What’s that strange sound overhead? Is it a magical creature landing on the roof or just a common crow? If your book is shelved in the fantasy section, it had better be a magical creature! But that doesn’t mean you can’t tease your readers a little, makin’ ‘em sweat, wondering if they’ll get the sweet supernatural content they crave. To what I’m sure is your great surprise, we’ve got some tips for that!

Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music]

Chris:  Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris. 

Oren: And I’m Oren. 

Chris: Hey, did you… did you hear that? I think my mic is picking up these weird sounds that I can’t hear myself, but when I listen to the recordings from the microphone, it’s like quiet, inaudible voices whispering… with faint notes of a song I haven’t heard since childhood. It’s probably the neighbors. 

Oren: Don’t be silly, Chris. Despite having encountered supernatural things many dozens of times, I am going to be skeptical of this one. 

Chris: Hmm. When will you acknowledge the truth before your eyes, Scully?! 

Oren: Scully’s very cool. I would like to be 5% as cool as Scully, and if this will get me there, I’m willing to do whatever it takes.

Chris: So this time we’re talking about the questionably supernatural.

Oren: Is it supernatural?

Chris: Is it magic? Is it not magic? 

Oren: So here’s my hot take. It better be.

Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Chris: No. How could you diss Ann Radcliffe that way? Disrespect. 

Oren: Ann Radcliffe and me, we got beef. My beef is that supernatural was fake and not real. I’m like the people who get real hung up on the idea that romance has to have a happy ever after. As far as I’m concerned, if you hint that there’s supernatural stuff, there had better be supernatural stuff. 

Chris: Say, that is true, if you are writing speculative fiction, there should be some things fantastical. But I still think we might need to acknowledge that there are works outside of speculative fiction in which that might go down a little better.

Oren: Hmm. Agree to disagree, except that I don’t agree. Hmm.

Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Oren: I think that it’s fine if you do that as long as it is a book that is never going to be read by me. 

Chris: [Laughs] Well–

Oren: That’s my stance. 

Chris: I don’t think you’re gonna pick up the average non-speculative mysteries. So I think we’re…

Oren: Oh they’re safe then, or are they? 

Chris: It is really funny to read some non-speculative works and see how they use speculative elements as dress up.

Oren: Mm-hmm. 

Chris: “Oh, see, I can add novelty to my word craft by using metaphors of this being a fairytale or treating this element as though it’s supernatural. But of course, we all know thats ridiculous.” 

Oren: “Obviously.” [Chuckles]

Chris: That’s how those stories go and it’s always weird. I critiqued a mystery story that, apparently it does have some level of supernatural elements in it, but I could not tell because it kept using metaphors. Okay, I know he’s metaphorically breathing fire because he’s angry, but could he literally breathe fire, please? That would be so much more interesting. [Chuckles]

Oren: That would be neat. Who knows? Maybe. 

Chris: I know this house only sort of looks like a cyclops because of the windows, but what if it actually was a cyclops? That would be better. With the speculative audience, you definitely don’t wanna taunt them with something that is fantastical only to, “Uh, sorry.” In the same way, you don’t be like, “Well now that those kids grew up and are adults, the magic goes away. ‘Cause they gotta act like adults now.” Nobody wants that. Don’t take the magic away. Don’t do it. 

Oren: The most popular trope that everyone hates. The weirdest concept. I suppose someone must like it, but everyone I talk to hates that trope and it’s always funny to me how common it used to be.

Chris: How could you do that to Kiki? How could you do that to her? 

Oren: [Chuckles]

Chris: I definitely feel like it comes from this outlook of, “Oh, well that’s not realistic. Of course, we gotta grow up so naturally the magic has to go away,” instead of thinking about what’s actually enjoyable for readers. 

Oren: Also, we were talking about Mary and the Witch’s Flower that does that. Not Kiki’s Delivery Service? 

Chris: Doesn’t Kiki’s Delivery Service also do that? She grows up.

Oren: I thought Kiki’s Delivery Service ended with a different weird ending, which was that her search was to find her element and then the ending is that her element is flying. 

Chris: Maybe I’m getting that mixed up.

Oren: Which was also unsatisfying because every witch can fly and it didn’t really establish that she was especially good at flying. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: I felt like that didn’t work either, but I think that’s a different ending than Mary and the Witch’s Flower where the character excitedly yells, “I’ll never use magic again!” It’s like, what? Why Mary? Why? Magic rules. 

