The idea for this story came from a book of Victorian ghost stories that were outside the usual canon that are reprinted ad nauseum. It contained two stories by Ambrose Bierce, ‘A bottomless grave’ and ‘One summer night’, plus commentary. In the introduction, it said that nobody before him had written like him, and nobody since had either. I took that as a challenge

I picked the later story as my model, since it seemed the more intriguing of the two. In both, he chose to show all the wires, instead of leaving the door open to a supernatural ending. That annoyed the heck out of me, because dark doings in a graveyard cry out for some sort of supernatural turn, even if it is only a last-second spook

The first order of business was all the characters had to be villainous, to one degree or another. In the other story, all the characters were corrupt, and cheerfully so. Next, I decided that a simple murder of the protagonist when the ghouls come upon him still alive in the grave had to go. The gleefully dark irony of the dead rising to take vengeance on their tormentor after mistaking a premature burial for one of their own was too good to miss.

This story ended up running a lot longer than I had intended. He original was only a couple pages, but he had the advantage that funeral preparations are more extensive now than they were then, and he didn’t have to lay out historical context. If there are any readers of Ambrose Bierce out there, I’m interested in knowing how I did. If the answer is ‘not well’, all I will say in my defense is the reason nobody has followed in his footsteps is it is so devilishly hard to do.

This piece might be salable - it does have a certain black humor to it - but it was written specific for my own website. As mentioned above, I was attempting to trail in the footsteps of the master, and the idea of people reading it without knowing what I was attempting to do was well-nigh unbearable. Yes, I plead guilty to being an egoist. I went to all that trouble to be creative, I want you to know what I was doing.

The reason for including it here was twofold. One, I figured I had at least made the attempt of rising to the challenge, if not succeeded. Two, I wanted to show that I can do darkness. There is an unfortunate trend within horror fiction toward nihilism, or at least darker-than-thou. I have not been able to get onto that bandwagon, but I thought I should display at least a little street cred.