"The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant is in two versions. The first version is a short story or tale published in 1886. The second is a long short story or novelette published in 1887. If you can, you should read these two versions together, even if the second version is fuller and, I would say, more important in the history of science fantasy and science fiction.
The first version is shorter, more objective, and more emotionally even. It takes the form of a first-person narrative within a third-person narrative, and so we're not completely immersed in the narrator's low or declining mental state. There is the very likely possibility that he's telling the truth about his experiences with an otherwise inexplicable invisible being. The situation, with its framing device set inside of a hospital, reminds me of the movie version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).
The second version of "The Horla" is longer and entirely subjective. The narrator is very slowly losing his mind, and by the end is ready to kill himself. His version takes the form of a series of diary entries. The diarist can be taken as an unreliable narrator. He may be merely insane rather than a witness to real but inexplicable events. Could Maupassant have gone into steep decline in between his composition of these two versions? Could he have been his own diarist/narrator?
A long time ago, I wrote about Fritz Leiber, Jr., and the problem of the weird tale in the twentieth century. That problem is summarized in passages from Leiber's short story "The Hound," originally in Weird Tales in November 1942:
"We begin by denying all the old haunts and superstitions. Why shouldn't we? They belong to the era of cottage and castle. They can't take root in the new environment."
* * *
"The supernatural beings of a modern city? Sure, they'd be different from the ghosts of yesterday. Each culture creates its own ghosts."
In "The Horla," Maupassant anticipated the problem of the weird tale in the twentieth century, for the new being of his title is a materialistic/scientific monster set to displace the supernatural monsters and ghosts of the past. At this point, I should say that "The Horla" is a very rich story, full of ideas and episodes, each with its own interest. It's a kitchen-sink kind of story, an attempt at a single explanation for seemingly many disparate things. Every fan of weird fiction should read it carefully, for it treats concepts of the supernatural past, the Nietzschean (and Darwinian) present, and the Fortean future, mostly directly and on full display now that we have had nearly a century and a half to read stories of this type. "The Horla" also anticipated H.G. Wells, and I wonder: was it the first alien invasion story in the history of science fiction?
In the two versions of "The Horla," the eponymous being is compared directly or indirectly to an incubus/succubus, a vampire, and a demon that takes possession of a man's life, mind, and activity. In the second version especially, "The Horla" presents a kind of unified-field theory of anomalous phenomena in that so many things that were formerly explained by supernatural means--incubi/succubi, night paralysis, vampires, demons, ghosts, poltergeists, and so on--now have a materialistic explanation, this for an age in which God has been proclaimed dead and the supernatural no longer has any power in our lives:
We've always had a foreboding of him, for centuries we've dreaded him and announced his coming. Our forefathers were always haunted by fear of the Invisible.
Now he has come.
He was the true subject of all the old legends about fairies, gnomes and evil, elusive spirits in the air. He was sensed in advance by men who were already apprehensive and trembling. (First version, Bantam, 1994, p. 295)
Note the language of the Christian concept of the Second Coming and of a relief from anxiety, fear, and trembling--except that those feelings are not relieved but enforced by the coming of the Horla.
From the second version, in which the hypnotist Dr. Parent, obviously meant to represent a man of science, speaks from a position of supposed authority:
"Ever since man has thought, since he has felt himself close to a mystery which is impenetrable to his coarse and imperfect senses, and he endeavors to supplement the feeble penetration of his organs by the efforts of his intellect. As long as that intellect remained in its elementary stage, this intercourse with invisible spirits assumed forms which were commonplace though terrifying. Thence sprang the popular belief in the supernatural, the legends of wandering spirits, of fairies, of gnomes, of ghosts, I might even say the conception of God, for our ideas of the Workman-Creator, from whatever religion they may have come down to us, are certainly the most mediocre, the stupidest and the most unacceptable inventions that ever sprang from the frightened brain of any human creature." (Random House, 1945, 1950, p. 33)
In "The Horla," God is dethroned first by science and materialism, and that clears the way for man to be dethroned from his place near the top of the great chain of being. Why should we enjoy any special status? Why should we not give way to this new superior being? For no reason at all.
There is much in "The Horla" for us to contemplate, definitely more than I can cover in a blog entry or two. I'll bring up two more concepts before getting to the main part of what I set out to say today. The first involves Friedrich Nietzsche . . .
I have read that if God is dead, then all that remains to drive human activity is the Nietzschean will to power. (The only other options, I guess, are nihilism and self-destruction, both of which were at work in Maupassant's work and life, as well as, ultimately, in that of Nietzsche.) I'm not a philosopher and don't understand philosophical ideas very well. All I can say is that there are exercises of will shown in "The Horla." An introduction to this concept is in the episode in which the diarist's cousin is hypnotized and her will coopted by her hypnotist. This taking-over of her will foreshadows that of the Horla's taking-over of the diarist's will later in the story. There seems to be a parallel made between possession by a supernatural being--a demon--and that of the materialistic/scientific Horla. In both instances, the possessed person loses his ability to exercise his will to a more powerful--or superior--being. We now recognize mesmerism as a pseudoscience, and so the force of Maupassant's idea is reduced in our time. But in his, mesmerism was perhaps seen as more potent scientifically and no doubt useful for his purposes. In any case, hypnotism or mesmerism was a way for him to treat the concept of a loss of will--or the Nietzschean concept of the will to power--to effect.
