Supernatural fiction contains its own generic borderland: a neutral territory, which Tzvetan Todorov calls 'the fantastic, ' between 'the marvelous' and 'the uncanny.' According to Todorov, 'The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.' Once the event is satisfactorily explained (and sometimes it is never explained), we have left the fantastic for an adjacent genre - either 'the uncanny, ' where the apparently supernatural is revealed as illusory, or 'the marvelous, ' where the laws of ordinary reality must be revised to incorporate the supernatural. As long as uncertainty reigns, however, we are in the ambiguous realm of the fantastic. Howard Kerr
About This Quote

Supernatural fiction is most commonly characterized by the presence of something that seems supernatural - magic, giants, demons, etc. However, the supernatural is only one feature of this fiction. The other main feature is the ambiguous nature of the fantastic - something seeming supernatural is not necessarily supernatural in nature. The reader must be careful not to assume that what seems supernatural is actually supernatural.

The presence of something that seems normal makes for a great story - think about it, you are reading a story where there are no vampires or werewolves or ghosts or witches or aliens or magic spells. What if things were different? What if new normal rules applied?

Source: The Haunted Dusk

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