What distinguishes a merely good fantasiste from a truly memorable author of weird fiction? One highly significant aspect of a wildly imaginative author is the ability to conjure hints of a world far greater than the one described in the actual story.

In The Shadow out of Time, Lovecraft writes one such passage. The following description is embedded within a passage describing a 150-million-year-old city populated by gigantic tentacled monsters. As Lovecraft shows, though, even these unfathomable creatures have unspeakable fears of their own:

“There were multiple levels of black vaults below, and never-opened trapdoors, sealed down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions of some special peril.”

These vaults, it is later explained, contain a still older and more sinister race from beyond the stars, which invaded the earth when the builders of this ancient city still ruled as the dominant lifeforms. It’s actually disappointing that Lovecraft chooses to reveal this, since brief hints might have been far more evocative, and allowed the reader simply to grasp the sheer scale of the world described.

Joshi describes howMachen used a similar tactic in his masterful story The White People. The narrator described, innocently, her acquaintaince with the “Aklo letters” and various other mysterious aspects of the supernatural culture with which she associates. As Joshi notes, these mysterious phrases peppered throughout the story allow us glimpses of a culture unknown in history, one with its own traditions, language, and even games.

Not only does this enhance the story’s realism, elevating it, as Lovecraft reommended, the the level of an actual hoax. Such hints set the imagination whirling, and allow the reader to create, in his or her own mind, a sense of the three-dimensionality of the world “beyond the veil.”

One final example: in the novel American Gods, which I’m thoroughly enjoying, Gaimain writes of the hall of forgotten gods, where are preserved the gods whose names have been forgotten by history; gods so ancient that even the gods of Egypt and Greece had long forgotten about them. These are mankind’s most primal deities: mammoth skulls, old shamans, carnivorous birds, and, in a particularly tantilizing hint, a certain god “with the head of an octopus!” Throughout the main character’s tour of this supernatural museum, he gains some sense of the time distances involved in the lives of gods, and grasps dimly that some things are unfathomably ancient even to them.

In my own writing, I tend to adhere to this motif more than almost any other. Not only do such implications bring the story to fuller life in the mind of the reader; they create what might be termed “Easter Eggs” for dedicated fans, or even those who glance over a story, to see a greater depth than the average paranormal “sketch” story. By allowing readers to feel as though they have “pierced the veil,” the writer allows them, to some degree, to write the backstory themselves. What better way to draw them into a new world?