Nothing Is Scarier / Literature

Nothing Is Scarier in literature.

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Wait for it...

General

• This is actually fairly common in Gothic Romanticism. Ann Radcliffe wrote what amounted to a treatise on horror writing. Essentially, "terror" is the feeling that precedes an event, while "horror" is the revulsion felt during/after said event. The former is, by far, more difficult to pull off. Scaring the audience without a visible threat is no small feat, but, as the other examples show, it tends to be much, much more effective. Her The Mysteries of Udolpho spends its time terrifying Emily, the main character. At one point she freezes because of some unseen thing lurking in the shadows, only to be relieved when it turns out to be a suitor . Radcliffe gets bonus points for including a bit of Fridge Horror when the reader realizes that this takes place in the character's room; the real "terror" isn't the possibility of something supernatural but that someone is in her room without her knowing it.

Specific Works

• 2666: It's never revealed what the Germans and Romanians saw inside Dracula's crypt, but the visitors "were divided into two groups, those were pale when they emerged, as if they had glimpsed something momentous down below, and those who appeared with a half smile sketched on their faces, as if they had just been reapprised of the naïveté of the human race."
  • The identity of who is raping and killing countless women in Santa Teresa is never revealed, we only get to see the (increasingly disturbing) crime scenes where their corpses are found.
• Thomas Cromwell invokes this in Bring Up the Bodies when interrogating Mark Smeaton, whom he's accusing of adultery with Anne Boleyn and needs more names from. He chides Wriothesley for mentioning the rack and in fact declines to use actual torture in favor of letting Mark's own imagination destroy him. Nighttime, an oblique comment that they'll "write down what you say but not necessarily what we do," and putting him into a lightless closet full of sharp and strangely-shaped objects^note actually Cromwell's Christmas decorations leave Smeaton barely coherent the next morning.
• Bruce Coville's Book of... Spine Tinglers II: In The Elevator, Martin — and by extension the reader — has no idea who the mysterious large woman in the titular elevator is, what she wants, why she's menacing him, or if she's even human. Furthermore, the woman doesn't speak (at least until the very end of the story), instead just staring and half-smiling at him.
• Done twofold in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
  • Scrooge is warned that the first spirit will come at one o'clock that night, the second at one o'clock the next night, and the last on the final chime of midnight. After seeing the first spirit, he waits for the second, unaware that the spirit is in fact waiting for him.
    Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was by no means prepared for nothing; and, consequently, when the Bell struck One, and no shape appeared, he was taken with a violent fit of trembling.
  • Then, of course, there was the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, who is always shrouded in a cloak and never speaks.
• C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia:
  • The Magician's Nephew (the prequel) makes some use of this trope with the deadened world of Charn, in which there's absolutely no life whatsoever until Digory and Polly find the evil Empress Jadis, leaving them to wonder what happened and what purpose all the empty and silent structures they pass along the way served. Though Jadis pretty well explains all this to them later and what she tells them is pretty terrible, her description is not quite as creepy as the place was when they didn't know. Also, as Digory tells Polly later when Jadis escapes into their world and is at large making trouble, "When there's a wasp in the room, I like to know where it is." In other words, running into Jadis again, dangerous and menacing as she is, is nowhere near so bad as not running into her and knowing that she's still at large being dangerous and menacing to all of London.
    • The nothingness on Charn is not helped at all by the warning next to the bell, which seems to invoke this trope: The gist of it is that something bad will happen if you ring the bell, and nothing will happen if you don't... but the latter will scare you more than the former.
  • In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a group of invisible people force Lucy to go into the house of a powerful and terrifying magician, to find his book of spells and use it to make the people visible again. Lucy finds the book and completes her task safely, but the walk through the house to find the thing is terrifying, especially since the magician himself is invisible and can walk soundlessly. There's also the part where she finds the book, which is set on a podium in the middle of the room. To read it, Lucy has to stand with her back to the doorway. She feels incredibly vulnerable because of this, and wishes very much that there was a door to close. After she casts the spell, she learns that she'd gotten a very one-sided perspective on the magician, who is actually quite kind. The walk out of the house is far less scary.
  • In The Horse and His Boy, Shasta has to spend a night alone beside the Tombs of the Ancient Kings. He's very glad that a stray tomcat is around and keeps him company, because he keeps imagining something is going to come out of them. On another occasion, he and a non-talking horse are riding through a fog when he suddenly realizes that something is right next to them and has been for some time. As it turns out, both times were benevolent interference by Aslan, the series' Big Good.
• Coraline:
  • The protagonist encounters this when facing down the cocoon with something unseen inside. She gets through it by realizing that, logically, nothing can be worse than the moment of staring at it, terrified.
  • In a previous scene, she was walking down a hallway, hearing tapping sounds from a nearby room, which is either water dripping from the tap, or the Other Mother drumming her fingers on the table. She kept walking without looking.
  • In another scene, the Other Mother disappears immediately after shaking hands with Coraline to agree to the game. Coraline's creeped out by this— she prefers the Other Mother to have a definitive location, because if she's nowhere, then she could be anywhere. And of course, it's always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see.
• The Curious Sofa by Edward Gorey. Heroine Alice has spent the book happily indulging in every kind of sexual hi-jinks, but the titular sofa fills her with "a shudder of nameless apprehension". When it's turned on, our POV in the accompanying illustrations slowly pans away from the sofa to an empty corner of the room, and the following are the last lines of the book:
  As soon as everybody had crowded into the room, Sir Egbert fastened shut the door, and started up the machinery inside the sofa. When Alice saw what was about to happen, she began to scream uncontrollably...
• The Day of the Triffids opens with the protagonist lying in bed with his eyes bandaged, knowing that something bad is happening but with no idea what it is and trying to keep his imagination from running away from him. It's so harrowing for the protagonist that The Reveal almost comes as a relief.
  • At the beginning of Simon Clark's sequel, The Night of the Triffids, the protagonist has to travel through pitch-black night and only has a lamp without mirrors to see the path. He can't see the triffids that he knows are coming, which adds to his nerves.
• For most of the first book in the Deptford Mice trilogy, The Dark Portal, no one knows for sure what Jupiter actually is and that adds to the building tension. A living God of Evil who never leaves his lair in the sewers, the titular portal, even his rat subjects haven't seen him. There are rumours that he is a giant, multi-headed rat monster but in the end when he finally crawls out he is revealed to be a hideous, bloated cat.
• Discworld:
  • Lampshaded, of course, in Witches Abroad when Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg agree that nothing they find under a certain trap door could be worse than what they can imagine.
    • Pratchett even coined a name for it.
  • In Wyrd Sisters, a witch visits her most terrible punishment on a man who broke into in her cottage. Nothing. After a couple of weeks of waiting for her to do something in retaliation, the man has a nervous breakdown and runs away. In that same book, the people of Lancre are used to strange and portentous things happening, but one night the events stop happening, and people start to get worried.
• Dracula employs this quite a lot, there’s graphic and bloody moments of horror sure, but the lurking dread Bram Stoker uses is just as effectively chilling.
  • Jonathan’s journey to Dracula castle in Transylvania is ominous, despite nothing truly terrible happening. The landlord and landlady of the hotel he’s staying in look terrified and make the sign of the cross when Jonathan tells them where he’s going and the landlady insists he wear a crucifix around his neck, after pleading with him not to go without any explanation. During the carriage ride to the castle, the passengers all bless Jonathan in turn and don’t answer any of his questions. They even sigh with relief when initially no second coach shows up to pick Jonathan up, only to scream along with the horses when a calèche driven by a man with sharp teeth and black horses appears. In the following journey Jonathan see a pack of wolves surrounding the calèche and strange blue flames on the road... none of which gets explained.
