He delighted in clever plotting, and served as a model for Somerset Maugham and O. Maupassant is one of the fathers of the modern short story. Other potently dark creations of de Maupassant are ' Who Knows?', ' The Spectre', ' He?', ' The Diary of a Madman', ' The White Wolf', ' On the River', and the grisly verses entitled ' Horror'.' -' Supernatural Horror in Literature', H. Relating the advent to France of an invisible being who lives on water and milk, sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extra-terrestrial organisms arrived on earth to subjugate and overwhelm mankind, this tense narrative is perhaps without a peer in its particular department notwithstanding its indebtedness to a tale by American Fitz-James O'Brien for details in describing the actual presence of the unseen monster.

Of these stories ' The Horla' is generally regarded as the masterpiece. Nevertheless they are of the keenest interest and poignancy suggesting with marvelous force the imminence of nameless terrors, and the relentless dogging of al ill-starred individual by hideous and menacing representatives of the outer blackness. 'The horror-tales of the powerful and cynical Guy de Maupassant, written as his final madness gradually overtook him, present individualities of their own being rather the morbid outpourings of a realistic mind in a pathological state than the healthy imaginative products of a vision naturally disposed toward phantasy and sensitive to the normal illusions of the unseen.

Who Knows? by Guy de Maupassant