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Crafting Plot in Horror

by Cassandra O’Sullivan Sachar


Horror needs to excite the reader and therefore must build to a satisfying ending. How that happens is very different from a novel and short story; a novel has the luxury of teasing out a big reveal over time, placating the reader with smaller titillations, while a short story demands swift movement to the climax and a faster closure. We haven’t traveled with these characters for 75,000+ words and therefore don’t need much wrap-up, but we need something, even if is simply the knowledge that, no, our main character is definitely not making it out of here alive.

Novels and Novellas

Slow-burning plots are common in horror, but the reader is more likely to stay absorbed if enough foreshadowing is sprinkled in to keep them curious. Stephen King’s “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone,” a novella within his collection If It Bleeds, opens with a motherless boy, Craig, getting a job reading to his elderly neighbor, a millionaire. The two develop something of a bond, a meaningful if not particularly warm one. When Mr. Harrigan dies, Craig places the dead man’s iPhone into his pocket; it’s an important gesture since Craig presented that to him as a gift after winning a nice lottery sum from a scratch-off ticket the old man gave him.

The reader can’t help but know that Craig will eventually call Mr. Harrigan, who will respond. We also know that consequences will ensue from Craig’s actions. Though the plot of this story is rather predictable, the reader keeps going to find out how, with the particular clues we’ve been given, it will all resolve. The plot is tidy and hole-free, leaving the reader entertained.

King’s plot in “Rat,” another novella within the same collection, bobs along swimmingly as the main character, Drew, hopes that he won’t run out of steam while writing this novel, the way he has with all previous attempts. Drew catches a nasty virus and starts struggling with his words, not that he has writer’s block but that he can’t make decisions. A talking rat appears to Drew and offers him a deal: It will help him get his novel finished, but, in return, “someone [he] care[s] for will die” (King 331).

In On Writing, King says, “Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and dullard’s first choice” (164). This seems dismissive, even though he goes on to explain that the “situation” and characters should come first, and I do agree. But plot in horror, especially, is crucial, as so many are riddled with errors in logic or are just plain anti-climactic; King doesn’t fall into these traps.

Even though the plot-line of “Rat” is recycled, King makes no claims of its being original; Drew even references “The Monkey’s Paw” as he and the rat discuss the offer. King builds tension partially by taking us through the banalities of Drew’s day before anything big happens: Drew fixes his humble meals and walks through the woods, but all of it sets the stage well for when the other shoe drops. It’s dramatic irony and the calm before the storm: the reader knows that something bad will happen even though the character doesn’t expect it. Rather than sit through throwaway, space-taking scenes, we are lulled into a false sense of security. The reader hungers for this, all the while anticipating what is next.

Driving questions will keep the reader turning pages as the stakes grow higher for our main character, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia has mastered these techniques in Mexican Gothic. When the main character, Noemí Taboada, receives a rambling letter from her cousin Catalina claiming that her husband is trying to poison her, amongst other wild statements, Noemí’s father sends her to Catalina’s husband’s country estate to sort things out. What is wrong with Catalina? And what about the patriarch, Howard Doyle, Catalina’s father-in-law, who suffers some sort of ailment, and on whom the rest of the family dote?

Like Noemí, the reader gets drawn into the mystery of the house. Soon, Noemí begins sleepwalking and having vivid, sexually-charged dreams about her cousin’s handsome yet domineering husband, Virgil. She also starts questioning reality. One of the great mysteries of the house involves how cut off it is from everyone and everything else. By the time Moreno-Garcia explains what is actually going on in a half-hallucination, half-reality scene, the reader is ready for it and accepting of it.

Along with driving questions, an author’s parsing out of information builds suspense. In Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, we learn early on that possession was suspected as the reason for the main character’s sister Marjorie’s behavior. Merry, the main character, drops hints that the situation ended in tragedy, mentioning that she had a glimpse of what her sister would have looked like as an adult, suggesting that she never reached this stage.

Furthermore, the stories Marjorie tells to Merry about their father killing their mother add tension, but we learn the family’s fate only near the end of the book. Was it the father’s religious zealotry that caused the family’s demise, and did Marjorie fake her possession, as she herself claimed, to draw attention to his dangerous behavior? The reader reads on to learn more.

When a work of prose is lengthy, the reader stays interested when there are mini-climaxes as well as a satisfying resolution. King’s The Shining is carefully constructed and well-paced, with events panning out in a slow but steady manner. We quickly learn that Jack has had troubles but wants to do better for his family, and we find out about Danny’s “shining,” his gift for knowing and even being able to “see” certain things.

With foreshadowing from the very beginning, from Danny’s imaginary-or-not friend Tony speaking of “redrum,” we know that the Overlook will destroy the family; we just don’t know how, and King has us on the edge of our seats as he carries us through scene after scene of near-disaster, allowing the characters to prevail until he must bring it all to a powerful climax.

King knows when the reader needs a front seat to the action, so we are right there as Jack chases Wendy and crashes the roque mallet into her flesh. Meanwhile, as Wendy and Jack fight each other, Dick Halloran battles against the elements — time, a snowstorm, and the Overlook pushing him away and/or attacking him with its henchmen, the topiary lions — to come answer Danny’s telepathic call for help.

But Halloran’s arrival is not merely a cheap deus ex machina to solve the family’s problems; King crafts the final scenes in such a way that Halloran, Wendy, Danny, and even Jack himself — the real Jack versus the thing that wears his face by the end of the novel — are heroes. As much as Jack has been lost to the Overlook and taken over by it, he comes to himself enough to offer final advice to his son: He begs him to run, and then he turns the mallet on himself.