  • Dracula’s introduction and rapport with Jonathan also invokes this. The Count in spite of his threatening appearance doesn’t do anything violent or directly threaten Jonathan and is quite friendly, but the reader knows full well how much danger Jonathan is in, making every conversation he has with the Count incredibly tense. Over time Jonathan witnesses the vampire nature of his host, meets the brides and realises he’s trapped in the castle.
  • The Apocalyptic Log the London police find on a shipwrecked European schooner the Demeter. The log-book which was found on the corpse of a sailor who lashed himself to the helm, details how while delivering mysterious cargo the crew are picked off one by one by something, leaving the narrator and others mad with terror of "Him". The second last survivor throws himself into the sea after investigating the cargo below deck and the narrator too scared to leave the helm starves to death. The lack of clear description makes Dracula’s presence and his slaughtering of the crew all the more terrifying.
  • What makes Lucy’s long and drawn out turn to vampirism truly unnerving is that none of the other characters clearly see Dracula’s involvement. Mina witnesses Lucy sleepwalk more and more overnight before finding her on the coast and sees what looks like a shadow bent over her. Dr John Seward can’t fathom how and why Lucy is losing so much blood and has to call in Abraham Van Helsing to make sense of it and there’s something that keeps tapping at Lucy’s window and casting a shadow over the house. It doesn’t end well at all.
  • Later in Chapter 19, the heroes are searching through a ruined building that Dracula has set up his abode. While they don’t encounter the Count, they are so on edge they are startled by every shadow that "fear helped the imagination". The large amount of rats didn’t help their nerves either.
• The 5th Wave: The motive of The Others is seemingly just Kill All Humans. They wipe out all power grids, send tsunamis and a modified flu to kill off 99% of the population, but nobody seems to know why.
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley might as well be the Trope Codifier for literary Nothing Is Scarier, being the mascot for Gothic Romanticism. The novel has explicit scary moments with the Wretch but they are far outweighed by the long hauntingly chilling moments of loneliness Victor Frankenstein goes through for the majority of the book. When the creature does make his appearance to Victor, It’s almost a relief compared to his absence wherein he could be anywhere and in latter half of the book, is always watching Victor from alps or the forest and killing everyone he loves.
  • After Victor created the creature in his apartment and becomes horrified at what he’s brought to life, he flees in the middle of the night when the Wretch wakes him up. He later returns to the apartment in daylight with his childhood friend Henry and finds nothing in the apartment. Instead of calming him, the lack of the monster actually causes Victor to Freak Out and fall into a four month coma.
• Goosebumps although usually more silly than scary with plenty of Defanged Horrors, still has surprisingly effective use of this in more than a few books. Especially when rereading as an adult.
  • Welcome to Dead House in pure Nothing Is Scarier fashion focuses on unsettling dread rather than up in your face horror. As the first real scare, is just Amanda spotting a boy she’s never seen before looking out at her from the bedroom of her new house and yet when she races up to investigate finds her bedroom empty. Both Amanda and her brother Josh hear and experience things around the house such as children giggling, footsteps, figures behind curtains and horrible nightmares. One particularly disturbing chapter is when Amanda and Josh meet the neighbourhood kids and while chatting on the basketball court, the kids (while staring intently and smiling) form a ring around Amanda and Josh and start closing in — before Mr Dawes the estate agent arrives. It’s unclear what exactly the other kids were going to do anything to them or if Amanda was just imagining things but either way given the reveal by the end it’s very disturbing.
  • Stay Out of the Basement also has a lot of this, for a good portion of the book the main horror is uncertainty of what the father of the protagonists Dr Brewster is doing in the basement. The first chapter ending with him bellowing at them to stay out of there while his hand is bleeding for some reason. What’s more disturbing later on is that the dad is acting off in little ways and at one point comes into his daughter Casey’s room to check if she’s actually sleeping after nearly catching her snooping. While The Reveal that he’s been replaced by a Plant Person is a bit silly, everything else about the story (a parent behaving weird and suspiciously) is very unsettling.
  • Welcome to Camp Nightmare while the Twist Ending is comical, everything leading up to it is pretty disturbing. Being dropped off the middle of nowhere the protagonist Billy gradually loses his friends over the course of the story as it's clear there’s something sinister going on in the camp and nobody is allowed to enter the forbidden bunk where the creature Sabre lives. One chapter has Billy’s friends Jay and Roger sneak out to the bunk and only Jay comes back to their cabin screaming that something killed Roger as the others barricade the door. Whilst everything gets explained in the end, the preceding uncertainty and horror was still effective in its own right.
  • The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight has many disturbing examples of this. For most of the book it’s a case of Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane as Jodie and her brother see scarecrows moving or being appearing in odd places, but usually it’s the farmhand’s son Sticks pranking them, yet at other times it’s inexplicable. Even more disturbingly is how their Grandpa, Grandma and especially their farmhand Stanley are acting, staring fixidly out into the fields and dismissing the kids’ queries about the scarecrows. In this case the explanation behind the horror is actually just as unsettling as the unknown preceding it.
  • A Night in Terror Tower although there’s a massive Genre Shift some way in, the first half of the book is just two kids Sue and Eddie getting lost from a tour group in a creepy tower and running into a scary man dressed in black who stalks them and repeatedly tries to kill them. For multiple chapters, no reason is given for why he is trying to hurt these children and that in itself is extremely terrifying. There's also the moment later on when Sue and Eddie go back to their hotel and find their parents gone, they have no money and they can't even remember their last names.
• Harry Potter:
  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has plenty of this because of the lull in the action. The Big Bad doesn't make a single appearance except in flashbacks, and Draco keeps sneaking around and is clearly up to something big. This builds up to some of the franchise's most intense and terrifying scenes in the final few chapters.
  • In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Voldemort invokes this after his takeover of the Ministry of Magic and infiltration of Hogwarts - he at first doesn't make it clear he's taken over the Ministry. If he had, say, proclaimed himself Minister right away, people obviously would have realized right away that the Ministry had fallen, been quicker to take precautions and protect themselves and each other, and been more active in resisting him. Instead, he placed a Ministry official under the Imperious curse, had him be the official Minister, acting as a puppet for Voldemort, while Voldemort himself remained in hiding with only his most trusted followers, carrying out his Evil Plan in private. The result? Most people, even those not in the Order realize something is going on, especially as anti-Muggle supremacy spreads, but no one is sure what, and thanks to the fact that anyone could be working for Voldemort, this leads to a whole lot of suspicion, distrust, fear, panic, and no one being sure what to do. Sure enough, once Voldemort officially declares war on Hogwarts, most of the wizarding world springs into action to stop him.
