The Horla

The Horla, short story by Guy de Maupassant that is considered a masterly tale of the fantastic. The story was originally published as “Lettre d’un fou” (“Letter from a Madman”) in 1885 and was revised, retitled “Le Horla,” and published again in October 1886; the third and definitive version was published in May 1887. It is presented in the form of a diary and energetically details the hallucinatory obsessions of a madman.

The narrator becomes convinced that a mysterious invisible parasite is draining away his life force through his lips. Unable to destroy the creature by setting fire to his house, he commits suicide. Some critics have seen a parallel between the narrator’s debilitating mental illness and the author’s degeneration from syphilis.