What Is Uncanny Fiction?

From an early age, ghost stories and other tales of the supernatural have fascinated me. As a teenager, I filled my shelves with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, and James Herbert. For me, fear came, not with blood and gore, but with the growing sense of unease. A quiet, creeping dread.

It wasn’t until much later that I realised I wasn’t drawn to the traditional horror of these stories, but what I came to identify as their uncanny nature. While horror remains one of the most successful literary genres of all time, the uncanny is a little more difficult to pin down. Less of a literary genre, the uncanny is more a style of writing, the fostering of a sense of dread. The subtle and unnerving increase of tension. The familiar made unfamiliar.

Psychology and the uncanny

In his 1919 examination of the uncanny, Austrian psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud discussed the nature of the uncanny in relation to the German word heimlich (meaning familiar, native, or homely) and unheimlich (not known, unfamiliar, unhomely). The word heimlich is, therefore, a little ambiguous, offering a sense of both what is comfortable and familiar, and that which is concealed and kept hidden. Unheimlich, on the other hand, refers to everything that should remain secret, or hidden away.