The Horla

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"The Horla" (French: "Le Horla") is an 1887 short horror story written in the style of a journal by the French writer Guy de Maupassant, published in a short story collection of the same title, after an initial (much shorter) version published in the newspaper Gil Blas, October 26, 1886. The plot concerns a man who believes he has come under the influence of an invisible supernatural entity called the Horla. 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'". The story is one of Maupassant’s most famous, and has been a major influence on subsequent fantasy and horror fiction.

Read on Wikipedia · Image William Julian-Damazy (drawings), Georges Lemoine (engraving), Public domain