Writing Atmosphere: Creating Dread Without Gore
Give a reader a hallway with one door slightly ajar and a light on behind it, and you can stop writing for a moment, because they have already started without you. By the time I get around to describing what is in the room, they have furnished it with something worse than I could manage, drawn from their own private catalogue of unease. That arrangement sits at the centre of writing dread, and it explains why I think of gore as an expensive way to end the conversation early.
I have nothing against a good bloodbath. My cosy mysteries keep their violence offstage by long tradition, and the darker thrillers I am drifting towards give me more room to be explicit if I want it. In both strands, though, the scenes I remember best as a reader involve very little that is graphic. They involve waiting.
Suspense Is a Question of Who Knows What
Hitchcock gave Truffaut the best explanation I know. Put a bomb under a table where two people are having an ordinary chat, let it explode, and the audience gets a few seconds of surprise. Show the audience the bomb first, with a clock on the wall, and the same dull conversation turns into fifteen minutes of suspense.
The page version of this is generous to a writer on a budget. Let a character chat with a neighbour whom the reader has just watched going through the character's post, and the conversation becomes unbearable without a drop of blood. All that was needed was for the reader to know slightly more than the person in the scene, and for me to resist the urge to let anyone find out yet.
The Door That Stays Shut
Shirley Jackson never shows a ghost in The Haunting of Hill House. What the reader gets instead is the house behaving oddly, and Eleanor Vance coming gradually apart inside it, which has been enough to keep the book frightening since 1959. I suspect that a writer who describes the monster has to guess what the reader fears, and will often guess wrong. A writer who withholds it hands the job over to the reader, who knows their own fears exactly and supplies a personalised version at no cost to the author.
Stephen King makes a related point in Danse Macabre, where he ranks terror above revulsion and admits to reaching for the gross-out only when he cannot manage to frighten anybody. I find that admission oddly reassuring. If the man who wrote The Shining treats the bucket of blood as a fallback, the rest of us can feel entitled to leave it on the shelf.
Ordinary Places, Slightly Wrong
Atmosphere often arrives through vocabulary before anything has happened. A car that waits outside a house is a different car from one that is parked there, though the paintwork is identical. A shutter closed at noon on a street where every other shutter is open says more about danger than a paragraph of adjectives could. Verbs do most of this work, and I now go through drafts looking for neutral ones that could be swapped for something faintly watchful.
Sunshine makes a good accomplice. A scene in full Costa Blanca light gives a reader no warning that they ought to be afraid. In The Forgotten Corpse a retired engineer is followed and threatened in the kind of light you find on holiday brochures, and I chose that on purpose. A sinister street at midnight asks the reader to put their guard up, whereas a sunlit terrace lets the fear in unannounced.
Giving the Dread Time
To borrow Hitchcock's arithmetic, dread needs minutes, and a writer who rushes to the incident has spent the whole budget in seconds. I find domestic tasks useful for stretching the clock. A character who makes tea while a car idles outside has a built-in timer, because a kettle takes however long it takes, and the reader can feel every moment of it. Sentences can help too. A long, unhurried one carrying plenty of ordinary detail lulls the reader into relaxing, and a short remark about the garden gate standing open then lands harder for having had somewhere to land.
Chapter breaks are the other tool. Ending a scene as the door begins to open, and picking it up the next morning with the breakfast things out, makes the reader do their own filling in, usually at the point where they had meant to switch the lamp off.
Letting the Aftermath Speak
When something terrible has already happened, I try to describe the room around it. A lamp still burning at breakfast time, or a coat hung neatly on a hook nobody uses, tells the reader that someone has been very careful, and careful people are alarming. The same applies to characters, who frighten me most when they react in small ways: someone who has quietly stopped using the stairs, or a woman who checks the back door, sits down, and then gets up to check it again.
Anatomy has a short shelf life as a source of dread. By the second body, the reader has adjusted, whereas an unexplained detail keeps working on them long after the page has been turned.
One Exercise
If you would like to try this, take a scene where you would usually show the violence and write it again from the far side of a closed door, using only what the nearest character can hear. Then go through the result looking for the most ordinary object in the room and change one verb attached to it. A mug that sits becomes a mug that has been left, and the reader will wonder by whom.
Both drafts will probably teach you something, and the second will probably be shorter, which editors tend to find forgiving.
I shall now read all of this back with the hallway light on.