Short horror story review - Guy de Maupassant – The Horla

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1887 – spoiler alerts A famous French horror story about madness, and demonic, possibly even alien possession. A young un-named man of letters keeps a diary of his descent into insanity. It begins innocently enough as he lazes by the Seine on a warm sunny day, watching the ships sail by. He sees a magnificent looking Brazilian schooner and waves to it, unaware that this invites a demonic passenger to leap from it into his mind. Over several days, the creature behaves like a poltergeist, moving his furnishings and drinking his water & milk. Gradually it takes control of his will, which he resists as well as he can. He witnesses a demonstration of hypnotism and compares the cousin controlled into begging for money (as a temporary experiment) to his own manipulation. He then reads of a mass hysteria outbreak in Brazil where people fled a village in terror of a creature controlling themselves and their cattle. He remembers waving at the Brazilian ship and senses that a similar creature possesses him. Finally, he tries to trap the monster in a locked room in his apartment and burns the house down, but he fears the monster might yet control him so he decides to commit suicide. There are a few hints that the Horla exists independently of the narrator. His servants hear a hideous shrieking as the house burns, and the report of the panic in Brazil suggests there are Horla among us too. The story was a huge influence on H P Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, which also deals with a pitiless alien entity of indescribable unstoppable power that destroys people’s sanity. The story inspired the movie, Diary Of A Madman, which I am also reviewing. The full translated text of the short story is available for free online at the link given below. Arthur Chappell