Chris: I know that there’s a story other than Mary and the Witch’s Flower, but Mary and the Witch’s Flower is particularly funny because apparently the storyteller’s goal was to condemn magic, but it makes magic so cool that you would barely know that. If you look closely at the plot, you can see where the storyteller was attempting to do that. In any magic story where magic is cool, you would have villains doing something bad with magic. That’s just normal. That doesn’t seem like you’re condemning magic. 

Oren: You were just showing me villains doing bad things and they were magical. That’s all that was happening. 

Chris: [Chuckles] Any case, back to the questionably supernatural. So why do it? Why have things that maybe or maybe are not magical, supernatural, fantastical in some way? 

Oren: Other than enraging me personally. 

Chris: [Laughs] Well, just having something mysterious is not gonna do it. It’s just the ending. Obviously creating a mysterious atmosphere, if you don’t know whether or not something is fantastical or if it’s normal, that opens up kind of a mystery, creates lots of atmosphere, which is a big reason to do it. 

Oren: Mystery enhances a number of other traits. If the magic is mysterious and you want it to be scary, that’s much easier than if it’s well known. And if you want it to be wondrous, that’s also easy. If you don’t know for sure if it’s magic or not, you can create this feeling that there might be magic anywhere around any corner, which is very cool, even if there’s very little actual magic in your story. 

Chris: I also think that it might be useful for slowing down the action in the story. I think this is good for horror in particular because we don’t necessarily wanna heat up things too soon. Any kind of monster is only gonna be threatening for so long. And a lot of horror stories, we build the mood first with a few events that seem not quite right, but aren’t overtly magical. And that helps the creep factor, and it also, frankly, uses some of the runtime. 

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Chris: Well, building up the threat so that later we can confront it. We don’t confront it directly at first. So if we’re not even sure if it’s something supernatural, then that takes more time to reach the point where you’ve actually got it unveiled or have to fight it, for instance. 

Oren: Another advantage is that if you’re in a world where the main character doesn’t know if something’s magical or not, doesn’t know that magic exists, that’s less you have to explain right off the bat. That’s just a practical benefit. Because if your main character is already a wizard or knows about magic, that’s more stuff you have to info dump. And if they don’t, then they can learn at the same time the reader does. It reduces your overhead, and that’s not the main reason to do it or anything, but it is a benefit.

Chris: And I think with horror in particular, a lot of times we don’t want to have magical protagonists because we wanna disempower the protagonist. It just doesn’t make sense to have somebody coming in with magic. Instead, they’re being introduced to magic for the first time because we want it to be intimidating. But you could do this with a light story as well. You could have a story that’s really about discovering something that is wonderful and whimsical. 

Oren: That’s like using a similar concept to hit a very different narrative experience. What you’re doing is, you are building the fantasy of, ”I might find magic, little old me living in my little suburb,” or wherever. That’s obviously a very different experience than a horror story being, “Ooh, is that thing spooky or just a serial killer?” But you use a similar process. 

Chris: The only real difference is that we want all of the fantastical things to feel positive in nature in some way. Instead of finding blood, you find flowers. [Laughs] 

Oren: Special glowing flowers. But were they glowing? They seemed like they were glowing, but during the day now you’re not sure anymore.

Chris: Just for an instant, I leaned my ear next to one and I thought I heard some fairy bells, but it could have been in my imagination. 

Oren: It was probably your imagination. 

Chris: Let’s talk about how you do things that are only questionably supernatural. What are the tricks and techniques? I would say first any event with an unknown cause. We’ve got, “Oh, why are all the doors open after midnight?” Yes, technically somebody could be opening it, but we don’t know who, and that’s a strange thing for somebody to do. That’s your bread and butter.

“This thing changed while we were looking in the other way. [Chuckles] We don’t know who did it.” Or strange unidentified music is another one. “At this time in the middle of the night, we hear strange tinkling music.” And somebody could be creating the music, but that’s a strange thing for a person to do. And maybe we wander outside looking for the source of the music and we can’t find it. When we wander different directions, it seems to come from different places. But again, that could just be a trick of sound echoing. 

Oren: Here’s a question. At what point does it become a problem that it might be magic? Because I’m thinking specifically of the “locked door” problem, where you have a murder and the victim was inside a room that was locked from the inside. And in that situation, finding out that its magic is actually a disappointment because you were trying to figure out what was the clever way the murderer did this. And if the answer is that they have a spell that teleports them out of the room, that’s kind of boring. So when does that happen? When do you risk doing that? 

Chris: That’s a good question. I do think one of the issues with the “locked door” problem is that the original expectation you were setting, is that there’s not gonna be magic. If we had magic in the setting where people could just say a few words in Latin and unlock doors, none of the characters are gonna ask, “Oh, how is this possible?” It wouldn’t even be worth bringing up. 

