The Case for Lying to Readers

Which sounds better?

Option A): There was a slow, persistent scratching at her door. Despite her sleep-addled state, goosebumps pimpled her skin. What was there, beyond the entryway?

Option B): As she drifted, she caught the sound of the motel owner’s dog pawing at her lodging’s front door. It brought to mind her own animals and, in the way of quasi-sleep, she began to imagine they were there with her, until they were—in her dreams.

There’s a place and time for both. But I posit the second option is more effective long-term. I used to call it the “Ramsey Campbell Method,” as that’s who I was reading as a teen when I first noticed the tactic—using 1st or 3rd-person narration to state a falsehood in order to creep readers out later when they look back on the tale and connect the dots. Neither of the above quotes are Campbell’s—I don’t have a copy of his horror novel Ancient Images on hand, which is where the scene of a woman falling asleep to the sound of scratching took place.

However, in Ancient Images, the heroine frequently has close encounters with a…creature, narrowly missing it. Yet she fails to recognize that fact. And because she fails to recognize what’s stalking her, neither she, nor the narrator, come straight out to inform readers that there is anything truly dire afoot until the back half of the book (if you don’t count dead film historians).

You can even be pretty blunt with it…pretend I have an old woman who seems to know what my young protagonist is thinking:

She turned her grin towards me. It was her teeth I noticed first. You can always tell—mine are sheared, a smooth line of calcium torture from witching hour grinds. Theoretically, I could have afforded to fix them at that point in my life but they were a reminder of humbler times and I imagined a bridge or veneers would make me vain. My new neighbor’s teeth were white bricks of marble.

She couldn’t read my mind. “They’re not real,” she confided as she leaned over her armrest.

This woman can obviously read or at least anticipate his thoughts.

Now, unreliable narrators are nothing new. And lying to audiences isn’t the sole province of horror. I remember the first time I went through Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun and the main character, Severian—one of the most earnest (or maybe not) unreliable narrators I’ve ever come across—likely misunderstood the term ‘animal husbandry,’ and told me as a reader that there was a group of people who married their own beasts.

Far from being convoluted, this magician’s trick—of pointing us one direction until we stop to think later about what it was we truly saw—is an act of supreme respect for the reader. It assumes that the people who take the time to read these tales are well-equipped and invested enough to pay attention. To notice discrepancies and minor details. I can’t speak for everyone, but I always enjoy it, being made to pay attention to a work instead of sleepwalking through it.

Most of the time.