Jacobs’s writing style in “The Monkey’s Paw” is mostly simple and unadorned, though he does use imagery in key moments to build suspense and create an eerie, unsettling mood. Take the following passage, for example, which comes after Mr. White uses the monkey’s paw to wish for his deceased son Herbert to come alive again (at the urging of his wife):
He sat until he was chilled with the cold, glancing occasionally at the figure of the old woman peering through the window. The candle-end, which had burned below the rim of the china candlestick, was throwing pulsating shadows on the ceiling and walls, until, with a flicker larger than the rest, it expired. The old man, with an unspeakable sense of relief at the failure of the talisman, crept back to his bed, and a minute or two afterward the old woman came silently and apathetically beside him.
Jacobs’s use of imagery here allows readers to feel “chilled with the cold” alongside Mr. White and also to visualize the way that the dim candlelight creates “pulsating shadows” on the ceiling and walls before going out entirely. It is only because Jacobs changes his style here—as well as in other suspenseful moments—that readers know something unnerving is about to happen. Though Mr. White feels a “sense of relief at the failure of the talisman” and Mrs. White “[comes] silently and apathetically” to bed, Jacobs’s eerie writing style here hints at the fact that the talisman did work, which the couple soon discover to be true (or possibly true), as they hear someone banging loudly on their front door.