This goes back to if we have an actual curiosity arc, is that different? When we’re setting up something that’s a mystery and usually there’s an active protagonist who is contemplating certain questions about the crime, and then to evoke curiosity, we’ll be like, “Oh, but this body was in three different locked chests that were locked from the inside” or whatever. You have impossible situation. 

I do think that you kind of need to establish the rules for a mystery like that. Usually the expectation from the reader is that they will be able to, if they pay attention, they’ll able to guess the answer. And that the answer will follow certain rules. And so if you don’t tell them early on that this is a setting where people can just say a few words and unlock that, then that would be kind of cheating. “Wizard did it” is cheating. 

But also that makes the whole question less profound, less wild. ‘Cause that’s what you’re doing to try to evoke curiosity. You’re trying to create a really wild situation that leaves people guessing. It’s not always backwards looking. We can create curiosity in a variety of ways. So it is curiosity evoking to have, let’s say, mysterious music coming out. But I think if this is a story where the supernatural is expected and you’re creating less curiosity and more anticipation that you’re gonna get something cool.

If we, for instance, hear fairy music, it has its mysterious aura of mystery, but it’s not as curiosity evoking as the weird… like, A Drop of Corruption is really good at this. This is the sequel to A Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. And sets up a really perplexing, “How could this murder have happened?” We have no idea, we think somebody died, but there’s no body and we don’t know how he could have possibly left the room, is the starting situation. But that’s really curiosity evoking. 

I think when we have something like weird fairy music, it’s less curiosity, but it has more novelty. We know that the book is supernatural. We have expectations set. So we know that a possible answer could be fairies. As opposed to if you just like, “Oh, well he got out of the room because fairies did it.” That would not be acceptable in A Drop of Corruption. 

Oren: And to some extent it’s almost like I know it when I see it. ‘Cause if we have a mystery with the locked room thing and it was magic, I’d be disappointed. But if the mystery is, “We found a murder victim and his organs are missing, even though there’s no marks on his skin.” And then I found out that that was due to an ancient cult performing dark magics. I don’t think I’d be disappointed. I’d be like, “Oh, cool. An ancient cult performing dark magics.” Even though technically that could be a mystery. Like, “How did they get those organs out?” 

Chris: If you were given something else enjoyable, that can soften the blow. But generally, if you’ve invoked a lot of curiosity, you’re looking for the answer to fit certain constraints. Or it’s surprising, but it still makes sense with what you know, which is what a lot of mysteries do. 

And I think in that case, if it’s like, “Oh, it’s disappointing that it’s not supernatural.” Well, if you have a mystery audience that are looking for a mystery answer that makes sense, more than they are looking for the novelty of real fairies or elder gods or what have you, then they’re looking for a different type of payoff. And it’s about those expectations that people come in the door with. And that you set as a storyteller. 

But I do think that might be the key in some of these situations. As I mentioned in an earlier episode, I’ve recently listened to Anne Radcliffe, who is a late 1700s, early 1800s gothic novel writer, and she had a habit of doing a lot of supernatural things that then she reveals to not be supernatural in the end.

Oren: Why would you think they were supernatural, silly reader? 

Chris: Well, it’s interesting because she clearly had a specific beef with people being superstitious and how that was bad and you should not give into superstition. 

Oren: [Laugh]

Chris: And in the context she creates, I can’t say that that’s wrong. [Laughs] That was her deal. And I think she tried to answer it with various levels of nonsensical-ness. One of the ones that I liked is when she uses, “Oh no, what is that little flame on tip of somebody’s spear? That’s so scary.” And then it’s static electricity from the storm overhead.

Oren: [Chuckles] It’s literally Saint Elmo’s Fire is what it is. It’s an actual thing in which the end of some kind of rod, like a ship’s mast or whatever, will glow blue, and it’s just a weather phenomenon. It’s caused by charged particles in the air. It’s very strange looking. 

Chris: At first, people are like, “Oh no, it’s so ghostly.” And then the character’s like, “Oh, this just happens when there’s a storm. I don’t think it’s ghosts or a portent of doom,” or whatever. The funniest one though is when she has a character that’s horrified, and this is like a total meta mystery, basically, because it’s written omniscient, but she won’t say what her main character sees. And we imply it’s a dead person.

There could be a non-supernatural dead person there. But it’s really funny when she then later needs to tie that up and she’s like, “Oh, actually it was just a wax doll. It was a wax doll, because you see…” And then of course she has to give this whole story of why a wax doll that looks like a dead person is there.