The second materialistic or scientific (or pseudoscientific) concept treated indirectly in "The Horla" is that of Darwinism, for the obvious point is that the Horla is more advanced than humanity in evolutionary terms: he has come, again, to displace us. In the first version, Dr. Marrande speaks as the narrator closes out his narrative:
"I don't know if this man is mad or we both are, or . . . or if our successor has really arrived." (p. 296)
In the second version, the diarist describes the Horla as man's "successor in this world." (p. 38) On August 19, he writes:
Now I know. I can divine. The reign of man is over, and He has come. [. . .] Woe to us! Woe to man! He has come [. . .] the Horla--it is He--the Horla--He has come!--" (p. 39)
He continues:
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, its nature is more delicate, its body finer and more finished than ours. [. . .]
There are only a few--so few--stages of development in this world, from the oyster up to the man. Why should there not be one more, when once that period is accomplished which separates the successive products one from the other?
Why not one more? (p. 40)
That, surely, is progress and evolution.
It's plain to me that the Horla is a being from another planet, from the stars. Some readers might see it differently. But I see "The Horla" as an alien invasion story, and perhaps the first of its type. H.G. Wells usually gets credit for writing the first or one of the first alien invasion stories in his scientific romance or seminal science fiction novel The War of the Worlds (1895; 1897). It's easy to see why "The Horla" would have slipped notice, for it is a far more subtle and less sensationalistic work. Again, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, another far more subtle (and insidious) work, is closer in concept to "The Horla."
Finally, I would like to bring up Charles H. Fort, the youngest of the four men of the title. I have written a lot of about Fort. I see him as a seminal figure in science fiction as well. In thinking about man's place in the universe, Fort famously concluded:
"I think we're property."
(From The Book of the Damned, 1919, Chapter 12; see "Piecing Together Separated Things," from May 13, 2022.) That idea--that we are merely the property of superior beings, extraterrestrial in origin--has come down to us through all kinds of science fiction and science fantasy stories from the pulp era to the present. In fact, it's extremely prominent in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, published nigh on two years ago. Fort is credited as the originator of that idea, which also, as it so happens, forms the basis, I think, of the ancient astronaut hypothesis. But was Fort the originator? Or did it come from somewhere else? I'll answer my own questions, for it seems to have come from "The Horla." Very obviously from "The Horla," in both of its versions. From version one:
What is it? Gentlemen, it's the being the earth has been awaiting, after man! He's come to dethrone us, subjugate us, tame us, perhaps to feed on us, as we feed on cattle and hogs. (pp. 294-295)
And from version two:
. . . but the Horla will make of man what man has made of the horse and of the ox: His chattel, His slave, and His food, by the mere power of his will. Woe to us! (p. 39)
So in the second passage, there is--as in the Cosmic Horror Issue--the combination of a Nietzschean idea--"the mere power of will"--and a Fortean one--we are "chattel."
(There are episodes involving mirrors and gazing into mirrors in "The Horla." I don't have those puzzled out, but I wonder if they could allude to the Nietzschean idea of gazing into abysses.)
As for the narrator/diarist in "The Horla," he finally puts together his ideas regarding the Horla by availing himself of what I have called the Fortean method. This is more overt in the first version than in the second, but it's present in both, for in both, the narrator/diarist discovers, like Fort, a newspaper account that provides an explanation for what has so afflicted him. In the first version, that account refers to "[a] kind of epidemic of madness" that has struck in Brazil, that is, attacks by "invisible vampires." These are obviously made by what the narrator has called the Horla. And he remembers that a Brazilian ship recently passed by his house near the Seine. Without the newspaper account, the attacks would remain an isolated mystery, perhaps an individual madness. But with it, they become real in the world, the account being all of the evidence needed that something strange is indeed going on here.
(The arrival of a vampire carried on board ship from another place reminds me of the plot of Dracula by Bram Stoker, published in 1897.)
So did Fort read Maupassant, specifically "The Horla"? I don't know. I didn't find entries on Maupassant in the indexes of either of my biographies of Fort (by Damon Knight and Jim Steinmeyer). Fort traveled in the Old World. Presumably he was exposed to Old World literature. But I guess these things will remain mysteries. In any case, I would say that "The Horla" was at least an early story to treat the problem of the supernatural past in the materialistic/scientific present; that it was one of the first if not the first alien invasion story; that it seems to have treated the Nietzschean concept of a will to power; that it also seems to have treated the Darwinian concept of man as just a link in an evolutionary chain reaching forever forward; that it predated the Fortean concept that we are merely the property of superior extraterrestrial intelligences; and that newspaper accounts and other documents can be used to explain what would otherwise remain disparate and unexplainable phenomena, and so in addition to science, we have journalism as an explainer.
So read "The Horla" and see what you can find in its pages.
Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley
