Let the Quiet Speak

In The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson writes, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”

That line lingers because it’s delivered into silence. Jackson gives us still rooms, waiting walls, and pauses that seem to listen back. The quiet becomes sentient.

Silence isn’t an absence of sound—it’s a pressure that builds until the reader starts to hear it.

  • Why it works: Psychologist and horror theorist Noël Carroll, in The Philosophy of Horror, explains that dread thrives in anticipation. When a scene denies resolution—when footsteps stop, when the radio cuts out—the mind rushes to fill that void with possibility. In writing, silence doesn’t slow the story; it loads it.
  • How to do it: Use pacing and white space as tension devices. Every pause is a held breath.

Do

Strip away dialogue to let sensory details breathe.

Use shorter sentences to mimic hesitation. Let a scene’s soundscape fade until it feels wrong.

Avoid

Explaining what characters think during silence.

Overfilling the gap with exposition or using ellipses or italics as shortcuts for tension can be off-putting.

Stillness as Suspense

Stillness is motion denied. It’s a frozen frame that forces the reader to stare too long.

Robert Eggers uses this masterfully in The Witch: the camera lingers on unmoving faces, unmoving woods, letting time stretch like skin. That refusal to cut is what makes you squirm.

In prose, stillness works the same way. Every unbroken paragraph, every unturned page, asks the reader to wait for release.

  • Why it works: As film scholar Julian Hanich notes in “The Audience Effect in Horror Cinema” (2010), prolonged stillness activates the body’s vigilance response—the same physiological state triggered by perceived threat. The longer the body waits, the more it believes danger is imminent.
  • How to do it: Stillness requires precision. It’s not about freezing a scene; it’s about letting readers notice the freeze.

Do

Anchor stillness to one vivid image (a pendulum, a breath, a door barely ajar).

Use paragraph breaks as beats; the white space becomes your metronome. Resume movement with subtlety—let one detail shift before chaos resumes.

Avoid

Using stillness as filler. It should hum with purpose.

Snapping instantly from stillness to shock or confusing stillness with inactivity can be jarring for your readers. Your characters are alert even when unmoving.

From My Work

From Salt & Bone (Book Two):
“Lisa stood in the doorway, hand poised over the switch. The generator had gone quiet. Not dead—just… quiet. In that vacuum, the building seemed to breathe. The air shifted. The drip in the sink kept time. She lowered her hand.”

From The Death of Me:
“I didn’t hear the scream so much as feel its absence—the way the air folded in on itself afterward. The fluorescent lights buzzed again, steady this time, like the world was pretending nothing had happened.”

Both moments hinge on absence: one of sound, one of motion. In both, stillness forces the reader’s attention inward, into the space between beats.

Why Silence Endures

Mark Fisher, in The Weird and the Eerie, writes that the eerie “depends on the absence of someone or something.” It’s not the creature in the woods—it’s the gap it leaves behind.

Silence and stillness endure in horror because they invite participation. The reader becomes the co-author of their own dread.

When you take everything away, what remains is imagination—and imagination is always the loudest monster in the room.

Extras

Table Of Contents
  1. Let the Quiet Speak
  2. Stillness as Suspense
  3. Why Silence Endures
  4. Extras