It’s like, “Well, you see. This guy, he caused so much trouble and the church wanted him to repent, so they ordered him to make a wax doll of a dead person, then have him stare at it every day to contemplate his mortality so that he would think about being a better person.” 

Oren: Just contemplating my wax doll over here.

Chris: “And then he decided that it was a good idea and then stipulated that his descendants would have to keep the wax doll of the dead person to contemplate their own mortality or else they would lose some of their inheritance to the church.” So they were required to keep it around, but they didn’t wanna look at it, so they put it under this veil outta sight where the main character found it and thought it was an actual dead body and was too scared to look closer. 

Oren: I have a really important tip for writers who are implying that there is something supernatural and then revealing it was something else. Don’t do that.

Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Oren: If you have to launch into a big backstory explanation to explain it, that’s probably not a good idea. That’s true in general for any mystery. If once the mystery is revealed, you have to be like, “Okay, here’s two pages of exposition.” Something has probably gone wrong. 

Chris: This is the method of, instead of just having events with unknown causes that are weird, Anne Radcliffe would actually have people see things that they thought were supernatural, and then it just turned out to be some guy who maybe was doing something a little unusual, but we would explain. Like at one point bandits are hiding their goods in the part of the castle that previously was abandoned, and so they see a guy in a dead woman’s room and they’re like, “Oh no, it’s a specter! It’s a ghost!” Because we have to assume that they didn’t look very closely.

I think it’s a little hard when we have movies with such good special effects. In our thought of, “Well, couldn’t you tell visually the difference between a ghost and a person?” But the assumption here is that no, ghosts could just be like people walking around, but we think they’re ghosts for some reason.

Oren: They could be. Who knows? [Chuckles] 

Chris: Did you ever watch, was Scooby-Doo a thing? 

Oren: Yeah!

Chris: Scooby-Doo is pretty famous for having people faking supernatural things. 

Oren: My brother loved Scooby-Doo, which part of my deep seated childhood resentment that he was allowed to watch cartoons when I was not at his age. His standard older sibling experience. He loved Scooby-Doo and so I watched fair amount of it just by osmosis ’cause that’s what was on. And yes, the older cartoons, the joke is that it’s always an old rich guy who is trying to scam someone in a monster costume. Which of course raises some serious questions like, “We saw that guy punch through a metal door. How did he do that?”

Chris: Again, not having really watched much Scooby-Doo I know the thing it has a reputation for is having obviously supernatural things happen, and then trying to weakly explain how the effect was created by some normal scheming guy in ways that are very unrealistic and definitely could not have created.

Oren: It depends on the episode. With some of them, all that really happened is that a guy chased them around and it’s like, “Well, that was actually a guy in a monster suit that chased us around.” Okay, sure, that could happen. And then in other episodes they’re like, “Ooh, how did he do all of this weird stuff?” Well, he used a fog machine and magnets, and those have varying degrees of credibility. 

But then there are also times when they just do things that there is no explanation offered or attempted. I think there was an episode where a vampire turned into bats, and then later it turned out he was a guy in a suit, and it is like, “Well, hang on… the bats thing.” I think that happened. Granted, it’s been a while, so maybe not. But I do know there were several episodes where the monsters clearly had superhuman strength and that was just never explained. 

Chris: I think part of the problem is not only is it increasingly hard to believe that something that we see could be ambiguous is about it being supernatural, but also if the audience knows it’s gonna be supernatural and there’s obvious signs it’s supernatural, I lose my patience. Of people being like, “Oh no, maybe it’s not supernatural.” It’s like, can you just accept a supernatural already? We know it’s supernatural. It becomes tiresome after a while if characters see something that is obviously supernatural and then drag their feet for a while, even if it’s realistic. It’s like, we’ve all been there. We’ve seen this happen in countless stories. 

Oren: I find myself really torn there, and this is actually why I so often prefer to start with characters already knowing about the supernatural. Just because on the one hand, I know it’s boring for them to go continue to insist it’s not supernatural for a long time, but at the same time it’s also really hard for me to believe that they would just accept that something was supernatural unless they had some pre-existing beliefs in that area. 

Chris: We just enjoyed T Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead. Which is basically an adaptation of Fall of the House of Usher. Although, Fall of the House of Usher is so brief that it sticks close enough that I think it’s fair to call it an adaptation. But again, it has so much plot that the original doesn’t because the original is just a tiny little story. 

