The Uncanny As Wordlessness

To accompany our fall 2025 issue (22.2), we have curated a craft folio on horror, the uncanny, and/or the strange, after noticing that several pieces in the print issue include that theme. Here is Raul Palma’s piece.

As storytellers, we tend to place a lot of stock in world-building. We sketch out societies, bureaucracies, and traditions, all as ways of laying the foundation of a shared human experience through which our protagonist can encounter something at the limit of their experience. But horror, and the uncanny especially, functions in a different way. Horror peels back the worlds we build, and prepares us, perhaps more than any other type of literature, to remember what it feels like to encounter the void—the utter absence of our fictions and forms. Such an encounter can be filled with terror, but in a moment like ours dominated by authoritarianism, totalizing technologies, and unregulated capitalism, we need a way of seeing past the opaque coherence of daily life. Through the uncanny, we can conjure wordlessness itself through the ritual of storytelling and see through the oppressive structures of modern society. What we make in wordlessness is entirely ours.

I’d say that each of us has had, at some point, an uncanny experience that, for a moment, helped us feel the presence of something cast out of our world. We know, at a fundamentally human level, what it feels like to come under the spell of the uncanny and to be seized with fear in a moment of truth, even if we cannot explain away the encounter or quantify it through any “legitimate” measure. Reason is impotent here.

Back when I lived in Chicago, I moved into a walk-up apartment in an old building that overlooked Lake Michigan. I was a senior in college. The plan was to live alone so I could finish my novel. I didn’t have much furniture—just a bed, a table, and some chairs. That first week, I purchased a mirror from a reuse store, carried it down Sheridan Road and up the three flights of stairs, and left it standing against my dining room wall. I didn’t think much of it, except I loved watching the reflection of the lake at dusk.

When a friend visited, he asked why I’d chosen to position the mirror facing the lake. Before I could answer, he turned the mirror around so that it would face the wall. “Raul, you can’t keep it there,” he said. I didn’t get what he was going on about, and to be honest, I was starting to worry. That’s when he leaned in and whispered, “Mirrors are portals. Think about it. What do you think you’ve been inviting into your home?” I laughed off his question, but when he left, all I could think of was the lake, its depths, the people drowned, bodies decomposing. I was scared. And something else happened after that day. Every time I would sit to write anything, I’d have this feeling—like someone was standing behind me, their face hovering over my shoulder, reading what I wrote.

When I tell this story, most people react in one of two ways: a) they ask me questions to try and evaluate how plausible my story is; or b) they ask if I could describe the apparition. In both cases, I disappoint. I can neither rationalize the occurrence nor distill the facts of the haunting in ways that are satisfying to those who are invested. I’m not sure the uncanny needs to accomplish either of these things. We’re accustomed to thinking of horror as a genre, but it can be helpful to think of horror as a process that unfolds—much in the same way that truth unfolds within specific procedures. Horror takes our comforts (the structures we build to keep life in order) and strips them bare so that we can feel the weight of the apparition standing behind us—standing there now. 

Here’s another story. I’m in Key West. All of Duval Street has erupted in the madness of Fantasy Fest. It’s late, and I’ve been drinking, so I’m trying to sober up and picking at a bag of fries. On Eaton Street I see two angels at the will-call booth of the abandoned, boarded-up theater. The lights are off. When I ask what they’re doing, they tell me a story. Many years ago, the theater was a church. The pastor, in a fit of romantic jealousy, barred the doors shut and burned down the church, killing everyone in it, including seventeen children. The scantily clad angels tell me that they smelled the fire; they heard the children screaming for help. They gesture at the dark gap of the ticket slot. “If you reach in, one of the dead children will grab you.” This is what they’ve been doing—daring each other to reach into the void.

