Things that Lurk in the Shadows

I’ve got something of a fetish for stories about the fantastic and non-existent creatures of the night like werewolves and ghosts and vampires. Especially vampires. In fact, my vampire fascination stretches as far back as to when I was about 8 (and that is quite a long time ago now) and I used to dream about being a vampire. Then, it wasn’t so much the blood-sucking business that appealed to me, but more the supernatural powers like super-human strength and the ability to fly and see in the dark. Nowadays it’s more what the seductive and shadowy vampires of literature represent that interests me (although I still wouldn‘t say no to supernatural powers). It’s the expression of uncontrollable and therefore terrifying sexuality and the awfully alluring call to glut oneself on the “dark” things of this world that the vampire represents which I love.

So you can imagine my glee when, one rainy afternoon in a dingy Parisian bookstore, I stumbled across an unassuming little tome entitled Histoires de Vampires which boasted Baudelaire, Dumas and Maupassant (amongst others) as authors. I snatched it up and discovered, upon reading the introduction twenty minutes later on the metro, that these stories were important contemporaries and precursors to later more well-known vampire novels such as Dracula (please let's not mention the Twilight saga here. Oops. I just did).

I’m not going to go into an in-depth account of each of the stories (even though I would like to) but I will tell you about my favourite amongst them: “Le Horla” (1887) by Guy de Maupassant. One of Maupassant’s first stories dealing with the fantastic and also one of the first stories marking his descent into madness, “Le Horla” is the unfinished diary of a man who is gradually overtaken by an invisible but overpowering presence he names the “Horla” (a vampiric entity in the sense that it feeds off the life-force of humans). The story documents the protagonist’s transition from happy-go-lucky and independent young man to the smothered, terrified and oppressed object of the invisible but irrefutably more powerful “Horla”. The complete domination of the protagonist plays out that old human fear that there is someone or something more powerful than us, someone or something that will come to take over the world and make of us their livestock.

To use the protagonist's own words (in my very rough translation) upon realising his plight: “Now, I know, I’ve figured it out. The rein of humanity is finished. He is come, He whom the very first fears of primitive people dreaded, He who was exorcised by disquieted priests, He who was evoked by witches in the dark of the night, and to whom, without yet seeing Him appear, the presentiments of the wary travellers of this world gave the forms of gnomes, ghosts, genies, fairies, pixies”.

“Le Horla” is an unsettling tale that sweeps you up in its gradual approach towards an all-consuming terror of that which we can’t see and the absolute loss of hope when faced with a foe more powerful and intelligent than we could ever be. So probably not a story to read if you’re prone to nightmares …