Books Dissecting The Dark Descent What You Do Know Might Hurt You: “The Damned Thing” by Ambrose Bierce A smart, unsettling story that prefigures Lovecraft (and many others)… By Sam Reader | Published on June 17, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post. Ambrose Bierce was a writer whose acid-tongued societal critiques and gift for crafting scenes of the unnerving feel like a lightning rod for literature to come. Not just in prominent works like The Devil’s Dictionary and “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” but in his unique voice and deadpan humor, attributes that made him a persistent figure in American culture long after his disappearance somewhere in Mexico in 1913. “The Damned Thing,” one of his best works of horror, pits three intellectuals against an invisible monster in a style that’s been emulated everywhere from the works of H.P. Lovecraft to the movie Predator. Bierce’s unnerving creature, intelligent protagonists in search of dangerous knowledge, and deliberate subversion of rural horror clichés rewrote the rules that insisted horror could be defeated by understanding and defining the unknown, in the process setting the stage for cosmic horror and more refined strains of Appalachian gothic in one single burst. In a small cabin in the woods, a jury of six men meets with a coroner over a mysterious death. The subject of the inquest, a local man named Hugh Morgan, has died under unknown and violent circumstances. The only witness of his death is a writer named William Harker, whose story is too strange to be believed. Confusing the issue further is Morgan’s journal, which details his studies into a horrifying invisible beast known only to him as the Damned Thing. As the details of Morgan’s gruesome end are revealed, it falls to the coroner to answer the question: should the questions around Hugh Morgan’s demise truly be answered? If Fitz-James O’Brien’s aim in “What Was It?” was to show that knowledge could take all the scares and fascination out of a supernatural experience, Bierce directly challenges his assumption. The cast of “The Damned Thing” are very well-versed and learned in their chosen disciplines, but even with all their collective knowledge, they are unable to do more than provide an annoyance to the titular Damned Thing. By the end, the closest we come to defining or understanding the entity (in a manner Lovecraft would echo) is the vague knowledge that it’s an animalistic monster that exists in some color impossible for the normal visual spectrum to perceive. The person who’s studied it the most thoroughly, Hugh Morgan, is unfortunately its most recent victim. Harker, the journalist studying him, knows Morgan saw something terrifying but is smart enough to realize his story won’t be believed and files his account as fiction. The coroner is smart enough to understand that it’s better if they chalk up Morgan’s death to a mountain lion mauling and put the whole thing to rest. All three are portrayed as rational, intelligent people who are able to process the facts before them, even as some elements remain unknowable. In an interesting inversion of the usual pattern, the more rural protagonists are also much smarter than the urban narrator. A lot of rural horror (a notable exception being Manly Wade Wellman’s American folktales) involves an urban narrator playing audience surrogate with the more “rustic” characters being, well, “earthy” and “superstitious” and other adjectives that are basically euphemisms for “weird hicks.” Both Morgan and the unnamed coroner demonstrate the reverse—the coroner is suspicious of Harker the entire way through, refusing to give Harker the journal where Morgan recorded his final thoughts on the Damned Thing because he knows how dangerous it would be in the hands of the naïve writer, and Morgan himself understands nature far better than the average rural protagonist. In Morgan’s diary, not only does he opine on natural philosophy, but reveals that he lured Harker out to his property just to get the young journalist to confirm that the Damned Thing exists. Harker, while self-serving and less grounded, at least demonstrates basic self-preservation. All three exhibit an intelligence and understanding that’s usually left out of horror stories for fear of undercutting the feeling of overwhelming dread or terror that’s outside any context. None of the context we do have makes the Damned Thing any less terrifying, nor is it any more understandable with this information. What the reader learns about the beast instead only heightens that terror—it’s capable of immense violence, but doesn’t attack Morgan until he shoots it; it’s defined in Morgan’s limited understanding as a creature that exists in a color not on the visible spectrum (explaining how it’s invisible); and it does show hints of intelligence, like how it gets close to Morgan’s property but doesn’t attack, and specifically goes after Morgan while leaving Harker alone. It’s still a massive invisible creature that tears a grown man to shreds and does so mainly because Morgan saw it, bothered it, and then hit it with quail shot. It’s bestial, but also intelligent enough to hold a grudge. While the reader might not know where it comes from or what the creature actually is, we’re still given a lot of information while still maintaining a convincing level of terror. There’s a further sense (and another place where Bierce presages Lovecraft) that trying to study and observe the creature literally drove it to Morgan’s front door. Trying to research and understand the Damned Thing is part of the reason it hangs around Morgan and leads to the ultimately fatal confrontation between observer and observed. The first time it’s noticed by Morgan’s dog, it appears watching Morgan from the ridge. As Morgan continues to watch it more and more, it moves closer and closer to him until he’s aiming a shotgun at the dark from his front porch. When it finally attacks him, it does so only after he tries to shoot it—a provocation in their escalating conflict driven by Morgan’s fatal need to find out more about his nocturnal interloper. The act of knowing more about the creature is directly tied to Morgan’s ultimate demise. The chronological end to the story reinforces this—the jury at the inquest finds that Morgan was mauled by a mountain lion “that had fits” in spite of knowing full well that it was something more than that; the coroner refuses to let Harker publish Morgan’s journal as it would only add to the chaos; and Harker publishes his account of what happened to Morgan as fiction specifically because no one would actually believe him and accept the story as fact. Further knowledge of the Damned Thing would only cause more problems than it would solve, and while the story doesn’t embrace the idea that ignorance is bliss, it does leave us with an overwhelming feeling that some things should just be left alone. After all, the one person who poked at the Damned Thing ended up getting torn to shreds. Perhaps that’s a warning Morgan should have heeded before it was too late. In ignoring the clichés of rural horror and directly refuting the concept that horror is specifically “about the unknown,” Bierce proved that (counter to what O’Brien and others might think) knowledge isn’t as effective a bulwark against the horrors as it might have seemed. His idea that maybe one shouldn’t poke the supernatural creatures to understand them would also lead to the birth of cosmic horror as a genre—both in that some things will remain mostly unknowable despite all the logic and intelligence applied in their direction, and in the idea that (as we’ve seen in Lovecraft, Wagner, and to a lesser extent Leiber and Bradbury) sometimes it’s best to let the monsters and forbidden corners go undisturbed…lest the “mountain lion” decide that maybe its best solution is to attack whatever keeps poking it. And now to turn it over to you: Is ignorance truly bliss in “The Damned Thing?” Was Bierce the earliest author to demand more from rural fiction? Was the coroner right to keep the journal from Harker? How much did Lovecraft borrow from Bierce? Is Manly Wade Wellman’s oeuvre a continuation of Bierce’s rural work? Please join us in two weeks when we look at a ghost story from the author of everyone’s favorite sled crash—“Afterward” by Edith Wharton.[end-mark] The post What You Do Know Might Hurt You: “The Damned Thing” by Ambrose Bierce appeared first on Reactor.