The Silence Between Pages

People think silence is empty. It isn’t. It’s where stories breathe before they speak.

In horror—and in writing—silence isn’t the absence of sound. It’s the moment your mind fills in what’s missing. The space between footsteps in a dark hallway. The blank line after a sentence that should have ended differently. The breath the author takes, just before the truth arrives.

That’s where the real story hides. Not in the screams, but in the quiet before them.

A good horror writer doesn’t show you the monster. He hands you a flashlight and lets you find it yourself. He trusts that your imagination—the same part of you that dreams, that remembers, that fears—is more powerful than anything he could describe.

Silence gives you that power. It turns reading into collaboration. You fill the void with your own dread. And when the page finally does speak again, it’s already too late—you’ve written half the terror yourself.

That’s the kind of story I write. Not noise. Not gore. But silence. The kind that follows you after the book is closed, whispering that maybe you didn’t finish it—maybe it’s still finishing you.

— RF