Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.
TITLE: The Horla
AUTHOR: Guy de Maupassant
79 pages, Melville House Publishing, ISBN 9780976140740 (softcover)
DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): This chilling tale of one man’s descent into madness was published shortly before the author was institutionalized for insanity, and so The Horla has inevitably been seen as informed by Guy de Maupassant’s mental illness. While such speculation is murky, it is clear that de Maupassant—hailed alongside Chekhov as father of the short story—was at the peak of his powers in this innovative precursor of first-person psychological fiction. Indeed, he worked for years on The Horla’s themes and form, first drafting it as “Letter from a Madman,” then telling it from a doctor’s point of view, before finally releasing the terrified protagonist to speak for himself in its devastating final version. In a brilliant new translation, all three versions appear here as a single volume for the first time.
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
MY THOUGHTS: Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla is another horror classic I should have read long ago, but if it was ever assigned in high school or college I have no memory of it. Considering it reads similar to my favorite Edgar Allen Poe stories (“The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”), I would hope I’d have remembered reading it before now. It’s a study of a man slowly descending into insanity while the reader watches, and as with Poe, the signs of the narrator’s madness are evident to the reader early on even though the main character remains somewhat unaware until it’s too late. However, this story differs from my favorite Poe stories in that de Maupassant’s narrator is not revenge- or guilt-driven; there may be an actual external cause, an actual supernatural entity possessing his home. The evidence for this presented in first person by journal entries could be authentic or could completely be in the main character’s mind. If the latter, the final events of the story are even more tragic.
What’s interesting about this Melville House re-issue is the inclusion of two earlier versions of the story. “Letter From A Madman” puts the narrator’s words in the form of a short letter to a doctor. The feel is less growing paranoia and more direct. In the alternate version of the story also titled “The Horla,” the protagonist tells his story to a board of doctors. The level of tension is somewhere between the well-known journal version and the letter version.
Each version has its positives (“Letter,” for instance, would make a great actor’s monologue, while the “board of doctors” version could easily be adapted and performed by an old-style radio troupe like Leonard Nimoy’s Alien Voices group) but the more well-known journal-entry version is the most compelling and involving of the three.