This post is brought to you by Strange Detectives by G. W. Thomas. A large portion of this book is given to “The Case of the Phantom Legion”, which owes some of its inspiration to Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla”. The Athenodorians are brought into the case when a rural doctor is attacked by an invisible thing. The trail will take the investigators to the forests of Michigan and a town haunted by a terrible secret.
“The Horla” was the final masterpiece by the French writer, Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893). Best known for stories of naturalism, de Maupassant was a student of Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), author of Madame Bovary. Both authors wanted to write stories that were free of romanticism. In these circles, de Maupassant is best remembered for “The Necklace”, about a wife who has replaced her jewels with paste, unbeknownst to her husband. Fortunately for Horror fans, the author also liked to write the occasional terror tale like “The Flayed Hand” (for more on severed hand stories, go here.) But it is only as de Maupassant descended into madness (due to congenital syphilis) that his darkest tales are written. These include “He?”, “Diary of a Madman” and his masterpiece, “The Horla”. For more on the Horror fiction of Guy de Maupassant, go here.
The book Modern Ghosts (1890) collects “The Horla” along with several other European authors. This is the perfect title for this story since nothing describes de Maupassant’s intention better. He wanted to tell a ghost story for modern readers at the same time he was dealing with his own growing sense of paranoia caused by his illness. The Horla hovers around the narrator and will not be disposed of by any means. The narrator seeks answers but traditional supernaturalism fails him. This is not some phantom to be dispelled by holy water or prayers.
The plot of the Horla follows a journal written by a man of means who perceives that some unseen thing is draining him of his spirit to live. At first, he thinks he is going mad but sees proof of the invisible thing in his mirror. The narrator looks into other cases and decides this thing is some other kind of being:
A new being! Why not? It was assuredly bound to come! Why should we be the last? We do not distinguish it, like all the others created before us? The reason is, that its nature is more delicate, its body finer and more finished than ours. Our makeup is so weak, so awkwardly conceived; our body is encumbered with organs that are always tired, always being strained like locks that are too complicated; it lives like a plant and like an animal nourishing itself with difficulty on air, herbs, and flesh; it is a brute machine which is a prey to maladies, to malformations, to decay; it is broken-winded, badly regulated, simple and eccentric, ingeniously yet badly made, a coarse and yet a delicate mechanism, in brief, the outline of a being which might become intelligent and great.
The diary writer decides to kill the thing by burning his house down around it. This desperate trick fails. The story ends with him contemplating suicide. De Maupassant does not feel he has to offer a solution, for he himself felt none. On January 2, 1892, he attempted to take his own life by cutting his throat and was placed in a Paris asylum. He died there a year later at the age of forty-three.
The story was reprinted in Pulp magazines like The Scrap Book (June 1911), Weird Tales (August 1926), The Golden Book (December 1933) and Famous Fantastic Mysteries (September 1942) showing its perennial appeal. None of these publications chose to illustrate the tale though (blah!)
The story of the Horla was adapted many times and in various formats. First on the Radio, it appeared on May 9, 1941 on Inner Sanctum, Weird Circle, October 24, 1943, August 8, 1947 on Mystery in the Air (with Peter Lorre) and The CBS Mystery Theater in 1974. On film it was Vincent Price who starred in Diary of a Madman (1963) which took its title from a different de Maupassant tale but certainly is “The Horla”.
Comic book adaptations are surprisingly late. (I would have thought EC would be all over this one! Classics Illustrated, at least which did “The Flayed Hand”.) When stories from the Inner Sanctum Radio show were adapted, Ernie Colon did “The Horla” for Inner Sanctum: Tales of Mystery, Horror & Suspense (2012). Colon gives his idea of what the invisible thing really looks like.
The Horla appears in several songs and in short films. In some ways, de Maupassant put a cap on the traditional ghost story by suggesting something new. His work inspired H. P. Lovecraft and other Pulpsters that came after. The name Horla is French: “Hors” (Outside) and “La” (There), meaning something from outside our normal world. Lovecraft is famous for his “The Outsider”, a title Stephen King borrowed in 2018. King’s novel has a thing that imitates humans and is shadowy if not invisible. The shade of Guy de Maupassant is certainly here.
Another example of this inspiration is Robert Bloch’s “The Shambler From the Stars” (Weird Tales, September 1935), which features an HPL homage as well as an entity that is invisible until its feeds, filing it with red blood. Bloch certainly had the Horla in mind, taking de Maupassant’s idea and making it even more horrific. It is one of my favorite Cthulhu Mythos tales.
Conclusion
The fact that “The Horla” has been reprinted dozens of times in books and magazines suggests that this tale written in the 1880s is still important today. I suspect this is because it is one of the tales that begins the “cosmic school” of Horror. The old reliance on a Christian view of spirits and phantoms (that actually goes back to the Greek and Latin writers) is falling away. More modern times require more modern ghosts. One critique of “The Horla” even suggests that the creature may be an alien. I don’t really see this as the author is quite vague about its origins but it certainly has a more modern appeal. Stories like “The Horla” signal a change from the Victorian to a new way of writing Horror that H. P. Lovecraft exemplifies. The Horla is not only a new being, but a new way to deliver the thrills and chills readers expect from a good Horror tale.
Mythos Horror at RAGE m a c h i n e
Many thanks for this feature. There is also a story by Ambrose Bierce, “The Damned Thing” (1893), along these lines.