Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) was late for fame. He was thirty when he published "Sebo Ball" (1880), a story that made him famous overnight. From that moment on, his literary activity becomes frantic: in the following ten he will publish more than three hundred stories and seven novels. Maupassant makes Flaubert's realism and his budgets on style a religion to which he consecrates, but his personal instinct deepens that reality and guides his stories towards the roots of love and hate, of perversion, crime, of terror And madness, until it becomes one of the great teachers of the horror story.
It precedes this anthology of stories an article in which Maupassant develops the only theories and ideas he wrote about what the fantastic genre supposed for him. It abounds among these stories a vision of the reality that generates anguish and terror, from the stupid cruelty of "the donkey" to a corroid plot of black humor, "the tumbales", which goes between the tombs of a cemetery; From characters victims of social demands such as "a parricide" to the theme of the revenge of the innocents in "confessions of a woman" or in "La Loca".