Suspense Short Stories

Suspense is defined as the author withholding information or when the unexpected happens, leaving you guessing and wanting more. In the story “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell, he has inserted much suspense in this short (long) story, for the reason that it makes the reader want to know more and having to mindset of excitement or surprise. Another reason he added many suspense is so that it wouldn’t be so blunt, it wouldn’t just tell us what happened it would give us details and how he got or how he did that and more.

Have you ever read a book that continued to keep you interested in what's going to happen next? You get lost in the book trying to figure out what's going to happen before reading on. This happens often in novels that have a lot of suspense like Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” or Tobias Wolff’s “Hunters In The Snow.” The fact that they both have suspense is often the only similarity people can think of. There are many similarities and differences in them both that get ignored such as similarities and differences in the plot, theme, and characters.

In Notes From a Midnight Driver there was a huge plot twist. At the end of Sols song the judge said to him “Dad [and] Sol had the strangest expression on his face. ‘Judy.” Sol said. (225 Notes From a Midnight Driver ) This event was a surprise for the reader, Alex, and even Sol. The plot twist connected many pieces and changed the whole novel. In Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie the technique of cliffhangers was used. The chapter ‘Fear,Gum, and Candy’ ended with “ I figured out how to save some money and Annette fell down the stairs.”( 185 Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie) After this chapter it left the reader wondering what that meant and wanting to know more. Both techniques Jordan Sonnenblick used kept the reader

More clues are revealed to everyone over the book for example, Dr Lanyon’s letter tells people some shocking facts about Dr Jekyll and that is when people start to suspect things. At the end of the book, Dr Jekyll retells the whole story in a narrative style which explains everything about Jekyll and Hyde and that Jekyll would kill himself after he wrote the letter. That is when the book ends. This shows how suspense is built up.

Suspense is also an important part of a story. If there is no suspense in the story, the reader wont want to keep reading your story, they’ll say it’s boring. Suspense keeps this from happening. You make the story exciting so the reader can continue reading. In the story the suspense is that Rainsford is trapped on an island with nowhere out and Zaroff is coming to get him! The author needs to have suspense to keep readers

harvey used to build his suspense in his story was reversal. Reversal is when the character is faced with a change of situations.Where it can go from good to bad and vice versa. Now after reading through the whole story, it can easily be said that the whole story is the reversal. The character starts its morning off as a normal day nothing wrong, mostly everything is calm. As the story continues you start to sense something goes wrong, “From there onward I have only the vaguest recollection of where I went”(Source 2). Automatically the character is face with a dilemma, he went out not really knowing where he would go and this makes one question what the character was thinking and whether something was wrong with him. Another example would be the ending which ties up the whole suspense of this story. “The air seemed charged with thunder. I am writing this at a shaky table before the open window. The leg is cracked, and Atkinson, who seems a handy man with his tools, is going to mend it as soon as he has finished putting an edge on his chisel. It is after eleven now. I shall be gone in less than an hour. But the heat is stifling. It is enough to send a man mad”(Source 2). The very ending is where the suspense is at a high point because it ends without many questions being answer. Yet it also brings in new questions to the reader’s minds. Leaving the reader to only question and figure out what will happen next, this is the suspense Mr. harvey had

example, the author leaves the end of the story open to interpretation, which forces the reader to

Suspense is when the author makes the reader, or audience excited or scared for what might happen in the story, or even what will happen to the character next in the story. Suspense might even be something you see or hear that will make you have questions about what will happen next. If there is a cliffhanger at the end of a story, it will leave you with questions wondering what will happen to the characters next. The mood, tone, setting, emotions of character, sound and sight might affect how the story is suspenseful. We all enjoy watching suspenseful movies and reading stories, because they are exciting. It leaves us with questions that the author won't have the answers to in the end, so the author gives us as the audience, the chance to make up their own ending to the story or movie. The author will give you clues throughout the story, to help you fill in questions you might have in the end. This makes it more exciting for the reader and the audience because we get to engage with the characters in the book or movie. The tv series, Stranger Things, is about 4 kids who have to fight off monsters in a little town in Indiana. This TV show is a great example of suspense, and it shows it effectively because, of Foreshadowing, Dilemma, and Dramatic Irony presented throughout the show. With just using those four examples, Stranger Things is a great example of suspense.

The second way, the author creates suspense is by foreshadow. Foreshadow makes the story suspenseful by how the characters say something like are they going to die or are they going to live. When you ask that kind of question you are kind of telling yourself that you may not come back to the present.Does this safari guarantee I come back alive?” “We guarantee nothing,” said the official, “except the dinosaurs.”Once they got there he kind of thought that i may die i may get shot.In conclusion, the reader knows that it is suspenseful in the story when at the beginning he said will i come back alive or will i die and in the end he stepped of the trail as soon as they got back things were different ad so h will be shot in the

In the sources the authors talk about suspense in stories they write. The suspense in the story could be how the author doesn’t give full detail or description on one or more characters. In the source “How do horror writers create suspense” by Percy D’Aco it shows that many horror stories often revolve around mayhem and the stuff in nightmares, and that great horror story often reflects a person’s biggest fear. Often authors like to keep the readers in suspense to scare them or make them want to keep reading and see how the story ends.

The ends of the story are very different from each other in quite a few ways. Let just say there is a good ending in one story and a bad ending in another. Lets go deeper

For example, when Angela Wexler a perfect child who would not do anything harmful bombed her own face only to get caught by her mother, who cares so much about her. In the story it states that “ Angela glanced at her watch and reached for the tall, thin carton wrapped in gold foil.”this quote shows us that Angela knows when and where (it was in the parcel) the bomb in the Wexlers apartment will explode (Raskin 112). The reason why this part of the story shows suspense is because we don’t know the intentions of Angela, until the clues we find later in the story shows us Angela’s actual intention was to get caught by her mother and be an actual normal being. Another example of suspense is the cliffhangers. The reason why cliffhangers are suspenseful because they leave the reader dangling with questions, and want to read on to know more. A good example of a cliffhanger is after Turtle finds the answer to the game, we think Angela and Dr Deere are getting married, but it is actually Crow and Otis Amber’s wedding, which is very awkward moreover, we never knew what happened between them, like you don’t know what is happening when you are absent (Raskin 207). All of these are good examples of suspense which a good mystery novel

I utilized a lot of different writing elements in the suspense/scary story, the most obviously used element was foreshadowing. The phrase “It is how she would have wanted it” was repeated multiple times throughout the story, first starting as a seemingly insignificant piece of dialogue but ending as the last line of the story. There was also a lot of conflict, for example when George criticised James about the cleanliness of his house, or when James killed George. The way that James has been “feeding” his dead cat can be seen as a sort of unpleasant comical irony in that he is dumping food on his dead cat twice a day. I used mood throughout the entire story and tone specifically in the dialogue. By describing the setting “George took a deep first step into the basement. The staircase was worn with unstable boards and cracked

This is all to have them anticipate the ending and the solving of the mystery, to keep them gripped. Even the very title of the novel is unclear and does well to conjure up ideas inside the readers mind. It is only until the whole story is took in and the ending is unveiled that the reader can fully appreciate and understand

Yet readers who stop to ask themselves exactly why they enjoyed the novel, what makes it work, will find themselves looking at a very complex book that means much