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Hell Is That Noise / Literature

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Examples of Hell Is That Noise from Literature, where the sound itself terrifies the characters. Good thing we can’t hear it!


  • Alatriste: Recurring antagonist Gualterio Malatesta is noted to have a very particular whistle that usually comes out in his giddier moments, and often precedes him. And his presence is never a good sign, for he's usually under the antagonist's payroll, eager to do violence, and a Master Swordsman that can give even the captain a hard time all by himself.
  • In Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams, the "shattering pop" of the flashbulb from her neonatal memory that precedes being Blinded by the Light in the protagonist's recurring dream.
  • In At the Mountains of Madness, the narrator keeps bringing up a strange musical piping sound in the air throughout the Mysterious Antarctica setting. At first he attributes it to the wind blowing through the Mountains and the Bizarrchitecture ruins of the Ancient Astronauts city, but then he hears that sinister piping when he's deep into the ruins and in the climactic ending it's revealed that it came from the Shoggoth, which are mindlessly howling the Starfish Language of their ancient masters.
  • In Deltora Quest, the Wenn make a hideous racket to incapacitate anyone who enters their territory, so they can be paralyzed and eaten by the Wennbar, a monster that controls the Wenn. The Forests of Silence (ironically) are not pleasant places. Also the Four Sisters: the main characters begin to hear the first Sister to be destroyed, only to realize that they've been hearing the same sound their entire lives, and didn't even think of it as sound.
  • In the Discworld book Moving Pictures there is an instrument called a resograph ("thingness-writer"), which measures disturbances in the fabric of reality. It drops a small lead ball in the direction of the disturbance, which "... in severe cases may exceed —plib— two pellets —plib— during the course —plib— of —plib— one —plib— month". Or to put it in other words...
  • The underwater cave in DO NOT TAKE THE SHELLS is filled with a constant noise that keeps getting louder, then quieter, then louder again, making it impossible to tune out.
  • In the Dresden Files novel Changes, Harry fights a vampire-summoned Mayan primeval monster, a complete Implacable Man called the Ik'k'kuo. Harry notes that its heartbeat is incredibly loud... and when you are in a completely dark building, an increasingly loud thump-thump is not what you want to hear.
    • Somewhat undercut when it makes a different sound that Dresden refers to as "that teakettle thing."
  • The Famous Five: The Five (especially Anne) are often scared by mysterious noises. Notable examples are:
    • In Five get into Trouble, they are startled by screech owls, on Owl's Hill. Even brave George thinks this noise is frightful.
    • In Five on a Hike Together, Dick and Anne are on a deserted moor on a rainy night, and they hear a fierce clanging of bells, which are certainly not church bells. They are a warning of an escaped prisoner. This is almost a Trauma Button, as they are startled when later, they do hear church bells.
    • Also in Five on a Hike Together, Dick is sleeping in a barn, and suddenly wakes to hear a scratching sound on the walls of the barn, followed by tapping on the window.
      Anne: How horrid. I shouldn't have liked that at all.
      Dick: I didn't.
  • Harry Potter
    • In the spin-off Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the Augurey's cry is scary enough for wizards to think it foretold death (it actually foretells rain).
    • The sound the Dementors make is described as cold enough to freeze your soul. (The kiss will devour it)
    • The scream of a fully grown mandrake plant is said to be enough to kill instantly.
  • The Haunting of Hill House — the noises outside disturb Eleanor.
  • "The Hound (1924)": The hound's presence is first established when the protagonists enter the Holland churchyard and hear the faint baying of a hound. This baying follows them on the ship back to England and to their manor-house on the moors, being rarely traceable as coming from a specific direction. The terror brought on by the baying swells with its reoccurrences and gets worsened by the additional but less frequent sound of moving wings. In the end, when St. John is dead and the narrator digs up the Dutchman in a bid for mercy, he is left stunned when he finds the corpse in an evident state of undeadness and covered in organic material that indicates he's killed someone not too long ago. Freeze turns to flight only when the Dutchman greets him by baying.
  • The 'growl' made by the house in House of Leaves.
  • In John Dies at the End, the sound of Korrok's otherworldly worm minions is described as "... fifty thousand men trapped on a desert island, deprived of food and water and sex but somehow kept alive for fifty thousand years. Then, after they've been tormented a hundred steps beyond insanity, tortured past self-mutilation and cannibalism, somebody drops off a sculpture of a naked woman made of T-bone steaks. If you could then capture the sound of them simultaneously fucking and eating and tearing her to shreds and broadcast it to the center of your skull at ten thousand watts, it would still sound absolutely nothing like what I heard."
  • In Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, the T. rex's roar, when first heard by the characters, is described as a horrifying, unbearable scream from another world. A character wets his pants while hearing it.
  • Dean Koontz's Phantoms will often include the descriptions of mundane sounds to help ratchet the tension, especially after a character has discovered a body. This culminates later on when someone picks up the phone and starts hearing various mundane animal noises, which slowly turn into the sound of thousands of people screaming in hellish agony.
  • In the Ravirn novels by Kelly McCullough, Eris' laugh is frequently described by Ravirn also known as Raven as sounding like glass breaking.
  • The trope is inverted in The Screwtape Letters. The letters that the demon Screwtape writes to his nephew are sent from Hell, where there is continuous noise. He tells Wormwood that in Heaven there is just silence and music. This is meant to be a terror to his nephew, as the demons want (although not necessarily like) the cacophony.
  • Colin Thiele's Aftershock! has this at the start of Chapter 2, depicting the earthquake from the end of Shatterbelt:
    The roar, when it came, convulsed and stunned the world. For a second or two beforehand there had been utter silence. The birds had suddenly ceased their songs, the dogs had stopped barking, the horses were standing tense and still.
    It started in the hills. Nobody had ever heard a sound like that before. It began as a rumble, a deep, deep thunder, as if some great god of the earth had stirred, and groaned in agony. But it grew with fearful speed, louder and louder, like a hundred jet planes taking off together. It swept down on the foothills and the city, on the streets and houses, on the people in St. Bernard's Park. It was in the air above them and all around them, and in the ground beneath their feet. The air thundered and vibrated, the earth rocked.
  • The Southern Reach Trilogy: There's a loud moaning noise which comes from the reeds every evening in Area X. At first, the expedition members taunt it with howling back at it, but when it becomes louder and angrier they desist immediately.
  • The heartbeat from "The Tell-Tale Heart" drives the narrator insane. Subverted in that there is no actual sound, he's just insane.
  • In James Thurber's "The Whip-Poor-Will" the song of a whippoorwill which will just not shut up drives the main character insane, leading him to kill his wife, the servants and finally himself.
  • The moan of an approaching zombie in World War Z. Or the nonstop moaning of an entire swarm... Of course, the characters turn to see where it’s coming from before they start running.


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