I proceed to shove my fries, one at a time, into the ticket slot. And then, feeling bold, I reach into the darkness, elbow deep, but there is nothing. “See,” I say. “No ghosts.” Afterward, we go our separate ways, and I walk to my home on Elizabeth Street, feeling like something is not right. That night I keep waking up facing the corner of my bedroom, where I can see the outline of a figure watching me. I rationalize it away—my contact lenses are off; my eyes must be playing tricks on me; it’s just shadows. But it keeps happening. I keep waking up facing this apparition. And as I try to will this feeling away, I’m suddenly startled by what sounds like many footsteps pounding on the floor above me—in the upstairs bedroom I’ve never used. And in the corner, what I can only barely see, is a figure standing ominously, growing, so I close my eyes and hide under the blanket like a child. Eventually I do fall asleep, but the encounter has never left me.

I have thought of this night many times. I have tried to explain it. The best I have is that I crossed a threshold. Reaching through the slot was a violation, and when I crossed into that space, I was possessed by something. As I share this story, I feel vulnerable because I am aware that as a writer in the United States, I am working within a culture that fetishizes the apophantic (the sorts of discourses or utterances that can be validated or invalidated), yet Horror is non-apophantic. Like a prayer or a command or an act of violence, it exists unto itself, given as a truth from its first utterance. 

Perhaps more pertinent is not how the haunting occurred, but what it offered me in that moment, alone in a house too big for me, on an island named after the bones of Calusa Indians that were discovered scattered across the island by colonizers. In just a short, blurry moment, the haunting cleaved a long-lasting hole open for me in the way that I understood Key West. It made visceral to me the histories I’d ignored or failed to see, and brought about, in my moment of fear, a type of justice that needed to be delivered then.

As a writer, I can feed upon these experiences to inform my work. I can ask: How do I create spaces in the text that cannot be totalized or appropriated by the apparatus of modern life?  In my novel, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens (Dutton, 2024), Hugo is haunted by his debts, and in the first paragraph, I begin the process of spatializing his haunting: “He’d feel his indebtedness drop into bed with him, this invisible thing. Sometimes it would take hold of his hand, kiss him, then wrap itself around his chest so that it hurt to breathe, or it would slap him awake and demand attention.” Though Hugo is oppressed by his haunting, at first, he refuses to believe that it is real. He associates his pain only with past financial missteps. However, as the haunting unfolds, he finds that instead of running to get out of debt (which was his ambition at the novel’s start), he suddenly prefers its company.

Throughout the novel, Hugo is financially destitute. He sees Miami as a place with no free and open spaces. Any outing, even for a cafecito, is out of his budget, but the haunting does not care about his budget, and it is not constrained by space. Early in the novel, for example, Hugo is alone and driving on the highway at night when he is suddenly overcome with the sensation that someone is in the car with him. He stops to inspect the car, finding nothing. “Hugo wanted there to have been someone . . . He wished for a child. He hated that he was alone . . . And as he brought this non-existent child to life in his imagination, he felt so sad at the world she would never know.”

Despite not having believed in hauntings, Hugo is challenged by uncanny moments like this to expand his understanding of experience. Even though he has no child, never had, never will, her presence in that car gives him a glimpse of the cost of his world. If modern society functions to control or limit by concealing or denying or rationalizing away the horrors of wordlessness, then perhaps it’s time we helped people remember what came before we built worlds. We do this, already, by telling stories that pull back the dressings of our world-making to reveal the shrieking and howling abyss beneath. The next step is keeping a razor-sharp eye on the ethical implications of what it means to shrug off the world that, for so long, we have insisted needs to be saved and preserved.

I’ll share one more story. I’m in high school, growing up in Miami, and everything about my life feels controlled by one system or another, whether it’s my schedule at school, hours in wrestling practice, traffic, my part-time job. I am growing up and becoming disillusioned by what modern life will offer. One night, without telling my parents, I drive out to the eastern Everglades, to an abandoned facility on the perimeter of the Krome detention center. It’s covered in graffiti, broken glass; down the long hall, beyond the cafeteria, there’s a large, fractured bathroom. Someone has spray-painted, “The devil lives here.” My friends will soon meet me here, but for the moment, I sit on the floor, alone, to write in my notebook with nothing but a small flashlight, feeling that I just need a space outside the noise. In time, the room is alive: the sound of someone stepping on glass; the shadows crossing the wall; the forms at edge of my vision; and a far-off voice, “Anyone there?”

Read more from Issue 22.2.