Ambrose Bierce was one of the strangest phenomena of American letters. The adjectives used to describe his writing - and character - tend to have a rather uncomplimentary ring: "venomous, " "vindictive, " "paranoid, " "rancorous, " "malevolent; " yet few would deny his brilliance of intellect and style. About half of his fiction output consisted of stories of horror and the supernatural, a genre which appealed to his psychic constituion and may have reflected a deep inner torment.