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Writing the Uncanny
literature CRITICAL

Withholding and Negative Spaces

Writing the Uncanny Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst (eds.)
withholding POV tense prose-rhythm ambiguity structure

Key Principle

The foundational uncanny craft principle: withheld information is more unsettling than disclosed horror. The causal chain is precise — deliberate structural gap → reader projects personal fear → reader unsettles themselves. The writer is not the source of horror; the reader is. This demands replacing the standard craft maxim with a more exacting one: not "show, don't tell" but "neither show nor tell: hint, suggest, allude, imply." Every craft decision — POV, tense, sentence length, metaphor — must be evaluated by how well it manages, maintains, or widens the gap between what the reader knows and what the text discloses.

Why This Matters

Standard craft advice — describe the room clearly so the reader can picture it — works directly against the uncanny. Specificity transfers the horror from the reader's imagination to the writer's, and the writer's version is always less frightening to this particular reader. The moment a writer explains what is frightening, they close the gap, and the dread collapses into the merely puzzling or the merely described.

Negative spaces are not vagueness. They are deliberate structural absences — the shape of what is not said, not shown, not resolved. The gap must be precisely carved so the reader cannot help but fill it. This applies at every scale: the withheld image (what is in the dark room), the withheld motive (why is he following her), the withheld resolution (what happened after the door closed). The larger the unresolved question at the story's end, the more the reader carries the dread away with them. A resolution converts the uncanny into the merely puzzling and retroactively explains away everything the reader accumulated.

Good Examples

Alison Moore, "When the Door Closed, it was Dark": All visual information is stripped once the character crosses the threshold — "the narrow hallway into which she stepped was packed with sunshine – the wallpaper and the carpet were luridly colourful, but when the door closed, it was dark." Reader and protagonist are rendered simultaneously blind. The effect is produced not by describing what is in the dark but by removing the description entirely. (Section 7)

Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat — prolepsis: After two chapters in present tense, chapter three opens with the protagonist's death announced in future tense: "She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds." The tense shift converts the reader from companion to observer of an already- forfeit life. The horror is not the announced death but continuing to read knowing it. (Section 7)

Shirley Jackson, "Paranoia": The title primes the reader to dismiss the pursuit as imaginary — Jackson invites the comfortable explanation. Then she subverts it, "but crucially, gives us no explanation as to why Mr Beresford is being pursued." The story ends without answering its own only question. The reader is left holding the dread. (Section 7)

Counterpoints

Overexplanation: Disclosing the source of fear — the monster described, the supernatural mechanism named, the threat categorised — closes the negative space before the reader can inhabit it. The horror becomes the writer's property, not the reader's. Uncanny effect requires that the reader never quite knows what they are afraid of or the precise moment the familiar dissolved into its opposite. (Section 7, citing Angela Michelis)

Premature revelation of unreliable narration: The reader must eventually realise they have been misled, not immediately suspect it. If the unreliability is flagged too early, the gap closes before dread can accumulate. The reader needs to have trusted before discovering that trust was unwarranted. Signalling instability at the outset produces suspicion, not dread. (Section 7)

Resolution at the ending: An ending that explains, resolves, or redeems retroactively answers every question the story raised and destroys the accumulated unease. "For those who read uncanny fiction there can be a perverse sense of satisfaction when a resolution is not forthcoming." The reader does not want closure because closure would explain away what they felt. (Section 7)

Key Quotes

"Not knowing the exact source of fear and not being able to recognise the precise moment when the familiar dissolves into its opposite are the two most potent contributing factors to an atmosphere of the Uncanny." — Angela Michelis, cited by Lucie McKnight Hardy (Section 7)

"Neither show nor tell: hint, suggest, allude, imply." — Lucie McKnight Hardy, Section 7

"A good piece of uncanny fiction should raise questions which it then refuses to answer." — Lucie McKnight Hardy, Section 7

"The anonymity of the observer is particularly unsettling." — Ra Page, The New Uncanny, Comma Press, 2008; cited in Section 7

Rules of Thumb

  • Evaluate every descriptive passage: does it close a gap or maintain one? If it closes a gap, cut or abstract.
  • For unreliable narration: plant the seeds of doubt invisibly; the reader must look back and find them only after they have already trusted.
  • Tense is not a neutral formatting choice. Present tense is companionship; future tense is doom; past tense is inevitability. Switching tense mid-story is a structural weapon, not a lapse.
  • Second person places the reader inside the frame and implicates them. Use it when the goal is to make the reader feel observed, not just frightened.
  • At the sentence level, incongruous simile is the micro-scale application of the same principle: force the reader to hold two incompatible registers simultaneously and they perform the horror themselves. Familiar comparisons confirm the familiar; surprise disturbs it.
  • At the macro scale: the uncanny ending and the short story's structural refusal of resolution are the same withholding principle applied at the largest available scale. Abruptness is not a limitation — it is the point.

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