, uh, pretty fuckin dark. The ritualism of the burial reminds me of something like Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique.

“My Favorite Murder”

This has a similar tone to “A Bottomless Grave”. A man who has brutally murdered his mother offers the testimony of the murder of his uncle to prove that he wasn’t nearly as awful to his mom. There is a strong echo of “Jo Dornan and the Ram”, here, as a god-like ram figures heavily into the death of hamstrung Uncle William.

“Hades in Trouble”

A comedy sketch where Baalzebub arrives at Pandemonium, having gone wandering, and - to his chagrin - intrigues Satan into visiting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Satan is besotted by Eve but has to settle for, as we find out, one of Eve’s daughters, who her son refers to as “Aggie”. Satan, it appears, is in way over his head on Earth.

“A Bottomless Grave”

A dark, dark comedy about a family of rogues whose fortunes change once the matriarch poisons the patriarch. The tone is sort of like the Addams family if the characters were all unsympathetic psychopaths with zero redeeming qualities. It could be a great base for a much bigger story, but idk about the mom throwing her babies at her risen from the dead husband.

“A Revolt of the Gods”

This is a wild, parodic fantasy that pokes mild fun at Carcosa with the ancient city of Sardasa but is mostly concerned with contempt for the concept of labor strikes as an unhappily married couple somehow dominoes their society into the complete destruction of their city. The husband was responsible for perfuming dead dogs, see, and the wife cut up the meat to be fed to the cats, and…

“My Credentials”

A rare glimpse of Bierce detailing the afterlife, even if - in this case - it is purely for humor at the expense of socialites who measure their standing by how many clubs they are a member of. It’s a bit closer to how it’s imagined in Beetlejuice, with the dead man - Peter - able to access periodicals published after his death to take them to St. Peter’s gate.

“An Imperfect Conflagration”

I guess this is the first of Bierce’s parenticide trilogy? A man murders his parents to humorous effect; him and his father have just stolen an ornate music box and his father tried to conceal it, given away by its morning alarm-clock chime. He murders his mother because she MIGHT have come into the library and seen the body.

“A Cargo of Cat”

Well, we had a sailing story about a ship full of dogs, so why not cats?

“The hatch that had held down the cargo was flung whirling into space and sailed in the air like a blown leaf. Pushing upward through the hatchway was a smooth, square column of cat. Grandly and impressively it grew—slowly, serenely, majestically it rose towards the welkin…”

“The Following Bear [From the Milpitas ‘Weekly Liver-Complaint’”

This is a sequel to the goofy praying bear in the apple tree story that reveals that the wife was not eaten. She tempts fate yet again, here, with Bierce detailing a combat sequence with her striking with a broom before we are treated to a ridiculous chase sequence where the bear expects her to feed herself to him.

“Boarding a Bear”

It appears that a Bierce trope regarding bears is that they are capable of eating nearly anything, like the treasures in “Juniper”. This bear WANTS to eat his landlord’s wife, but she keeps him at bay with apples (wtf is up with the head hatch 🤨) and, when she runs out of those, a call and response prayer that the bear knows outrageously well.

“The Captain of the Camel”

The premise of a Captain who has stuffed his ship full of books is interesting enough but Bierce immediately takes it to a farce when, with the ship stranded at sea for a year, the crew commits to eating all of the novels that the Captain has dispensed with, the most notable side-effects being ragged with as well as romance throughout the crew.

“Curried Cow”

If only all of these comic stories were this good!! This is the tale of a woman with a beloved cow who LOVES to kick the shit out of people. There are a ton of great asides in this one, from the entire county’s male population preemptively marrying to avoid getting married to the aunt, to the battle between the Methodist Parson and the combative cow and one great, final kicker.

“Stringing a Bear”

Uhm. Okay? One old frontiersman starts to tell a story about how he strung a bear with a lariat and then gets interrupted by his excitable friend, resumes the improbable story with the bear stringing ITSELF, and then has one last poke at his gabby buddy.

