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Writing the Uncanny · 13 of 23
Writing the Uncanny
literature MEDIUM

Identity Dissolution and Environmental Transfer

Writing the Uncanny Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst (eds.)

Key Principle

Uncanny horror operates most powerfully not by introducing a monster but by erasing the self. Jackson's two core mechanisms — systematic identity dissolution and the transfer of emotional disturbance into physical environment — work together: when a character loses their grip on selfhood, the world around them responds in kind. The interior collapses outward, and the outward presses inward, until no boundary remains between the two.

Why This Matters

If identity markers are preserved throughout a story — stable name, recognisable face, established relationships — the reader remains safely anchored to the character. The uncanny requires that anchor to slip. Jackson produces this by withholding or blurring the standard cues of selfhood: a photograph "so blurred that it resembled a hundred other girls in the camp," parents who refuse to recognise their returned daughter. The horror is not death but non-existence — the possibility that a person can cease to be recognised, or cease to recognise themselves.

The second mechanism follows directly. When an interior state exceeds what language can hold — grief, loneliness, rejection at the level of the self — direct realist narration flattens it into social convention. The uncanny externalises it instead: the disturbance becomes physical. This is not mere metaphor; within the story's logic it is also literally occurring. Alison Moore argues that this makes the uncanny the most truthful literary mode for certain experiences, because the strangeness preserves the felt texture of the event in a way that "I find impossible to express outside fiction."

Good Examples

Eleanor's dissolution in The Haunting of Hill House: Jackson identified the pivot of the novel as the question "Whose hand was I holding?" — the horror depending entirely on the reader not knowing whether Eleanor or the house is the answer. The reader's cognitive anchor to Eleanor is systematically erased alongside Eleanor's own. (Chapter: Spotlight on Shirley Jackson)

Poltergeist phenomena and personal instability: Eleanor's emotional instability as an adult produces physical manifestations — "the house shivered and shook, the curtains dashing against the windows, the furniture swaying… and the floor moved under their feet." The origin story, poltergeist phenomena accompanying her father's death, establishes the causal logic early. (Chapter: Spotlight on Shirley Jackson)

Moore's own A Dedicated Friend: Written about donating a kidney, Moore found she could only capture the experience through uncanny fiction: "the uncanniness in the story captures how it felt in a way that I find impossible to express outside fiction." Biographical necessity confirmed the principle. (Chapter: Spotlight on Shirley Jackson)

Counterpoints

Stable identity markers throughout: If a character is consistently named, described, and situated within their social web from first page to last, the reader has no experience of dissolution. Conventional suspense — "what will happen to this person?" — replaces uncanny horror — "is this person still here at all?"

Disturbance that remains purely interior: If the character suffers psychologically but the world around them stays neutral, the two registers remain parallel and separate. The uncanny effect requires that the world responds — that stone cold corridors lean inward, that the soup goes cold in a way that feels intentional.

Reductive biographical reading: The biographical wound — Jackson's conditional mother-love — illuminates the formal mechanism (the "familiarly unmotherly" house that promises softness and delivers rejection), but collapsing fiction into biography destroys the formal achievement. Luke's description of Hill House captures the heimlich/unheimlich duality as architectural logic: "Great embracing chairs and sofas which turn out to be hard and unwelcome when you sit down, and reject you at once." Using this only to explain Jackson's childhood flattens what it does to readers. (Chapter: Spotlight on Shirley Jackson)

Key Quotes

"Hundreds of people saw Louisa on the day she left… and yet no one really saw me." — Shirley Jackson, "Louisa, Please Come Home" (Chapter: Spotlight on Shirley Jackson)

"In the Uncanny, the familiar and the strange coexist. The effect is unsettling, disorienting. But – therefore – as a means of expression, it can feel uniquely true. Strong emotional disturbance, as Moominpappa suspected, has a natural home in the Uncanny." — Alison Moore (Chapter: Spotlight on Shirley Jackson)

"For a woman constantly criticised by her mother, alienated by her husband, and isolated by her neighbours, the worst answer of all is: 'No one's.'" — Grady Hendrix, on The Haunting of Hill House (Chapter: Spotlight on Shirley Jackson)

Rules of Thumb

  • Erase at least one key identity marker per act: unnamed, unrecognised, or untethered from their own history. Each erasure compounds the next.
  • When a character's interior state peaks, find its physical equivalent in the setting. The house responds; the furniture resists; the light changes quality.
  • The question "whose hand was I holding?" should have an equivalent in your own story — a moment where the reader cannot confirm whether they are inside the character or outside them.
  • Biographical displacement, not representation: your own wound becomes the logic of the space, not the content of the narration.
  • The most dangerous place in the story should feel, at some moment, like home to the person it is destroying.

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