The Parenticide Club

Description

Known as an American journalist, satirist and short story writer, Ambrose Bierce included four of his most grotesque stories into this collection – four very short stories, each of which feature murders viewed through the eyes of the victim’s members, including the murderer as well.

The first story in the collection is entitled My Favorite Murder and it features a man arrested for the murder of his mother and telling about another murder, one that he liked best, of his uncle. The second one bearing the strange title Oil of Dog is even more unusual and grotesque, while the third story with the title An Imperfect Conflagration centers on a fire that is not sufficiently well-directed to bring about the desired outcome. The last of the four stories is entitled The Hypnotist and it describes the experiments carried out by a man who discovers supernatural powers in himself.

All four stories feature protagonists who have murdered at least one of their family members and they live without being in the least affected by remorse or a bad conscience, so these stories by Bierce are not only about murder, but about moral insanity as well. The methods used by the four murderers are all ingenious and gruesome, some of them violent, others committed without aggression, but all of them magnificent in a revolting and jaw-dropping way.

Like in any of Bierce’s stories, humor and satire are also at home in these four short pieces – the readers will be astonished while reading, they will be amused and they will also laugh out loud, even though they will know that what they are reading about is not laughable at all, such is the great power of Ambrose Bierce’s extraordinary story inventing and storytelling talent and of his stories that were deliberately created to shock the reader.
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