“The Baptism of Dobsho”

A dude’s friend gets into the religious spirit with this local new sect so much that he starts confessing sins that he’s never had part of and hinting at more. The narrator sets the baptism up for an outrageous prank that involves a now antiquated laxative powder that fizzes and dissolves into CO2 when wet, I guess like super pop-rocks.

“A Providential Intimation”

A man wins the jacket of a wealthy man and finds in the jacket pocket what he assumes is a great horse race tip on who to bet. The setup: he sends the money to a clergyman to place the bet. It turns out that the horse broke its neck, but then we find out that the horses are named after mine claims, which you can buy stock in…

“Mr. Jim Beckwourth’s Adventure”

Hey, this is the same guy who told the story about the exploding geothermal lake! This is a tall tale / fantasy that attempts to explain the origin of the hot spring phenomena in the Yellowstone region but sounds more like an area in the earth’s crust that is thin enough to see and feel the fires of Hell. Except that, well, you probably wouldn’t describe them as beautiful.

“How I Came to Like Dogs”

A ship is transporting some 60 to 70 million dogs and wrecks on a sandbar. The initial irony of this story is that, once everyone - dogs and men - get on a raft to drift at sea, they feed the sailors> to the dogs>. Since this is the early, opening twist, you can probably imagine where this story is going, but not how they come to this consumptive epiphany.

“Jo Dornan and the Ram”

This absolute unit refuses to back down from any danger that he can meet head on. In this case, the narrator observes Jo lock himself into a head-butting duel with a ram. Things don’t go quite the way in which he expected, and part of the tall tale feel comes from the description of when the ram finally makes contact, the moment describing some sort of god-like combat.

“How to Saw Bears”

A bear accidentally starts a saw mill in the middle of the night, which is played for comedic suspense once the narrator figures out that the bear is responsible for the disturbance. The narrator does not want to be eaten by the laconic bear but the mill needs some sort of repair in order to keep the conveyor going.

This is escalating quickly. I think that it’s fair to say that Coransee and Teray are the two children of Rayal and Jansee seen in the prologue. We don’t know a lot about the Pattern, yet, but we do have an idea that there are Patternists, mutes, and Clayarks, and different classes within the Patternists — Outsiders and slaves, though those appear to be effectively the same thing.

So uh sometimes, when you forget your book in your other car, you walk around a nearby bookstore and find the one, first-published book from a series that neither Barnes and Noble have deigned to keep around!!!

“Jim Beckwourth’s Pond: And Some of Its Peculiarities”

This is another goofy Great Plains tall tale and involves something like a cross between a hot spring and a geyser. It’s mildly interesting to Jim but he has to lie in order to get his traveling companions to come see it. In a circumstance of infernal serendipity, it appears as though Jim has the power to make the entire lake EXPLODE.

“Maud’s Papa”

Uh, a dude who I can’t quite call a walking thesaurus sort of accidentally murders his paramour’s father in the middle of a practical joke that she has staged. At the same time he is dumping phrases like “I’ll conciliate your exegesis with a proletarian!” he is forcing a bottle of ink down the old man’s throat.

“Snaking: A Tale of the Frozen Truth”

A tall tale more palatable because we are told up front that the man telling it is a profound liar. We move from men collecting snakes during winter to a snake den with hammocks to his partner making a fire on the top of the rock that heats the den up so that the snakes wake, with the listener only half-paying attention and calling the liar out on inconsistencies.

“Maumee’s Mission”

A modest tall tale of the Great Plains. A group of travelers is exploiting the dumbest of the caravan by way of the optical illusions of distance on the plains. They kind of own everything that he has, but aren’t intending to collect on it. What goes around comes around, though, and they founder on the last wager that they make.

“‘The Following Dorg’”

I appreciate how meta Bierce is with this one. It’s a tall tale except it is less tall and more long. The more he writes, the longer the dog in the text gets, until it becomes so grossly extended that a telegram must be sent to inform the owner at the head what is going on at the dorg’s rear.