The Horla

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognised by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature’s greatest writers. In The Art of the Novella Series , Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time. 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.