WW Jacobs is probably best remembered for just one story.

Which is slightly unfair to a writer whose reputation during his lifetime was mainly as a comic writer of nautical and domestic tales. But The Monkey’s Paw is difficult to forget — especially if your dreams tend to be coloured by the last thing you read, as mine sometimes are.

What makes it so frightening is mostly what Jacobs doesn’t tell us.

[spoilers ahead]

He doesn’t show us Herbert’s death. He doesn’t tell us exactly what has come back. And when the story reaches its terrible climax, he gives us a door, a desperate plea, and one wonderfully unhelpful little pronoun:

For God’s sake don’t let it in.

It.

That’s all we get.

I think that’s the secret.

Jacobs leaves gaps, and we fill them.

He suggests; we imagine. In that sense, the reader becomes a kind of collaborator in the story — supplying the thing that Jacobs wisely refuses to show us.

It’s not so very different from comedy, either. A good comic writer doesn’t always explain the joke, or even need to provide a punchline. The writer creates the situation, trusts us to make the connection, and lets us discover the humour for ourselves.

Jacobs knew that sometimes the most powerful thing a writer can do is stop talking.

Give the imagination a little room, and it will do the rest.

Usually with considerably more enthusiasm than is strictly helpful for a good night’s sleep.

Over to you: tell me about a story I shouldn’t read just before switching off the light.