But I think it’s a really good novella and I think in that one, we have weird things. And I think the important thing there is it’s not necessarily that the characters accept outlandish ideas immediately. It’s that they’re willing to move forward, not being sure, so that we don’t delay too much arguing about it. They don’t just refuse to take action, which is frustrating if we know. It’s that they pursue things reluctantly, not knowing what the explanation is, but hey, “Why don’t we try this because we need some solution.” And I think that works pretty well. 

Oren: It does help a little bit in What Moves the Dead, that, spoilers, the explanation is that it’s a spooky fungus. The characters are more willing to accept that because they don’t know a whole lot about fungi. And this is the 1890s where mycology is still kind of in its infancy, so it’s a little easier for them in that context to accept that maybe fungus can do this. 

Whereas nowadays, at least for someone who is knowledgeable about fungi, it would be like, “What? No fungi can’t do that. That’s ridiculous.” Although perhaps not a normal person ’cause I have talked to several people who think that The Last of Us is based on real science. 

Chris: [Laughs] No.

Oren: And are genuinely afraid that fungus is going to do that. You should be worried about increased fungal infections for a number of reasons, but they’re just the boring kind that will kill you. Not the kind that will turn you into a cool zombie. 

Chris: We should be worried about more epidemics, but we don’t need to worry about zombies specifically. But I think that works well. If the characters can’t fully embrace it, but they have limited options of their situation, they need to do something. They can just keep an open mind and take what actions they can think of that might do something. 

Another thing that we see often in gothic stories or in other stories where we need to make fantastical things ambiguous, is using dreams. Dreams are just very convenient because there’s all sorts of tropes about people getting visions or portents that are actually real in dreams.

Or you can have something that is ambiguously a dream. If you have a dream where the character gets outta bed and walks around and then sees something supernatural and then suddenly wakes up in their bed, you don’t know if that was actually a dream or not. And so that can be really convenient for making something ambiguous or having the character be like, “Okay, well obviously that didn’t really happen.“ But maybe it did. 

Oren: But maybe.

Chris: Or maybe something invaded their mind. You can have your antagonist that attacks people in their dreams, which happens. Another Kingfisher one, What Feasts at Night would be the sequel. So dreams really offer a lot in terms of creating ambiguous situations. Is that a magical dream? Is it a normal dream? Or was I actually walking about in the middle of the night and saw things? 

Oren: So here’s a thought. At what point does it cross the line from something that it’s okay to leave ambiguous, to something that you really need to explain by the end? I can think of some stories where if this character has an arc about regaining their faith, I don’t really need to know if the good luck they had at the end was actually an angel or not. I’m okay with that being ambiguous. I think that if someone was going around doing murders and the witnesses were all like, “It looked like an angel killing people with a flaming sword,” I’d want to know if that was real or not. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: And so presumably you cross a line somewhere. I just don’t know where that is.

Chris: That’s a good question, but certainly I think when it’s more closely related to actual plot arcs that need to be concluded. I think that’s the first question I would ask. Is there a plot arc here that we need to close? And sometimes that might be a curiosity arc. It might be, again, “We had a murder done in a weird way.” We really do expect that to be explained by the end, because that’s the expectations you set with a mystery audience. If you’re gonna evoke so much curiosity that it’s designed to create enough engagement for people to keep going. That’s probably something that needs to be answered.

Whereas it’s something that we’ve closed up all the arcs, but this could be one way or the other. I also think that it might be easier to have something that has two different options instead of something that’s wide open. Was that really the ghost of my mother or was that just a dream or hallucination when I was on shrooms? [Laughs] We have two different options. 

Whereas if we have a situation where we never find out where the strange music is coming from at all, that’s not an either or. That’s a wide open. So I really think that ambiguousness and ambiguous endings, you really do best when you paint what the possibilities are. It’s either this or that. And we don’t know which, but we can imagine either one. 

Whereas if you have a wide open question, that could be anything. “We didn’t find out where the strange unidentified music came from,” so that doesn’t give us anything to go off of or to think about. Whereas if you have, “Oh, we thought that that music came from this person, but then somebody else said that they were dead before we heard the music.”

Oren: Ooh.

Chris: Did they make a mistake or did that person play music from beyond the grave? 

Oren: Hmm. 

Chris: [Laughs] We have two options. We’ve closed off the plot arcs. I guess that’s where I would start. 

Oren: Well now we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close and no, we’re not gonna explain if that stuff at the beginning about special voices hearing on the microphone was magic or not. You’ll just have to wonder. 

Chris: …Or will we? 

Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Chris: Okay, well, if you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music]

Outro: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.