Ambrose Bierce's Portal Trap

Credited by Lovecraft in "Supernatural Horror in Literature" as a writer of tales that "admit the malignly supernatural and form a leading element in America's fund of Weird literature," it is my observation that Ambrose Bierce also introduced the motif of the portal trap to Weird fiction. Two fine examples are "The Spook House" and "The Difficulty of Crossing a Field." The first tale features a doorway, the other a gateway; each one concludes with unexplained disappearances of personages after moving through these unexpected and malevolent thresholds. Bierce's own unexplained erasure is legendary. Perhaps through his extended travels, he had knowledge of ley lines and nodes. I have always been fascinated by the notion that the legendary originator of portal traps somehow shared the fate of the protagonists of these stories.

Though mainly concerned with automatic writing, the concept of which I 've always regarded as a portal of the pen; it is also interesting to note that W.B. Yeats experimented with portals as evidenced in "A Vision" and his discussion of meditating on a candle's flame then transferring one's vision on any blank wall, whereby geometric doorways, such as a triangle for Fire or square for Earth, would form and allow communications with Elementals of each Realm.

The notion of portals can be regarded as either heady or silly stuff, depending on one's education through life experience; nevertheless, the concept being a major feature of Lovecraft's work is in itself a matter of the truly High Weird. If I were to exemplify my personal encounters, readers might dismiss my overall ability to reason or wink at an over abundant imagination. As related in my tale, "It Wasn't Quite Halloween," since adolescence I have been able to see things literally manifest themselves from "out of the woodwork."

In summation, on further reading of his tales one will discover that Bierce was the originator of the motif of the portal trap in Weird fiction. Apart from arcane texts, does anyone have knowledge of earlier literary examples of such devious doorways?



©2018 by L.P. Van Ness. All rights reserved.


[genre: weird fiction essay, the original text,
hand written notebooks of L.P. Van Ness]