• Both played straight and played with in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which starts out creepy and just gets worse from there. From the moment Charlie Marlow begins speaking (to the unnamed narrator who frames the story) he makes clear that he has learned something that destroyed his innocence, but for the longest time he won't say precisely what it was. Then, as he launches into his tale about journeying to the Congo, he alternates between building more suspense on the one hand and outright describing horrible things on the other (Fresleven's slaying, for example); the genius of it is that even the horrible things, which at worst are merely gruesome, become terrifying in the context of what is revealed later. Very early, Marlow speaks of the Congo as a "snake" that bewitched him, compelling him to take up a job on a steamer there...for reasons even he couldn't fully understand. Once he gets there, it's not too long before he starts to hear about and even see some pretty horrible things - but he tries to ignore them at first, and even though he now knows what is happening, he still doesn't know why. The greatest riddle is put before him when he tries to peer into the impenetrable African jungle, noting that it looks like nothing he's ever seen in Europe, and reflecting that the immense vegetation, the humidity and the steam are together creating an atmosphere of tantalizing mystery that he simply must know about. "What was in there?" he asks himself - and also disturbingly slips into anthropomorphization when he wonders, "Would we handle [it], or would it handle us?" What Marlow eventually learns, of course, is that it's not the jungle itself that is creepy; it's what happens to "civilized" men when they go into the jungle.
• This trope is the heart of William Gibson's short story "Hinterlands", which concerns an interdimensional "highway" and its effects on the astronauts who travel it. The Fear, as it's called in the story, visits those who even think too much about what's on the other side. The astronauts who actually go there all come back insane or dead by their own hands.
• The Last Adventure of Constance Verity:
  • Agent Barker was assigned to keep files on Constance Verity's many adventures, only to go on paid leave when the contents of one of her files gave her night terrors.
  • Whatever "the origins of the color periwinkle" is, it's horrifying enough to wipe the smug grin off of Thelma's (disembodied) face.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The Hobbit:
    • It's flat-out stated that the scariest thing Bilbo had to do in his whole adventure was walk down the lightless tunnel to Smaug's lair. Not the dragon himself, not the giant spiders from Mirkwood, not the Goblins, Trolls or Wolves from the Misty Mountains, just the tunnel and the crippling fear of not knowing if a dragon was sleeping at the end of it.
    • The chapter where Bilbo traverses through the deep tunnels of the Misty Mountains after getting separated from Gandalf and the Dwarves, strongly invokes this. Bilbo wakes up in the darkness and "He could hear nothing, see nothing, and he could feel nothing except the stone of the floor", he does find a light source in his elvish blade and goes on, not taking the side passages and hurrying on for fear of goblins and "half-imagined dark things coming out of them". The narration doesn’t help saying there are worse things than goblins that live and sneak around in darkness, just as Bilbo meets Gollum.
    • The journey through Mirkwood also uses this trope a good deal. Bilbo and the Dwarves don’t encounter anything frightening for most of the chapter, but the forest is frightfully dark and massive cobwebs surround the path. They almost go mad trudging through the woods, and are especially scared at night as eyes watch them from darkness, especially insect-like ones. At other times they hear eerie laughter and voices of elves and this only causes them to hurry on with what strength they have left. Actually encountering the elves and to much lesser extent the giants spiders is almost a relief compared to the preceding unknown.
  • The Lord of the Rings:
    • The journey through Moria and the buildup to the Balrog employs a lot of this, the Fellowship is just walking in the dark for hours and Frodo hears something moving behind them which only stops when they stop (which turns out to be Gollum). Pippin foolishly drops a stone into a well that causes an echo which turns into the faint sounds of hammering far off, Gandalf fears that they disturbed something but the real horror comes when they read Balin's dying Apocalyptic Log which speaks of "drums in the deep", and the Fellowship actually hear drumming and attacked by Orcs. It only gets worse after the Orcs are beaten and Gandalf feels "something" behind the barred door which even the Orcs are afraid of and when he attempts to shut the door with magic he's nearly overcome, at this point Gandalf just tells the Fellowship to Run or Die as their weapons are useless against this new devilry.
    • Similarly in Shelob's lair we don't even see the Giant Spider fully until later, it's mostly Frodo and Sam walking around the horrifying dark tunnels using the Phial of Galadriel and cutting through the black webbing. What description we get off the eldrich spider are the points of light that are Shelob’s eyes and the malice and hunger she radiates.
  • The Fall of Gondolin: When Tuor and Voronwë creep into the dark tunnel leading to the hidden city, they cannot see or hear anything, not even the drip of water. Vonronwë grows worried about the lack of visible guards, and fears they are being ambushed. And indeed, a few seconds later, a voice commands them to stand still or they will be shot.
• Mentioned fairly explicitly in the H. G. Wells story The Invisible Man when the invisible man finally reveals himself:
  They were prepared for scars, disfigurements, tangible horrors, but nothing!
• In the works of Stephen King:
  • The short story "The Reaper's Image", one of his first published stories, focuses on something seemingly innocuous: a mirror with a black smudge that sometimes appears in the corner. The smudge doesn't appear for most people. But the few people who do see it, for some reason, become terrified and flee the room. Once they do — and once they are out of sight of any other human being — they are never seen again.
  • The short story "The Jaunt" has teleportation. It is virtually instantaneous for physical things. However, if someone is not put to sleep, the mental time taken seems endless. All people see is a featureless whiteness. Eventually "the mind turns on itself."
  • In his nonfiction book on the horror genre, Danse Macabre, he explains it like this (quoting author William F. Nolan): "You approach the door in the old, deserted house, and you hear something scratching at it. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. "A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible," the audience thinks, "but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall.". So what you do is hold off on showing them the 10 foot tall bug as long as possible."
  • It:
    • This trope is heavily used, played straight, played with and subverted in the opening chapter. Little Georgie Denbrough is nearly mad with fear during the seemingly endless minute he's searching for the box of paraffin at the top of the cellar stairs, imagining that something hairy and clawed crouched down there will grab and eat him at any second. But nothing bad happens to him; there's no monster, he gets the box and his fear sloughs off once he closes the cellar door. Then later, when he's sailing the boat he and Bill made and it's sucked down the stormdrain, he sees the clown Pennywise inside. As he sticks his hand into the drain to get the boat (and his balloon), he's not expecting anything bad to happen^note not true for the reader, who knows poor Georgie is doomed the second he puts his hand down there, because all his senses are telling him "it's OK, everything is all right." Then Pennywise seizes his arm, he turns his head, sees the clown's face change into what Pennywise really looks like...and King refuses to tell the readers exactly what it is that Georgie sees in his final moments, only that it "was terrible enough to make his worst imaginings of the thing in the cellar look like sweet dreams; what he saw destroyed his sanity in one clawing stroke."
    • A later scene in It where the Losers’ Club travel through the Pennywise’s abode on Neibolt street, has a grand display of this. Up to this point we’ve seen the titular monster transform into all kinds of horrors that directly threaten or attack the characters, but in the Neibolt house Pennywise for once doesn’t appear in person for most of the chapter. But this only makes his omnipresence more haunting as the kids walk through the decrepit environment, which seems to expand before their eyes - trying to seperate them from each other, which rattles the Losers’ Club into hysterics. This Eldritch Location where the kids aren’t even attacked manages to be more terrifying than any of the previous shapes the titular monster takes.
