When I wrote about M.R. James earlier this summer, I drew a distinction between terror and horror.

Horror shows us the monster. We react.

Terror invites us to imagine it. We anticipate.

Shirley Jackson understood that distinction instinctively.

Read today’s quotation again.

…whatever walked there, walked alone.

The most unsettling word isn’t walked.

It’s ‘whatever’.

Jackson refuses to tell us what is moving through Hill House. Instead, she leaves a deliberate gap for our imaginations to fill. Like M.R. James before her, she knows that uncertainty is often far more frightening than certainty. The difference is when the uncertainty hits.

Perhaps that’s why her novels still feel so modern. She isn’t really writing about haunted houses or ghosts. She’s writing about that quiet moment when the familiar world slips half an inch out of alignment, and we realise we can no longer trust what we thought we knew. Not all that different from the de-familiarisation I talked about in looking at the opening of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This quotation goes further than Orwell’s opening 100 words, I think. How? It’s the dehumanising power of ‘whatever’. We believe we can accommodate the human. But the inhuman?

That’s terror. 

And terror gives us a reason to read on, to see if our worst fears are imagined, or if it’s actually much, much worse.

Join the conversation: tell me about a book or story you’ve read which has relied on terror, not horror …