The most effective horror immerses its audience in objectless states of anxiety, a condition that builds more dread than the visible constrictions of a defined source: “[I]t is not the monster … [that is] essential to the horror

genre, but rather an ‘epistemic deficit’: an anxiety-inducing not-knowing in relation to the events and entities of art-horror” (Hills 30). Although ontologies (states of existence, being, and becoming) participate in the production of horror fiction’s shocks and terrors, in that narratives often present as ghastly a given subject’s corporeality and existence, epistemologies (systems of knowledge) are arguably a more significant foundational component of horror’s creeping mechanisms. Chris Meyers and Sara Waller distinguish between ontological and epistemic horror as the difference between something wrong signaled by the explicit presence of a monster and a vagrant apprehension produced through a fundamental lack of certainty: “[M]aybe there is something wrong with a thing in the world, or may be something wrong with me, or may be I have no idea of what I am up against” (119). In a Dark, Dark Room presents both ontological and epistemological horrors, the former in the guise of corpses, ghosts, and men with uncanny teeth, the latter in narratives that for the most part refuse resolution or explanation. Occasionally, these ontological and epistemological horrors intertwine within the same story. However, Dark’s monsters are arguably far less frightening than the text’s refusal to answer raised questions or remain within the boundaries of single narrative realities.