    • Earlier than that we have Stan’s encounter with Pennywise at the Standpipe (where a few kids drowned), which is an immensely effective example of this. Rather than getting a traditional up in your face scare or meeting Pennywise face to face like the rest of the Losers, Stan instead just finds the Standpipe unlocked and goes inside. At the stairwell he hears calliope music and smell of popcorn and cotton candy of a carnival and lured Stan climbs up a dozen (he thinks he only climbed up a little way) but stops when he hears beneath the music — the sound of wet eager footsteps descending the stairs and bobbing shadows above him. Stan only sees the shadows for a moment as the Standpipe doors swing shut leaving him in darkness. Fleeing back to the door Stan tries to push it open as he hears footsteps coming closer and closer, foul water runs down the stairs and dead voices call out to Stan as something approaches from the darkness. Thanks to some Clap Your Hands If You Believe Stan is able to use his bird book to ward whatever is coming towards him off and escape. What makes this encounter so much more frightening than a lot of the other scares in the book, is that the horror is sensory and sparse, Stan just finds himself stuck in a dark place and knowing a death that he can’t see is coming down the stairs to meet him. It’s small wonder Stan chooses to commit suicide rather than return to Derry and subject himself to that level of mental torment again.
    • Speaking of Stan’s suicide, that is also a case of this in the book. We follow his wife Patty’s POV as she witnesses Stan answer the phone and be initially delighted before becoming quiet (it’s Mike telling him to come back to Derry and fulfil their vow). Stan then tells Patty he’s going to take a bath and she hears him go upstairs and the sound of water running into the tub and then stop five or ten minutes later. Patty realises Stan went up without a beer like he usually does and goes to get one for him from the fridge. The fear well and truly seeps in when she finds the bathroom door closed and no answer as she taps on the door, Patty likens the feeling to a “cold pocket” when swimming through a warm lake as a kid and you feel a suddenly chill, except in this case it wasn’t around her teenage legs but around her heart. She tries to reassure herself her fright is unfounded and everything is okay as she goes downstairs to get the key and go back up to unlock the bathroom… to see Stan dead in the tub with his wrists cut and the word IT written on the wall. Similar to Georgie and the storm drain the reader is horribly aware of what’s going to happen but can’t do anything but witness it slowly play out through Patty’s eyes.
  • Apt Pupil from Different Seasons ends on a single sentence saying that Todd went on a mass shooting spree for five hours before being taken down by the police. Nothing is described in any sort of detail.
    • Earlier in the book: To stave off his nightmares, Dussander lures a stray cat into his clutches and kills it by tossing it into his oven and turning the heat on. Later on, he goes to an animal shelter where he obtains a puppy....but we're left to wonder exactly how Dussander dispatched it, because we never hear about the poor pooch again.
  • The first half of The Langoliers invokes this a few times and manages to be more unsettling than the titular flying meatballs with teeth. The crux of the story is about 10 passengers waking up in an empty airplane (mid-flight) where the pilots, the cabin crew and everyone else besides themselves are gone. The crew are even afraid to land because they are utterly terrified of what could or couldn't be under the clouds and their imagination is making it worse. When they land in the airport it's completely deserted and literally feels dead and "left behind", worse still the psychic kid among them Dinah hears and "senses" that something is coming in the distance making a crunching noise, and if that weren't enough one of the passengers Craig is clearly mentally unstable so the crew is also Alone with the Psycho.
    • Hell even when the Langoliers show up in all their silliness what's more disturbing is that wherever they go they eat away the Earth itself leaving utter blackness. When the crew do escape they barely keep their sanity staring at the pitch black nothing that is all that is left of the ground below and of which they are at risk of falling into when they run out of fuel.
  • Gerald's Game being a minimalist book is a masterful case of this. Initially the horror is purely just the predicament Jessie has found herself in, i.e handcuffed to a bed by her husband who died from a heart attack in a house on a lake far from help and in danger of starvation or dehydration. Yet as night falls Jessie half-dreaming becomes afraid sensing that something is wrong in the darkness and thinks she can make out a tall figure standing in the corner of room staring at her. What’s perhaps most terrifying about this is that Ruth the practical voice inside Jessie’s head is stunned into silence by this and later upon fully waking she ponders on whether or not what she saw was real or just her imagination. It’s not. The terror returns full force of the following evening as Jessie understands that she has to free herself before it gets dark again and whatever she saw the previous night returns. After the gruesome business of freeing her hand from one of the cuffs, Jessie has to pull the bed around trying to reach the key, terrified of the thought of something coming to the house as she dallies. The most terrifying segment comes when she falls unconscious again after fully getting free and wakes up in the darkness, somehow knowing she’s not alone in the house… before she encounters the Moonlight Man in the study and gives him her wedding ring. The whole finale is utterly nail biting with tension and doesn’t let up even when Jessie gets out of the house.
  • King’s The Stand also employs this a lot. The first portion of the novel where the world is slowly overcome with a pandemic of accidentally realised Influenza is scary due to fact it isn’t clear what is happening some way into the book. Though more terrifying is Humanoid Abomination Randal Flagg the Walking Man, we never once learn what exactly he is, although The Dark Tower series would reveal he’s on the side of the Satanic Archetype Crimson King but the sheer presence alone Flagg has and the effect he has on people, even when he’s many miles away from them is palpable. In one scene a character talks through a doorway to Flagg who’s standing in a dark room, King purposely gives minimal description of Flagg in the scene, making his character all the more unnerving.
• Fundamental to Lamplight, which features an invasion of un-named beings who can never be physically seen - only their shadows are visible.
• In The Little Sister, the series takes an unusual turn when the conclusion has Marlowe investigating an isolated estate on a private road. The lack of traffic or people makes it eerily quiet as it is, but then even Marlowe himself suddenly announces something seems off.
  [The living room] was curtained and quite dark, but it had the feel of great size. The darkness was heavy in it and my nose twitched at a lingering odor that said somebody had been there not too long ago. I stopped breathing and listened. Tigers could be in the darkness watching me. Or guys with large guns, standing flat-footed, breathing softly with their mouths open. Or nothing and nobody and too much imagination in the wrong place.
• One of H. P. Lovecraft's signature styles, where he describes the monster(s) only partially... and allows the readers' minds to assemble them from that description, if any is given.
  • He's probably at his scariest when he tells you absolutely nothing about what's happening; see "The Music of Erich Zann" for an example.
  • At other times, on the other hand, he gives meticulous, almost clinically scientific descriptions of what the creatures are like. But in At the Mountains of Madness he combines the two ways of storytelling, and describes the creatures to the most minute detail when they are in hibernating state and assumed dead, but at no point does the narrator see them move or do anything - he only sees the results of the massacre that took place once they woke up on the autopsy table. Also, whatever it was that Danforth saw that psychologically scarred him. We never even get any real hints beyond the idea that it may either be a mirage, a hallucination brought on by extreme stress, or something so terrible that even the Elder-Things feared it. It also doesn't help that Danforth's ramblings (the only clues he ever shares about what it was) mention several unrelated creatures such as Yog-Sothoth and the Colour out of Space.
  • On the subject, The Colour Out of Space is a great example in that we are only really told about the effects the Colour had on the area surrounding where it landed, to the point that it isn't even entirely clear if the Colour is actually a living thing or just a phenomenon akin to a natural disaster.
• In The Man in the High Castle, it's never explained exactly what Nazi Germany is doing in Africa, as none of the characters who know like to think about it. But with references to a "big, empty ruin", Human Resources, vast construction of some kind, the reinstatement of African slavery, and one description of "the billion chemical heaps that are now not even corpses", it must go beyond just a Final Solution.
• The famous short story "The Monkey's Paw" wields this trope to terrifying effect. The couple's first wish gets them the money they wanted, but it comes in the form of compensation for their son's death. The horror summoned by the second wish is never revealed, because the old man uses the third wish to send it back just before it opens the door.
