The unnamed narrator of Guy de Maupassant's novella The Horla is a land owner in late 19-century rural France. In the first entry of the diary that comprises the narrative, he is downright exultant, but four days later he has developed a fever and begun having nightmares. His doctor suggests bromides, showers, and a vacation. The trip to an even more rural spot appears to help — but soon after, he writes that he's hearing strong winds and strange voices and wonders deliriously whether the voices might be coming from disembodied beings. The fever returns, and with it the nightmares: He dreams of an incubus, which he names the Horla, that kneels on his chest and literally sucks the life out of him. The dreams physically and mentally exhaust him, and it seems full-blown madness isn't far off.

But Maupassant does something interesting: he gives his narrator the power to step back, to analyze everything from an objective point of view. Temporarily able to quell the nightmare's effects on his waking life, the narrator acknowledges that his inability to determine the cause of his fever has led him to believe in sinister, otherworldly beings, and he speculates that his solitude has increased his susceptibility to paranoia. The reader almost believes a sensible conclusion is being built up — there are moments of beautifully communicative insight — but before long, the intensity of the visions and the power of the incubus subsume him, and he begins to confuse dreams with reality. Leading up to the extreme measures that he takes to finally rid himself of the Horla, his madness becomes almost laughable — yet there's something resoundingly sane about his attempts to identify a cause.

Parallel to the narrator's exertion to cope with the dreams are Maupassant's efforts to create a perfect text, as evidenced in the two supplemental versions of the novella included in Melville House's edition. Reading the three, it's easy to see that Maupassant was troubled by and beset with paranoia about the general state of the modernizing world. What's unclear, however, is whether his own paranoia was indeed unreasonable.

-Tom Roberge