I just finished reading the classic collection of horror stories Can Such Things Be by Ambrose Bierce. I loved the ryness of Bierce’s prose, and while the stories were hardly terrifying by modern standards, there were gems in the collection that were memorable.

I originally read the collection because it has been noted that Chambers pulled from Bierce in crafting his story “The Repairer of Reputations,” which leads off The King in Yellow anthology. My take away is that Chambers pilfered the last three stories for names and took nothing more. Thus, the connection should be forgotten.

Bierce’s stories should be forgotten for a second reason. They are horribly racist. As someone who writes Lovecraftian fiction, I certainly have wrestled with the ethics of building upon something so undeniably problematic and have feared that anything I create will be fruit of a poison tree. Yet, there are stories in Bierce’s collection that are on an entirely different level. Multiple stories in his anthology set racism at their very core such that the story can not function without it.

My rule of thumb has been that if I can re-write a Lovecraft story such that the racism disappears and the story still functions as it did before, then there is something redeeming to the original. Indeed, I’ve done this with one of Lovecraft’s most xenophobic stories, “The Street.” Likewise, Jonathan L. Howard successfully transformed “The Horror At Redhook” in the first chapter of Lovecraft and Carter. Lovecraft wrote “The Horror At Redhook” after getting mugged in that neighborhood as a way to vilify immigrants…yet the story has enough other elements that Howard was able to salvage it from itself.

For at least two of the stories in Bierce’s collection there is no such path to redemption. Even the stories that are not overtly racist pass this low bar by featuring only white people, which is a separate issue.

And so here I am. I have such respect for the prose and style of a great American author and still have no desire to see his work survive. It is the classic problem faced by white Americans–this may be my heritage, but do I want it to be my legacy?

Some things should not be.