The Death of Halpin Frayser

[1] Halpin Frayser, a 32-year-old resident of the Napa Valley, awakens from a dreamless sleep speaking the mysterious words "Catherine LaRue" into the darkness.

The most obvious interpretation of the story is supernatural: Halpin was killed by the zombie or lich-like corpse of his mother.

[4] As summarised by H. P. Lovecraft, the story "tells of a body skulking by night without a soul in a weird and horribly ensanguined wood, and of a man beset by ancestral memories who met death at the claws of that which had been his fervently loved mother".

[6] More recent commentators, including William Bysshe Stein and Robert C. Maclean, have highlighted the incestuous attachment between Halpin and his mother.

[6] Maclean has speculated that after Halpin and his mother fled separately west, they lived as man and wife in California (although there is no indication of this in Bierce's text).

[6] The story has been viewed as "perhaps Bierce's most remarkable supernatural tale"[6] and a key precursor of zombie fiction.

[4] In 1927, H. P. Lovecraft included "The Death of Halpin Frayser" among "permanent mountain-peaks of American weird writing".

[9] "Halpin Frayser" supposedly goes beyond Bierce's other non-war stories in "reaching a truly rich measure of psychological complexity".

[3] As Samuel Loveman has noted, "flowers, verdure, and the boughs and leaves of trees are magnificently placed as an opposing foil to unnatural malignity".