Guy de Maupassant's Tales of Terror Reviewed

Tales of Terror from Tartarus Press is the latest major incarnation of the Guy de Maupassant's work, featuring 32 of his most macabre and bizarre pieces collected in one convenient volume. Maupassant has long been an established figure in both weird fiction and mainstream world literature since the early twentieth century, though he has arguably slipped under the radar lately. So, it is a timely move to see his work re-introduced in a format specifically tailored to the strange. Tales of Terror offers an appetizing lineup of Maupassant's bleak, psychological, odd, and always paranoid tales to re-acquaint weird readers (and possibly the entire genre) with this important French writer. A Foreword by Ramsey Campbell and an Introduction by the translator, Arnold Kellett, give adequate background on Maupassant's queer life and literary output.

As a weird writer, Maupassant toyed with the horrors and potential monstrosities of existence from many angles: the purely weird and supernatural, the real and cruel, and the psychologically maddening. A further subset focused on the great traumatic event of his time and place: the disastrous Franco-Prussian War that the author himself served in. This Tales of Terror volume herds all of these dark works together, providing readers with a buffet of paranoid doubt, curiosity, and genuine fear.

The book begins strongly with Maupassant's most widely acknowledged weird masterpiece, "The Horla." In this story of a man haunted as much by an invisible vampire-like being as by his own head, readers get a distillate of Maupassant's entire weird oeuvre. An outside terror plays on the narrator's nerves, driving his inner self toward the breaking point, and a doom ultimately his own responsibility by the tale's end. In no other Maupassant story do the supernatural and the psychological enjoy such an intricate dance, though each of these components exhibited by the writer elsewhere pack a stronger individual punch.

Several other stories see Maupassant feverishly hawking unadulterated weird imagery that is nearly unsurpassed by his contemporaries and his literary descendants. These are his "pure weird" stories, with an almost undeniable element of the supernatural at work. In "The Hand," a foreigner keeps a captured human hand chained up and constantly fears its escape and retribution. "Was He Mad?" exposes the freakish magnetic powers of a man, and the sanity-shattering effects his abilities have on his visitor. "He?" is another tale where Maupassant boasts his abilities to infuse his work with something from his own heart. The story follows a man's visions of a mysterious intruder, and his obsessive desire to confront the weird invader or flee from him. Overall, it contains an embryonic Rod Serling like plot and imagery that predates the Twilight Zone by more than half a century.

Two other stories with potent supernatural actors read like hallucinatory dreams. "The Dead Girl" sees the dead rising from the ground in a night shrouded cemetery to re-write their epitaphs with what they deem truer assessments of their lives. "A Night in Paris" is an account of a nightmare (or is it?) for a nocturnal wanderer who feels his own life and his city gradually evaporate into an eternal night of blackness and (crawling?) chaos. This Maupassant tale may be another missing link in the field of weird literature, as it contains unmistakable proto-Lovecraftian themes that will cause readers well versed in weird fiction to applaud.

A lesser represented set of stories in Tales of Terror read like mysteries that wrap up in logical, mundane explanations. Though they contain imagery and actions worthy of the weird label, the supernatural in these pieces is clearly a farce. "The Devil," in which a peasant watching over a dying woman concocts a plan to hasten her departure by giving her a mechanical vision of Lucifer, is a perfect example of this. So is "The Mannerism," where Maupassant draws upon his predecessor Edgar Allan Poe in an exploration of premature burial. Here, however, the victim rises from the grave after an attempted robbery as a faux apparition, meting out indirect justice.

In other portraits of terror by Maupassant, the author moves to strictly real world horrors where mere men and women take the part of monsters. "The Blind Man" and "Coco," tales that graphically depict the torment of a blind man and a horse respectively, use base human cruelty as the specter. "The Diary of a Madman" fuses Maupassant's fixation on obsession with his ability to create obscene human devils. It introduces us to a crazed elder of justice whose bloodthirstiness leads him to swipe out at his victims from the secure perch of his position of power. Unlike most tales of this kind by other writers, these are not moral fables. They are raw images of creatures that must have haunted Maupassant's troubled mind and the France of his day, fiends that still haunt us today in ever greater numbers.

The same model of real life horror applies to what might be called Maupassant's war stories. Tales of Terror contains several of these, which may leave those with a taste only for the macabre and the outre wondering what they are doing here. Fear not, as these bits of historical fiction are not only full of their own horrors, but are also reminiscent of the weird Civil War stories of Maupassant's rough contemporary, Ambrose Bierce. "Two Friends" shows the cruelty invading Prussian troops inflict on two men who live mainly for fishing. "Sainte-Antoine," "Old Milon," and "Mother Savage" utilize a colorful lineup of French commoners fighting back against the Prussians in entertaining ways. Certainly, the patriotic affinities of Maupassant leave an impression in these tales. Yet, they are not crude propaganda pieces, but energetic and realistic ghosts of a war that could stand-in for most other struggles with a slight change of props and names.

Today, there is a lot of unsettling talk about the decline of literacy (and especially the diminished appetite for the rich prose of previous epochs) due to broken education systems and new technologies. Where will masters like Poe and his French incarnation Guy de Maupassant be in another century? None can really say. Fortunately, the small, but vibrant community of weird literature has been spared better than others from the troubled drain on readership. Tales of Terror is an artistic time capsule that should secure a lingering place for Maupassant's macabre, febrile horrors for a new generation, and may be a meteoric jolt of paranoid weirdism that will fire the pens of new artists in the field.

-Grim Blogger