Does your manuscript fill up with exclamation marks the moment you reach the climax?
Your protagonist screams. Their heart pounds. They think, "I can't believe this."
While you're writing, it feels like the scene is taking off. But when you reread it, it somehow feels cheap.
I do it too. The more a scene matters, the more words I pile on.
Then a book I read recently showed me what to do instead: Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye (1928), one of the most notoriously extreme works in French literature.
What struck me most wasn't how lurid the events are. It was how eerily flat the voice telling them is. That flatness, set against one sudden burst of poetry, is where the book's black humor comes from.
Today, I want to look at how it's written. Here are the three techniques I stole from it:
Report the most shocking scenes flatly.
Let yourself sing only about the sky.
Take the narrator's name away.
Let's go through them one by one. At the end, I've put together steps you can try on your own manuscript right away.
The More Shocking the Scene, the Quieter the Voice
"Wait, aren't you supposed to pour emotion into the climax?"
That's what most of us were taught. Story of the Eye does the exact opposite.
Here's just a sliver of the plot. The narrator is an unnamed boy, "I," and the other lead is a girl named Simone. With every page, their games escalate toward sex, violence, death, and sacrilege.
Yet the tone of the narration barely changes. It reads like an accident report, simply listing what happened in order.
"I was scared."
"I shuddered."
There's almost none of that commentary.
Here's the thing: when the writer names the emotion for you, all the reader does is receive it. When the writer holds back, the reader has no choice but to build the reaction themselves.
On top of that, the flatness of the voice and the extremity of the events don't match at all. From that gap rises a strange kind of comedy, what we call black humor.
You don't know if you're allowed to laugh. But you laugh a little anyway. That discomfort is exactly what sticks in the reader's memory.
How to Create Black Humor
I tried turning it into a formula:
Black humor = weight of the event × flatness of the voice × visibility of the mismatch
Since it's multiplication, if any one of them is zero, there's no laugh.
If the event is light, it's just everyday life. If the voice is overheated, it's just tragedy. If the mismatch isn't visible, it's just dry prose.
The first factor, weight, means things you normally shouldn't laugh at: death, violence, illness, failures you can't undo. The heavier it is, the bigger the drop.
The second, flatness, is the report-style voice we just looked at. You write a heavy event at the same emotional temperature as small talk about the weather.
And the key is the third one. It's what makes the reader think, "Wait, something's off about how this narrator is reacting."
There are five common ones:
Mismatched detail.
Mismatched listing.
Mismatched procedure.
Mismatched timing.
Mismatched wording.
Let's look at each with an example.
Mismatched detail means writing about something trivial in the middle of a major event. It's a funeral, and all the narrator can think about is that the frame of the memorial photo is slightly crooked.
Mismatched listing means lining up heavy things and light things with equal weight. "That year, my grandfather died, the fridge broke, and I finally learned to do a flip on the monkey bars."
Mismatched procedure means handling something abnormal like an office routine. Facing a dead body, the narrator first lines up their shoes neatly, then calls the police.
Mismatched timing means following a decisive moment directly with an everyday action. "She didn't move anymore. We went out to buy bread."
Mismatched wording means calling a heavy event by a word that doesn't fit. Like calling a catastrophe "a minor mix-up."
The rule: one per scene. Stack too many and it turns into a comedy sketch, and the weight disappears.
Also, don't let the narrator explain the joke. The moment you write "Ironically," the laugh dies.
In a word: write a heavy event at the wrong temperature, with a completely straight face. The more the writer keeps a straight face, the more the reader laughs.
Sing Only About the Sky
"So should I just write everything flat?"
Then it'd just be a record. This is where Story of the Eye gets really impressive.
The usually flat voice suddenly starts to sing, but only at certain moments: when the narrator looks up at the sky.
The starry sky.
The sun.
The Milky Way.
In scenes under the night sky, the narrator's language suddenly balloons into something enormous, questioning life and death and how the universe came to be. Desire, death, and the cosmos fuse in a single sentence.
As if the report-style voice of a moment ago never existed, a quiet, crystal-clear passage appears.
Hmm. That's a sneaky move.
When someone shouts all the time, people tune them out. When someone who's been silent raises their voice just once, everyone turns around.
Poetic language works the same way. The more sparingly you use it, the harder it hits.
By the way, the French critic Roland Barthes discussed this work in his 1963 essay "The Metaphor of the Eye." He traced a chain of round objects (eye, egg, sun) and a chain of liquids (tears, milk, blood). He argued that the book is built less like a novel stacking up plausible events and more like a poem.
That's Barthes's interpretation, not a fact about the text. But for writers, it's a big hint: a passage that sings can be the lever that lifts a work from "a record of incidents" to "a poem."
Put Fear and Laughter on the Same Plate
Reading Story of the Eye, I kept feeling the ground shift under my feet.
Terrifying, yet somehow comical.
Dazzling, yet nauseating.
Heavy, yet suddenly light.
Near the end, the main characters cross into Spain as if on the run. To me, this stretch read less like tragedy and more like a theatrical adventure story. After the weight, it deliberately swings all the way to lightness, and that's exactly why the horror stands out even more.
That's my own reading, but you can use it as-is in your manuscript.
With fear alone, readers get used to it. With laughter alone, readers relax. Put both in the same scene, and readers don't know how to react.
I suspect that "not knowing" is a big part of why the book stays with you so intensely.
A Nameless "I" Puts the Reader at the Peephole
The narrator of Story of the Eye is a boy, "I," who's never given a name. The story is told in the first person, looking back on the past.
This "I" is a participant in the acts. At the same time, he's placed in the position of watching what Simone does.
So what happens when there's no name? The reader slips right into that "I."
In my reading, this makes the reader feel as if they've been made to stand at a peephole.
You don't want to look.
But you can't look away.
And thanks to the report-style voice, there's still a little distance.
Close, yet far. That precarious distance is what makes the extreme scenes "readable."
Honestly, it's brilliant. Just leaving out a name changes this much.
Five Steps to Try on Your Manuscript Right Now
"So where do I start?"
All right, open the single biggest climax in your manuscript. Then try these in order:
- In the climax, underline every word that names an emotion (scared, sad, unbelievable, and so on)
- Delete every underlined word and rewrite only what happened, in chronological order
- Add one moment somewhere in the scene where a character looks at nature, like gazing up at the sky
- Write that description, and only that one, like a poem, with full feeling, in three to five sentences
- Right after the climax, add one slightly comical line or an anticlimactic event
When I tried this myself, the word count dropped by 30% from the original, yet the scene felt about twice as strong.
What matters isn't making everything flat. It's designing the gap between a flat voice and a single raised one.
Your climax can be a little quieter. The longer you stay silent, the harder that one line about the sky will hit.