• A literal example, which crosses with The Nothing After Death and Cessation of Existence: The Neverending Story (and its movie adaptation) has an Eldritch Abomination called The Nothing, which is a sudden erasing of existing things. The Nothing itself isn't ever described in the book. In fact, it's implied that it cannot be described by any other word than "nothing"... One character tries to describe a lake being claimed by the Nothing and fails. The lake did not become a hole or a dried-up lake, because then there would be a hole or a dried lake bed. No, the only thing that was left was simply nothing. Later, when Atreyu takes a look at the Nothing from afar, he can't even glance at it head-on, and his eyes hurt just from seeing it, because his brain can't comprehend it. It isn't blackness, it isn't even empty space, because blackness can be comprehended and empty space is something that can be occupied. The Nothing is quite simply something that isn't. And it's disturbing! (Or just confusing...)
• In Out of the Dark, the Shongairi find the silence more disturbing than facing the destruction humans can cause in direct combat.
• Made mundane in The Pearl, where the "Pearl of the World" found by the pearl-diver Kino eventually attracts the attention of two hired ruthless "trackers"; they are never identified as or associated with anyone.
• The Phantom of the Opera, being seminal Gothic Horror invokes this. For a lot of the novel the titular antagonist is kept a mystery and his presence is mostly felt rather than seen. The first chapter opens with a bunch of ballerinas fleeing into older dancer’s (La Sorelli) room and share stories about the Phantom, as Little Meg reveals her mother knows the Phantom, they hear footsteps from outside and Sorelli goes into the dimly lit hallway to check wielding a knife and finds... nothing. The Phantom’s first "appearance" in the book is as an angelic voice Raoul hears talking to Christine in her dressing room, jealously thinking it’s a rival suitor he enters the room after Christine leaves, but like with Sorelli finds nothing. The eeriness is further enhanced when Christine is astonished to learn Raoul could hear the voice too and when she personally learns the terrible truth, she desperately tries to protect Raoul, who is shocked to see how haggard she looks when she takes her domino mask off during the Masquerade ball. Eventually Christine fully reveals the terrifying true nature of the Angel of Music, making the eleven chapters of build up well earned.
  • It’s especially unnerving later on when the Phantom starts stalking Christine and Raoul around the Opera House. While Erik never directly appears, Christine who has been a Plucky Girl up to this point, starts getting extremely nervous and jumpy. At one point Raoul wants to go down a trapdoor and Christine forcibly stops him and pleads with him not to. After a moment the trapdoor closes by itself and we never learn whether it was the Phantom or not. See also this passage.
  When on their expeditions, she [Christine] would start running without reason or else suddenly stop; and her hand, turning ice-cold in a moment, would hold the young man back. Sometimes her eyes seemed to pursue imaginary shadows. She cried, "This way," and "This way," and "This way," laughing a breathless laugh that often ended in tears.
  • Worse still during the climax where Raoul and the Persian are traveling through the bowels of the Opera House, they encounter unexplained horrors like the black figure or "shade" in a felt hat. The Persian claims the shade has almost caught him before and at Raoul’s questioning states the shade has nothing to do with Erik or the theatre police, but disturbingly doesn’t elaborate any further. Not even the author’s notes offer any concrete explanation, making the cellars of the Opera and its shadowy inhabitants unknowable and frightening.
• In the works of Edgar Allan Poe:
  • In "The Raven", the narrator answers the tapping at his chamber door to find "darkness there, and nothing more."
  • The prisoner who recounts his captivity in a dungeon of the Spanish Inquisition in "The Pit and the Pendulum" discovers a deep pit in the middle of his prison chamber. Despite having already endured various tortures, a look down into the pit horrifies him more than anything—but he doesn't tell what he saw in the pit.
• The book version of The Princess Bride has a Zoo of Death instead of the Pit of Despair. It has multiple levels of basement, and as you go down the enemies get scarier. One level has absolutely nothing in it. Just a long, black tunnel with the exit door at the other end. For Inigo and Fezzik this is doggone scary. Something should be happening! This is the level of the Enemies of Fear. The idea is that you panic, run for the opposite door and let the extremely venomous spider under the handle kill you. The thing is, Fezzik gets so panicked that he smashes the door off its hinges, and Inigo steps on the spider as it tries to escape.
• In A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Baudelaire children experience this trope when they are shoved down a dark, empty elevator shaft. The following two pages are filled entirely in black, after which the author writes that he couldn't possibly describe what their screaming sounded like.
• The first half of Tailchaser's Song builds up the Clawguard this way. It's known that cats, kittens included, are going missing all over. In many places, entire clans of cats are found torn to pieces as if a bear mawled everyone to death. This isn't solely affecting cats either, as a mother fox mentions something was hunting her children. Initially, the only known clues about the Clawguard are that they smell odd, are large, and have red claws. Halfway through the story, they attack Tailchaser and his group while they're trying to sleep, where the Clawguard proceed to drag them underground to their master Hearteater.
• The Time Machine another H.G Wells work has a Wait For It when it comes to the iconic Morlocks. The Time Traveler while exploring the peaceful land of the Eloi in the daylight finds several frightening structures that he can’t figure out and a deep dark well that fills his little companion Weena full of fear. All the protagonist can gather is that the Eloi fear darkness for some reason, the Time Traveler stays up and sees simian-like shapes moving on a hill and another night sees a pair of red eyes staring at him in the dark. Soon he encounters the Morlocks for real and begins to fear darkness and night time as much as the Eloi, even while exploring during the day.
• Tortall Universe: In Trickster's Choice, the first part of the Balitang family's trip to their estates are marked by dozens of raka villagers watching them silently from the sides of the paths, the adjourning boats and so on. When the watchers suddenly vanish, Aly guesses that something's wrong, and when she realises that all the animals have stopped making sounds, she knows there's something wrong. They get attacked shortly afterwards.

Nothing at all

General

• This is a main theme of the works of the Kyoto School of Buddhist Existentialism. According to them, every type of fear is based on the feeling that there is nothing and that this feeling of nothingness causes fear. One of the strongest sensation of "nothingness" is the idea of death. To live free, people have to confront their fears of nothingness.
• The last man on Earth sat in a room. There was a knock upon the door. This is known as the shortest horror story ever. However, another author was able to modify this story to make it scarier:
  The last man on Earth sat in a room. There was a lock upon the door.
  • A famous theory is that it's a woman knocking.
• Done tongue-in-cheek with So You've Decided To Be Evil by Neil Zawacki, in which "Not Actually Existing" is one of the options you can take as a villain.
  Instead of being known by any particular name or costumey gimmick, you can simply be the mysterious 'thing' that no one ever sees but knows truly exists. The nightmarish monstrosity only hinted in rumors and whispered in folktales, existing out there somewhere, ready to eat them should they get to close. The fact that no one ever sees you will only add to the legend, making you even more terrible and fierce. People fear what they do not know, and even if you do not really exist, you will still be very fearsome indeed.

Specific Works

• A rare in-universe example is from Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman, when Dragon threatens to eat the protagonist for trespassing.
  Dragon: I am frightened of nothing.
  Fat Charlie: Nothing?
  Dragon: Nothing.
  Fat Charlie: Are you extremely frightened of nothing?
  Dragon: Absolutely terrified of it.
  Fat Charlie: I have nothing in my pockets. Would you like to see it?
  Dragon: No, I most definitely would not.
