Le Horla

"The Horla" (French: Le Horla) is an 1887 short horror story written in the style of a journal by French writer Guy de Maupassant, after an initial, much shorter version published in the newspaper Gil Blas, October 26, 1886.

American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, in his survey "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1927), provides his own interpretation of the story:

Relating the advent in France of an invisible being who lives on water and milk, sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extra-terrestrial organisms arrived on earth to subjugate and overwhelm mankind, this tense narrative is perhaps without peer in its particular department.

The story has been cited as an inspiration for Lovecraft's own "The Call of Cthulhu", which also features an extraterrestrial being who influences minds and who is destined to conquer humanity.

The word horla itself is not French, and is a neologism. Charlotte Mandell, who has translated "The Horla" for publisher Melville House, suggests in an afterword that the word "horla" is a portmanteau of the French words hors ("outside"), and là ("there") and that "le horla" sounds like "the Outsider, the outer, the one Out There," and can be transliterally interpreted as "the 'what's out there'".

In the form of a journal, the narrator, an upper-class, unmarried, bourgeois man, conveys his troubled thoughts and feelings of anguish. This anguish occurs for four days after he sees a "superb three-mast" Brazilian boat and impulsively waves to it, unconsciously inviting the supernatural being aboard the boat to haunt his home.

All around him, he senses the presence of a being that he calls the "Horla." The torment that the Horla causes is first manifested physically: The narrator complains that he suffers from "an atrocious fever," and that he has trouble sleeping. He wakes up from nightmares with the chilling feeling that someone is watching him and "kneeling on [his] chest."

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Wikipedia