Writing the Uncanny Quotes

“If we are attempting to write the Uncanny, our aim, surely, is to leave the reader with a sense of loss – of an understanding not quite grasped.”
― Lucie McKnight Hardy, Writing the Uncanny

“Writing fiction, imagining characters we have not met and do not know, we use our empathy to try to describe their lives. However, the imagination must be fed by research, or else we produce caricatures.”
― Dan Coxon, Writing the Uncanny

“Theology, the domain of male priests, referred to spirits or souls, rather than ghosts, a word smacking of lay superstition and pagan practices, associated with women. The dead, however, were no respecters of categories and roamed in both discourses.”
― Dan Coxon, Writing the Uncanny

“In the novel Follow Me to Ground by Sue Rainsford, the slugs which inhabit the narrator’s garden at night are ‘shrivelling over the pebble and dirt like the skin on staling fruit’.11 Here the visual image this summons is unsettling: the slug being likened to a foodstuff implies that it may be devoured, with all the revulsion that would entail, but without stating this explicitly.”
― Dan Coxon, Writing the Uncanny

“This effect can often derive from the negative spaces that inhabit a story: the absence of information, the dearth of explanation, the omission of clarification and exposition. It is human nature to seek to fill in the gaps, and when the writer withholds these nuggets that will help the reader make sense of a story, the reader’s own interpretation is often more unsettling because it will draw on their own fears, paranoias and phobias. Sometimes, the absence of something can be more unnerving than a sinister presence.”
― Dan Coxon, Writing the Uncanny

“The ‘uncanny’, therefore, was not merely something unknown, but something that had been hidden or repressed. He famously called it ‘that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’.”
― Dan Coxon, Writing the Uncanny

“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.”
― Lucie McKnight Hardy, Writing the Uncanny

“As we are well aware, the sensations brought about by the manifestation of the Uncanny – dread, unease, that inescapable sensation that something is not quite right – have been said to derive from that which is familiar (homely) becoming unfamiliar (unhomely). This effect can often derive from the negative spaces that inhabit a story: the absence of information, the dearth of explanation, the omission of clarification and exposition. It is human nature to seek to fill in the gaps, and when the writer withholds these nuggets that will help the reader make sense of a story, the reader’s own interpretation is often more unsettling because it will draw on their own fears, paranoias and phobias. Sometimes, the absence of something can be more unnerving than a sinister presence.”
― Lucie McKnight Hardy, Writing the Uncanny