• In Robert A. Heinlein's classic short story —And He Built a Crooked House—, Quintus Teal the crazy architect and the Baileys are trapped inside their house which Teal designed and which has features of Bizarrchitecture and Alien Geometries. They lift the blinds of one of the windows - and they see nothing. Nothing at all.
• Animorphs while more action and adventure focused has a suprising amount of this in lieu of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Yeerks have taken over most of the adults and kids in the town including Jake's brother and the kids have to be on the look out constantly for a threat they often can't see. Sometimes it's not even the Yeerks and normal people are just behaving creepily and dangerously which is just as frightning as the alien invaders.
• In Bird Box, there is something outside whose appearance drives people into insanity. A mother and her two children flee to a safe place but to do so they have to cross a river while completely blindfolded. Much of the book is spent in complete darkness with the protagonist having to rely on her other senses and not knowing if something is out there or not.
• Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came: The poem ends as Roland arrives at the titular Dark Tower, leaving what's inside, and what horrific fate Roland fully expects to meet, to the reader's imagination.
• Of all the places for this trope to originate, it may have come from A Christmas Carol. After the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present give Scrooge long conversations about what's wrong with him, the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come never says a thing. Adaptations with a narrator tend to emphasize this by removing or reducing the narrator's part for the length of time that the third spirit is on.
• Deltora Quest:
  • Similar to the Sauron example below we never actually see the Shadow Lord once throughout all the books, only hearing his voice and in Return to Del as a shadowy figure briefly glimpsed on a tower. While his name and backstory is properly explained in the expanded material, he is much more sinister as an evil omnipresence rather than one Evil Overlord. The anime adaptation decided to make the Shadow Lord a straight up Eldritch Abomination instead.
  • The Shifting Sands has an effective example of this with the guardian of Lapis Lazuil, which is the Shifting Sands itself. Unlike every other book where the gem is protected by some guardian man or monster, the antagonist of the book can't be seen or known, it's the simply "The Hive" and its origin is a complete mystery having existed long before the time of Adin. The Hive as the sands are called have a will of its own and draws people and objects to the centre of itself. Lief, Barda and Jasmine don't kill or defeat it, they simply get the Lapis Lazuil and escape whatever the hell it is.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: In the first book, Greg can't even bring himself to write that Rowley ate the Cheese. The only thing we see of the act is a speech bubble of Rowley gagging as Greg looks upon sickened.
• The Divine Comedy: On the path between the Sixth and Seventh Circles, Dante and Virgil come across a large vault with an inscription that reads "I hold Pope Anastasius, enticed to leave the true path by Photinus." We never learn what's happening to him in there.
• Gentleman Bastard: Ships passing through the Ghostwind Isles have to endure an Ominous Fog where they lose track of time and a voice whispers in the crew's minds, addressing each one by name and trying to lure them into the water. Jean thinks he sees a thin humanoid outline high in the mist, but nothing else reveals itself to anyone who stays on the ship.
• Generally what makes Gerald's Game so unsettling apart from the heroine Jessie’s predicament and her Dark and Troubled Past is this. Jessie is alone and trapped in a bedroom and all she can hear the sounds of a loon on the lake and a lumberjack somewhere far off chainsawing a tree down. The pure isolation and nothingness makes the book so terrifying long before the tangible horror comes along by night fall.
• Goosebumps:
  • The Haunted Mask which is already one of the scarier books in the series — especially the original TV adaptation — has a case of this with the unnamed shopkeeper who created "The Unloved", the eponymous haunted masks. In the books we never learn why he created these apparently real and grotesque faces, but even more disturbingly in the show is the revelation that he made the masks to cover up his own Nightmare Face and every beautiful mask he creates will soon turn hideous due to the ugliness within him. We never actually see his real face, making an already unnerving character even more scary.
  • A Shocker on Shock Street despite most of the scares being loud and crazy theme-park style, there’s a few effective moments of this such as the Mad Mangler’s lot. After escaping from the giant mantis, Erin and Marty go past an empty lot which according to Erin is where the Mangler lurks attacking people who walk in thinking it’s a regular lot. Marty himself steps into the lot where “Tall weeds bent low, blown by the moaning wind. Shadows moved against the fence at the back”… yet nothing attacks Marty and he leaves the lot unmangled. The ending particularly in the Graphix adaptation is a powerful example of this: Marty is seemingly electrocuted to death and lies there with a lifeless, empty gaze as Erin desperately tries to wake him. Then her father enters the scene, his face completely shadowed except for the shine of his glasses as he menacingly approaches a terrified Erin, desperately begging Mr. Wright to help them. Erin screams that he's not her father and the page's last panel is a black space decorated with Erin's fading cries. Even if the kids are actually robots believing they’re kids, the way it’s framed as the murder of a child is still utterly horrifying.
• An in-universe example in The Guns of the South. Nate Caudell witnesses a black mulatto slave on the run from her master, one of the AWB men. Later in the story the slave hangs herself, which he learns about from a letter from Mollie. Nate thinks about his memory of how docile the slave had seemed before being sold (and thinks about how, having grown up a slave, she must have been used to life as a slave), and compares it to the blind, terrified panic she was in when he saw her on the run. He wonders what could have driven the slave to such abject fear and desperation to escape, and which would later drive her to kill herself. He is so shaken by the possibilities that he tears up the letter from Mollie.
• In Harry Potter:
  • The Dementors are in general a massive example of this. What the hell are they? We the readers and Harry never really find out. They’re more solid than ghosts but clearly wraith-like, they can produce mist and cold, can suck your soul out and prolonged contact with them actually depletes a Wizard’s power making them the only magical creatures capable of doing so. Somehow wizards are able to negotiate with them, despite us never hearing them talk. Worse of all they appear to be immortal and according to J.K grow like fungus. It is semi-confirmed the Dementors’ origins are tied to Azkaban's creation itself and the experiments done by dark wizards there, but even then those who investigated “refused afterward to talk about it”. The unfinalised version of Prisoner of Azkaban actually implied they were wizards and witches who have lost their souls, but wisely this was removed allowing for the mystery to remain.
  • This is played more for laughs, but what did the centaurs do to Umbridge after capturing her in the Forbidden Forest? She doesn't show any signs of physical damage after Dumbledore rescues her, but she's temporarily catatonic from whatever she endured, and she panics when the students taunt her with hoofbeat noises. (One infamous fan theory holds that the centaurs did to her what centaurs were known to do to human women in general in Classical Mythology, even though the wizarding world's wise centaurs are a far cry from their savage mythical inspirations.)
  • What did young Tom Riddle do to his peers in the cave that traumatized them so badly?
  • What did the Muggle boys do to Dumbledore's sister Ariana to drive her mad as a girl? (As with the Umbridge example above, the popular fan interpretation of this one isn't pretty either.)
• House of Leaves was built on this. The house and the Minotaur are terrifying because you can't possibly know when they'll strike. Tom nearly goes insane from this, which gets all better when he smokes a few joints. But the same sensation drives Halloway to suicide and traumatizes everyone who was in the house, including Karen who never actually went into the mysterious parts of the house and Johnny, who didn't even know whether it existed. It could be said they go to an even greater extreme on this, really. The climax of the book, where the house makes its most "aggressive" attempt on its inhabitants, isn't the end. Unlike the standard horror movie, where the family stands outside the smoldering ruins of the haunted house, minus one or two members, and the hero grimly says "It's over" (until the sequel), the family flees to another state and the house remains where it is. The story continues, and one of the characters returns simply because he can't stop picking at it in his mind. Even after that return, the book goes on in Truant's narrative, then terminates... several times. When it finally ends, the reader is left unsure of where they are and if the story is truly over, or even if it ended and the narrative kept going on. It's a truly labyrinthine and truly disconcerting effect.
