: Re: How to creep the reader out with what seems like a normal person? The person in question, though this is yet unknown, is not actually a person. Instead, they are some form of eldritch being
Demonstration
All humɑn beings ɑre born free ɑnd equɑl in dignity ɑnd rights. They ɑre endowed with reɑson ɑnd conscience ɑnd should ɑct towɑrds one ɑnother in ɑ spirit of brotherhood. — Universɑl Declɑrɑtion of Humɑn Rights.
Ideally that text would have invoked a subtle feeling of oddness since:
every normal (double-storey) a has been replaced by a single-storey É‘. I here abused a Unicode character intended for phonetics to achieve this effect. Therefore, the effect may have been spoiled if the font in which this text was rendered for you sucks at supporting special characters (or you are using a screen reader or other non-standard ways to consume that text). Otherwise, if you directly noticed what was odd, you are very observant in this respect.
Actual Answer
If you want to invoke a feeling of oddness directly in the reader, you can use slight typographic differences for every word said by your eldritch being (or if it does not speak, when describing its actions).
Since parsing text happens mostly automatically for most of us and we are also very good at autocorrecting if something is slightly off, the reader may not consciously notice such changes, but only be slightly unsettled by them subconsciously.
Possible changes are:
Switching between common variants of a letter such as single-storey and double-storey a and g. Some modern typefaces offer variants of several other letters as well, some of which can be very subtle, such as the the letter g missing its ear.
Switch between a matching pair of serif and sans-serif typefaces. There are only few pairs of typefaces that are so close that this may works.
Similar to the above, mirror or or rotate every instance of such letters as A, H, M, S, O, V, W, X, Z, o, s, v, w, x, z. Whether this actually makes a difference and is sufficiently subtle depends on the typeface. For example, my browser renders this in a typeface where I can only spot (very subtle) differences for H, S, and s.
Slightly change the kerning, i.e., the spacing of letters. (Credits to Leftroundabout.)
The last two are the most difficult to pull off, but have the advantage of not only being a different style choice but being actually subtly imbalanced.
The downsides of this approach are:
Accessibility and portability are considerably diminished or require effort.
It does not have the same effect on every reader: A typographically predisposed reader may instantly notice what is going on, while others may not notice it at all. But then this applies to almost every literary technique. To some extent, you can compensate for this with slowly driving up the intensity, so that it will go from unnoticed to subconscious to explicit for every reader, just at different points in your story.
Unless you are using something like TeX, the act of writing this may be tedious.
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