“Creeping unease” and “unspoken terrors”: on the epistemic value of quiet horror

This article critically assesses Shirley Jackson’s fiction to argue that quiet horror has epistemic value, despite its focus on suggestion, the uncanny, and the unknown. To reach this conclusion, section one begins by clarifying what quiet horror is, justifying the focus on Shirley Jackson, and explaining how the three stories that will be used as case studies are representative of Jackson’s oeuvre. Section two argues that fiction is a potential source of understanding and outlines three epistemic values that have been linked to speculative and horror fiction: the immersive thought experiment value (2.1), the existential explanation value (2.2) and the mirrored understanding value (2.3). I argue that these values are shown in Jackson’s “The Lottery,” “The Tooth” and “The Daemon Lover” respectively. Section three considers two objections: that Jackson’s quiet horror can generate no new understanding (3.1) or only limited understanding (3.2). I argue that both objections fail and that Jackson’s stories can generate a notable degree of understanding.