The Damned Thing

"The Damned Thing" is a horror short story by Ambrose Bierce, the American writer and former soldier of the Civil War. It first appeared in the magazine Town Topics on 7 December 1893 and is organised in four parts, each with a humorous subtitle.

The story opens in Hugh Morgan's cabin, where local men have gathered around his battered body to hold an inquest. William Harker, who witnessed the death, enters and is sworn in to describe what happened. He reads a prepared statement about a hunting and fishing trip he took with Morgan, during which they met a series of disturbances that Morgan called "that damned thing". In the final encounter, Morgan fired his gun in terror, fell, and cried out in mortal agony, while Harker saw him thrashing wildly. By the time Harker reached him, Morgan was dead. The coroner finds nothing relevant in the dead man's diary, and the jury attributes the death to a mountain lion.

The second half takes the form of entries from Morgan's diary, which reveal his growing awareness of an invisible creature he is hunting. He concludes that it lacks colour, or has a colour that makes it invisible, and to test his own sanity he plans to bring Harker along.

The story belongs to a tradition of invisible monsters that includes O'Brien and Maupassant, but Bierce offers a near-naturalistic explanation: an animal whose colour lies beyond human perception. For this reason it is often classed as science fiction rather than Gothic fiction, and his arguments later influenced H. P. Lovecraft.