Library
Writing the Uncanny · 21 of 23
Writing the Uncanny
literature HIGH

Reweirding: Place, Space, and Specificity

Writing the Uncanny Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst (eds.)
place setting humdrum-uncanny wyrd liminality eerie psychogeography

Key Principle

The uncanny is not the unknown but the familiar made strange — which means that Gothic landscapes (remote moors, ancient forests, decaying mansions) are structurally the wrong kind of setting. They are marked as strange in advance, which means readers arrive with defences raised and expectations of strangeness already formed. The humdrum uncanny instead extracts its dread from ordinary built environments: suburban streets, retail car parks, canal towpaths, underpasses. The mechanism is wyrd — the Anglo-Saxon concept at the root of "weird," meaning the total interconnectedness of all things — applied as a perceptual practice: close, specific, genuinely curious attention to the ordinary reveals what is already latent rather than importing strangeness from outside.

Why This Matters

Freud's formulation is directional: the uncanny is the hidden in the familiar, the repressed that returns. Folk-horror tropes locate strangeness in remote, already-marked-as-strange places — which reverses the required direction. If the strange is somewhere else, the reader is not ambushed; they have travelled to meet it. The humdrum uncanny ambushes readers where they least expect it: inside the environments they have stopped looking at. Gary Budden's account of becoming lost and panicked in "a tangle of placid and moderately affluent streets" near his own home is the precise experience that generates the material — not imagined, not imported, but discovered through genuine unsettlement inside the ordinary.

The structural lesson extends beyond choice of setting. A writer who understands why liminal geographies work can apply the same logic to any transitional or functionally blank space. Nicholas Royle's analysis of the beach demonstrates that the most powerful uncanny settings work because their geography independently performs the same operations the narrative requires: the beach is already structurally destabilised before any plot event occurs.

Good Examples

Gary Budden, "Greenteeth" (cited in "Half-Concealed Places"): A "housing-crisis horror" set on London's canal network. The uncanny is extracted from a site of contemporary social anxiety — the housing market, the city's relentless development — rather than imposed through gothic convention. The canal network is humdrum infrastructure; the horror lives inside the humdrum, not despite it.

Nicholas Royle on the beach (Section 16): The beach generates uncanny effects structurally before any narrative choice is made: it is liminal (neither land nor sea), tidal (objects buried and revealed on the rhythm of the return of the repressed), sensorially ambiguous (the sea's sound is sourceless), isolated (cliffs and dunes create a "discrete world"), and porous (sand migrates into rooms and sheets — the beach follows characters inside). A writer who understands this is not choosing atmosphere but outsourcing structural work to the landscape.

M. John Harrison, "The East" (cited in "Half-Concealed Places," 1996): The source text for the Tier 3 taxonomy. Giant retail car parks, traffic intersection forecourts, and tunnel entrance arches — spaces designed purely for function — become eerie precisely because they resist narrative. They carry the evidence of human design without human meaning.

Counterpoints

Folk-horror as worn-out formula: Folk-horror tropes, once widely enough known, cease to function as uncanny because recognisable narrative shorthand pre-dilutes the strangeness. The writer who reaches for the ruined farmhouse or the village ritual is working with material that readers have already supplied a story for. The uncanny requires that the reader is ambushed; a known form provides advance warning.

Reweirding as performed method: Budden's own warning — reweirding can itself become a recognisable style. Genuine attention produces the effect; deliberate application of the method produces its simulacrum. The distinction is whether the writer is genuinely curious about a place or performing curiosity. Specificity of naming is the primary test: not "a one-way system" but "the Tottenham Hale one-way system." Generic detail signals performed attention; specific detail signals the real thing.

The beach as mood-setting without structural understanding: James Herbert's "The Fog" is Royle's negative example — combining death and the beach mechanically does not produce uncanny writing. "It's not as simple as combining death and the beach; you have to write it like you mean it." (Section 16) The structural properties of the beach only generate uncanny effect when the writer exploits them rather than merely citing them as backdrop.

Key Quotes

"I think of it as a method of writing fiction that taps into the true idea of 'wyrd'… an awareness of the total interconnectedness of things. Therefore, all actions, places, events and things are of equal import and all part of the greater picture of whatever we want to call reality." — Gary Budden, "Half-Concealed Places"

"The eerie strand, the weird foreshore — it's hardly surprising, given its role as go-between, land on one side, sea on the other, there one minute, gone the next, either hidden or uncovered by the tide." — Nicholas Royle, Section 16, "Beach Reading"

"Half-concealed places that had the feel of the past, but were too anonymous to count as history." — Joel Lane, "The Circus Floor," Nutshell 11 (1990); cited in "Half-Concealed Places"

"All the wonders lie within a stone's-throw of King's Cross Station." — Arthur Machen, Far Off Things (1922); cited in "Half-Concealed Places"

Rules of Thumb

  • Choose the specific over the atmospheric: "the Tottenham Hale one-way system" rather than "a one-way system." Generic place-names signal imported strangeness; specific names anchor the uncanny in the real.
  • Apply wyrd-thinking: treat every ordinary detail as potentially charged. The writer's job is attention to what is already there, not importation of strangeness from elsewhere.
  • Use the Tier 3 test: spaces designed purely for function (retail car parks, motorway slip roads, tunnel arches) resist narrative and therefore generate the eerie. Tier 2 spaces (abandoned cinemas, decaying docks) are already narrativised and require more work to destabilise.
  • Understand why a liminal setting works structurally, not just atmospherically. The beach is potent because its geography independently performs tidal concealment/revelation, porosity, and sensory ambiguity — not because it "feels" eerie.
  • Writing without looking for it: authentic attention to a place will produce uncanny effects that deliberate formula cannot replicate. Royle's principle — that Raymond Chandler, not seeking the uncanny at all, produced it — applies to place as much as to plot.
  • Edgelands (transitional zones between city and country) are productive precisely because they are simultaneously in multiple states of transformation and cannot be resolved into a single category.

Related References