• Hothouse: It's never explained what actually lives inside the Black Mouth, or how it is that it draws other creatures to itself — all that's shown is that something lives inside the volcano, the power its voice has over all living things, five long chitinous fingers emerging from the volcano's crater and being withdrawn, and the character's feeling that something awful waits within.
• I Am Legend is set After the End and has vampires or at least vampire-like infected humans but the real pulse pounding horror, is the agonising loneliness and dread the protagonist Neville goes through as the last man alive. For lot of the novel Neville spends his time holding out in the ruins of humanity searching for a cure and in constant fear of being attacked at night by the horde. This novel set a standard for Nothing Is Scarier in post-apocalypse fiction.
• In the Imperial Radch series, Ghaon's solar system is surrounded by an invisible, undetectable, inexplicable phenomenon called the Crawl. All the characters or readers know is that any ship that tries to bypass it with Gate travel, open communications within it, or stray from very secret safe paths through will be destroyed — or left floating, dead and derelict, with no signs of distress.
• In The Lord of the Rings, this is a huge part of what makes Sauron such a legendary and terrifying villain. Throughout the entire three-book epic, he never appears in person, except as a glowing disembodied eye atop his tower in Mordor, if you count that (even that's just Peter Jackson's interpretation, it's unclear in the books whether the "Great Eye" imagery is a metaphor or not). Except for the story of his creation of the Rings of Power, we never learn a single thing about his history, his motivations, his interactions with the world, or even what he looks like now except that he is impossibly old, impossibly powerful, and always watching. It goes a long way towards establishing him as a (seemingly) invincible force of pure evil on a scale far above even the world of elves, one that cannot be bargained with, reasoned with, or even properly understood, only surrendered to, and the atmosphere of sheer existential dread he conjures up in the characters - if not the readers - doesn't pass until the very end.
  • When in Moria, the Company comes across a fork in the road, with one of three passageways all leading in the same direction they could choose from. The passage on the left led downwards while the passage on the right leads upward and the passage in the middle stays level, but is narrower than the other two. Gandalf does not recognize the fork at all, having had travelled only in the opposite direction through Moria before. They retire to the nearby guardroom to rest as Gandalf contemplated the path to take. Finally, he says, "I do not like the feel of the middle way; and I do not like the smell of the left-hand way: there is foul air down there, or I am no guide." Gandalf goes with the right passageway that leads upwards. One figures the left passageway probably was home to Orcs or something because of the odor, but what awaited errant travellers in that middle passageway that caused Gandalf to have such an intuition, such consternation? It's even worse in the movie adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring: When the drums start beating, there's a cut to the three paths...and torchlight appears in the middle.
• H. P. Lovecraft, while he is primarily remembered for his descriptions of Alien Geometries and Cosmic Horror, used descriptions of casual landscapes or events were just as equally unsettling and creepy.
  • We're talking about a man here who in "Cool Air" managed to make a description of an ordinary rental apartment in the middle of a hot summer day, with the narrator in the company of the landlady and two burly mechanics suspenseful and creepy.
• This ironic and somewhat disturbing poem by Archibald MacLeish (see also The End of the World as We Know It trope):
  Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
  The armless ambidextrian was lighting
  A match between his great and second toe,
  And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
  The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
  Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
  In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb—-
  Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:
  And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
  Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
  There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,
  There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
  There in the sudden blackness the black pall
  Of nothing, nothing, nothing —- nothing at all.
• The stories of stations wiped out by the Dark Ones from Metro 2033. Patrols go to the end of their routes and vanish. Guards are slaughtered without firing a single shot. The stations are wiped out to a man, with no corpses left behind, just lots of blood...
• "The Nothing Equation" by Tom Godwin (better known for his other short story with "Equation" in the title) is about a man who's sent out to an observation bubble in space, far away from any space station or planet. The people who've manned the bubble previously have all gone insane and/or committed suicide, afraid of what's outside the bubble. The protagonist, however, is quite certain that there's nothing out there. He's right, there's nothing. A whole lot of nothing.
• The short story "Peekaboo" by Bill Pronzini embodies this trope. The only character in the story is a career criminal pretending to be a reclusive writer hiding out in a rented house a good distance away from the closest town. One night he thinks he hears an intruder in the house and decides to investigate while armed. While he's searching his suddenly creepy hideout, he can't help but reminisce on the games of Peekaboo he used to play when he was a kid, as well as the old rumors of occult worship and paranormal activities surrounding the house. He's a nervous wreck by the end of the story, and when he finally reaches the basement after finding nothing in the rest of the house he giggles in relief. There's nothing there after all, it's just him, all alone, hiding under the stairs.
  "Peekaboo," a voice behind him said.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The heroes are traveling through the Labyrinth when they hear breathing and footsteps. They escape from the maze and seal the door before they find out what the creature is.
• The Riddle Master Trilogy, by Patricia A. McKillip: We hear of a king of Hed chased into his home by — something. But it didn't come through the last door. He waited, and waited, until he longed for it to break in. Then he opened the door — and found no sign of it.
• Seeker Bears: Lusa comes across a forest with dead trees everywhere. But she realizes that the scariest part about the dead forest...was the silence.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • When Daenerys visits the House of the Undying, she is told to take the first door on the right in each room to navigate the house. At some point she comes across a long corridor with only doors to the left. Then the lights begin to go out and she hears something approach... At which point she figures out that the last door to the left is the first door to the right, escaping whatever that was.
  • In the backstory, there's the Doom of Valyria. The Freehold of Valyria ruled an entire continent for five thousand years with the aid of their dragons. And then suddenly, for no known reason, the whole continent exploded and ended the Freehold in overnight, with only a few people escaping. As Valyria was highly volcanic in its day, the description given sounds broadly like a supercaldera eruption — but Valyria was also known to make extensive use of sorcery, and a simple eruption wouldn't cause the place to have remained utterly uninhabitable for over three hundred years. In-universe, nobody actually knows what happened there precisely or what Valyria is like now, save that, whatever it is, it's unnatural and dangerous, and expedition to the ruins almost invariably vanish without a trace. The only exception was when the Targaryen princess Aerea flew there on the back of the dragon Balerion. When they came back, Aerea was gaunt, wasted, and afflicted with a horrific fever and even more horrific worms inside her, with her last coherent words just being "I never...". Balerion, meanwhile, had a huge, bleeding wound on his side. Balerion was probably the largest and most powerful dragon the Targaryens ever possessed... and something hurt him.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe: In Aftermath: Empire's End, it is revealed that Palpatine claimed to have sensed a powerful signal through the Force from the Unknown Regions, one that not even Darth Vader could sense. He had theories about it, but it's never revealed what it is exactly. Whatever it could be, it tempted Palpatine so much that he tried to map out the Unknown Regions (an area of the galaxy on the map but largely unexplored), sending probes so he could create hyperspace routes for his Contingency Plan (a backup plan in the event of his death). However, nothing is revealed about the Dark Side presence lurking out there, — though it could very well be Supreme Leader Snoke, the leader of the First Order in the sequel trilogy, considering that the Imperials who escaped to the Unknown Regions after the Battle of Jakku eventually formed the First Order, and that Starkiller Base's origin point is located somewhere in the Unknown Regions. However, groups like the Acolytes of the Beyond also sensed this signal. Grand Admiral Thrawn might also know what's lurking out there, based on his knowledge of the Unknown Regions.
