From what I’ve read, it seems to me that a lot of noir is just about vantage point. I’ve said this over and over again, but in most kinds of fiction — literary and crime — the protagonist is working to heal some rift in society, or, in microcosm, the family; in noir, however, society itself is the rift. You can’t heal it; it’s that force working against you that you can’t really understand. That’s the atmosphere at play.

Which, y’know, seems to me to be a pretty natural way to read the world. But maybe I should be writing horror.

This from Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror.

Atmosphere is created by anything that suggests an ominous state of affairs beyond what our senses perceive and our minds can fully comprehend. It is the signature motif that Schopenhauer made discernible in pessimism —that behind the scenes of life there is something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world.