• Star Wars Legends: When an energy spider is first encountered in Jedi Search, it's in the pitch blackness of the deep mines of Kessel. The characters are only aware that there's something big in the darkness with them, something fast and dangerous that's picking them off one by one, but cannot even begin to guess what it is until Han, who has secured a set of infrared goggles, gets a quick glimpse — and even then, all he sees are the silhouetted shapes of several long, slender legs around the warm body of the creature's victim.
• There's a Wocket in My Pocket!: The Vug under the rug. It is never shown, hiding under a rug in a dark room, and the only detail the reader knows about it is that it's the only creature the narrator is afraid of.
• In "The White People" by Arthur Machen, we never do find out what the horrible eponymous beings are. Though they are implied to be either fairies or members of a pagan tribe of witches.
  • The girl writing the Apocalyptic Log in the story mentions how she saw something in a secret forest but never explains what it is. She eventually goes back to the forest and blindfolds herself. She walks around blind and finds absolutely nothing. Which excites her because that's exactally what she expected and she believes that it proves all of the fairy stories she heard as a child were true.
• The Witches has a truly chilling case of this with Grandma's missing thumb. After listening to her detail to the protagonist all the cases she knows of children getting cursed by Witches, getting stuck in paintings, turned to stone and transformed into a porpoise etc, when the boy asks his grandma whether she encountered a Witch herself as a girl, Grandma despite her Nerves of Steel refuses to tell saying it's simply too horrible. When he asks if it has anything to do with her missing thumb, Grandma clams up completely and the boy goes to bed. We never learn what exactly happened to her or how she escaped with her life from (presumably) the Witch. The protagonist comes up with his own conclusions such as it was pulled off like a tooth or shoved in a kettle spout and steamed away while the reader's mind will race with even more gruesome and dark possibilities.

There all along!

• Blindsight: After frantically fumbling around while weird things happen all around them, the protagonist finally realizes that alien...things have been on their ship for quite some time, concealing themselves in plain sight by using a loophole in human visual processing. It's actually pretty ninja.
• In the second book of the Codex Alera series, Amara is resting in an abandoned barn with legionares after a battle. She wakes up, kicks away a rat, goes outside and finds Bernard and Doroga. They discuss tactics and Doroga explains more about the Vord and their ability to turn people into super-zombies via parasites. Nine pages later, Bernard complains that the Vord have scared away every animal within a half-mile, including the rats.
• The mysteries in the first few Harry Potter books revolve around this variant of the trope, always with a Red Herring obfuscating the real malevolent presence behind the book's main threat:
  • One of the more unsettling moments in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is when Harry is walking through Hogwarts's Forbidden Forest and hears a sound like "a cloak slithering over dead leaves" but doesn't see anything in the darkness. (Years later in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry remembers the sound while keeping watch outside the tent and shakes his head to get rid of the paranoia.) At the end of the book, not only did that noise come from Evil Sorcerer Voldemort, the series's Big Bad, but he's been clinging to life as a face under the turban of the seemingly meek Professor Quirrell. Turns out that sinister Professor Snape wasn't the bad guy: as much of a prick as he may be, he actually saved Harry earlier in the book and helped protect the eponymous stone.
  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets introduces multiple red herrings as to who could be releasing the monster (which is more a "wait for it" example, as we don't see it until the climax) from the Chamber. As it turns out, the real culprit is a piece of Voldemort's soul hidden in Ginny Weasley's diary, which they had to go back to the Weasley home to retrieve before departing for Hogwarts, and which Harry subsequently encountered without knowing it was Ginny's. (Harry does know from the start that the diary he finds is supernatural, as someone named Tom Riddle communicates through the book and even shows him a flashback, but this too serves as a red herring. The flashback misleads Harry to think that Hagrid may have opened the Chamber, and only later do we find out that "Tom Riddle" is actually Voldemort's birth name.) This whole time, Voldemort's soul has been possessing poor Ginny to unleash the monster and scrawl ominous threats on the walls.
  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban builds up the menace of the second title character, an escaped Fantastic Terrorist named Sirius Black who betrayed Harry's parents to Voldemort and then murdered his pursuer, Peter Pettigrew, in an explosion that also killed a dozen Muggles. But before the climax Harry never meets him in person, even when Sirius repeatedly breaks into Hogwarts: once slashing up the moving painting at the entrance to the Gryffindor common room (don't worry, the occupant just temporarily relocates to a different painting), and once actually entering the common room to wake Ron by tearing up the curtains around the poor kid's canopy bed. When we do finally meet him, the "there all along" variant of this trope is doubly in effect. Not only is Sirius the ominous black dog that's been stalking Harry throughout the book, he's also trying to protect Harry from Peter, who actually betrayed Harry's parents and faked his death in that explosion, and who's still alive in the form of the pet rat that Ron's been carrying with him across the series up to this point.
  • In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, after enjoying the Quidditch World Cup and going to bed, Harry and company are awakened by Mr. Weasley, who tells them to flee into the forest. The kids only glimpse what's causing the fear—a group of Death Eaters dangling Muggles in the air and blowing up tents—but the really creepy part comes when the heroes are hiding in the forest. Harry, who is missing his wand and feeling vulnerable, senses someone standing a few yards away from them in the darkness; then that someone utters a spell that causes a giant green skull with a snake in its mouth to appear in the sky. Another chilling moment comes later in the book when Mr. Crouch comes shambling out of the Forbidden Forest, babbling incoherently. At the sight of Harry, he comes to his senses long enough to explain that he walked all the way from home to confess a mistake to Dumbledore and warn of Voldemort's return. But when Harry comes back with Dumbledore, Crouch has disappeared. Crouch's mistake turns out to be smuggling his Death Eater son out of Azkaban, which enabled the son to escape his father's control and mastermind Voldemort's resurrection under the guise of Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody. (Yep, this book's secret villain all along was Harry's trusted mentor—not Igor Karkaroff, who was also a Death Eater but is too cowardly to want anything to do with Voldemort anymore.) Crouch Junior cast that spell in the dark forest after the Quidditch World Cup, and killed his father after Crouch Senior arrived to warn Dumbledore.
  • A briefer example appears in "Bathilda’s Secret," the seventeenth chapter of the final book. After a tender moment at Harry's parents' grave in Godric's Hollow, Hermione sees something move in the bushes as she and Harry leave the cemetery. Harry sees nothing and tells her it's probably just a ghost (in this universe ghosts aren't particularly frightening). But then he sees an eddy of dislodged snow, which unnerves him because ghosts can’t move physical objects. They soon encounter Bathilda Bagshot, who can somehow sense them even under Harry's Invisibility Cloak. Though somewhat unsettled by her bad smell, her creepy stare, and the fact that she only gestures instead of talking, Harry trusts her. It only gets creepier when they follow Bathilda into her derelict house and Harry agrees to go upstairs with her while Hermione has to stay downstairs. At one point when Harry goes into a dark room and lights his wand, he starts because Bathilda silently moved closer to him in those few seconds of darkness. It's then revealed that this poor senile woman is actually dead, controlled by Voldemort's snake Nagini, who's been hiding inside her body.

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