To keep the reader intrigued, a writer must know when to use present action and when to move things along. Edgar Allan Poe’s greatest weakness in his singular novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is not that it lacked a plot, it was that the plot zoomed through certain parts while stalling in others. Distilling this novel to some key points, it has all the makings of a great work of horror: A potential shipwreck! Imprisonment within a hiding place on the ship! Mutiny! Cannibalism! Murderous, conniving islanders!

Sadly, though, these points of excitement were spread out and rarely described in sufficient detail, “told” versus “shown.” This novel included long, drawn-out descriptions of all the wrong aspects: how cargo should be stored on a ship and the nesting habits of penguins, for example. The juicy parts were skimmed over, such as when Pym and two others who were starving to death murdered and devoured their companion after he drew the short straw. Granted, the experience was traumatic for the narrator, so perhaps a sentence like, “I bit into his sweet, succulent flesh,” would be in poor taste, but why include that scene at all just to shortchange the reader on the details?

Pym is the kind of guy you don’t want to get stuck in a conversation with at a party; he rambles on and on, trying to tell you the whole story, when it would be far more compelling to discuss only certain aspects. There’s little present action; Pym narrates the events as if he witnessed rather than suffered through them. There was a scene which should have been very exciting, where Pym and his allies defeat members of the mutiny, but it’s told the way one might discuss one’s dinner plans, skipping over the action and moving on:

With this he beat out the brains of Greely as he was in the act of discharging a musket at me, and immediately afterward a roll of the brig throwing him in contact with Hicks, he seized him by the throat, and, by dint of sheer strength, strangled him instantaneously. Thus, in far less time than i have taken to tell it, we found ourselves masters of the brig (Poe 85).

What?! Even if it happened quickly, the reader needed some details here! Did the brains actually splatter out? Was there blood, at least? Did the eyes bulge out when he was strangled? I have so many questions about what should have been an exciting scene.

There was one grisly part described to my standards; in one of the many occasions where the men stranded on the ship thought they would be rescued, they saw what appeared to be a man gesturing to them from the other vessel, yet it was merely a corpse propped up and animated by a seagull “busily gorging itself with the horrible flesh, its bill and talons deep buried, and its white plumage spattered all over with blood” (Poe 99). This is what the reader wants: not only are we revulsed, we feel the survivors’ disappointment that they will not be rescued after all. I only kept turning the pages to get to the end of the book and put myself out of my misery.

Short Story Collections

With short horror fiction, the writer obviously has fewer words to create a complete story arc, but it’s necessary. Though Shirley Jackson shines in “The Haunting of Hill House,” some of her Dark Tales read like bad episodes of The Twilight Zone, where the world of our main character is amiss in some way, yet nothing actually happens to them, and the reader is left hanging.

In “Paranoia,” Mr. Beresford is on his way home to take his wife out to dinner for her birthday when he becomes aware of a man in a light-colored hat following him. He tries and tries to escape, only to have a strange encounter with a shopkeeper. When he finally reaches home, his wife takes a phone call and says, “Listen, he came here after all. I’ve got him,” suggesting that people really are out to get him, after all (Jackson 49). What will happen to him, though, the reader will never know, and we are left with little concern since he may not even be in any harm.

There’s more of the same in “The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith”: Is her new husband a murderer? There seem to be some allegations, but Nothing. Actually. Happens. These are tales, yes, but few are very dark.

Poe is a master of suspense and pacing in some of his short stories, but others follow the Pym model and elaborate the wrong parts. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” who could forget the narrator’s mounting panic when the police come to search his house? The narrator, defensive from the start, wants to show how he is calm, as opposed to mad Poe does a marvelous job of staying in the moment with the flood of the narrator’s thoughts as well as manic increase of em-dashes until he finally confesses to murder.

Another fine example is in “The Masque of the Red Death,” where the stranger follows selfish Prince Prospero from room to room with a “solemn and measured step” until it is finally revealed that there is nothing under the garments; they are “untenanted by any tangible form” (Poe 327). Prospero couldn’t escape the disease that spread through his kingdom, after all. However, in “The Imp of the Perverse,” the initial ramblings about perversity go on far too long for a short story, and we’re not given enough details about the exciting elements: his motive, his capture, or his current situation. Too much is a summary/reflection instead of in-the-moment action.

Similarly, Poe’s endings of several other stories were disappointing, especially when everything ended up okay, such as in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “Eleanora,” and “Man of the Crowd.” In each case, I was expecting a ghastlier and thus more intriguing ending. I wanted Eleanora’s ghost to wreak havoc on the narrator’s new marriage since he hadn’t kept his vow to her, or for a violent confrontation to take place with the old man the narrator had been following in “Man of the Crowd.”

I certainly wasn’t expecting the deus ex machina in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” which felt extremely unlikely, though the in-the-moment action of the advancing pendulum was frightening. I greatly preferred the endings of “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Berenice,” and “Hop-Frog,” where actions had consequences and no one came to save the day. In most short stories with happy endings, there hasn’t been enough terror or character development to justify that these should even be considered horror.

In terms of delivering an enjoyable final punch, M. R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary contrasts with many other short-story collections. Despite the heavy commentary of his rambling narrator, James evokes a feeling of fright mainly in the way he plots his stories rather than through characterization, which is not strong. His characters are often flat and could be interchangeable; many are academics or other serious men who eschew spiritual leanings and are therefore quite terrorized when they have undeniable proof of an evil force, one they did not seek.

James lays the breadcrumbs for the reader so that we have clues of what to expect even though we don’t know what the execution will be. For example, in “The Ash Tree,” a woman is hanged for witchcraft after being observed meddling with a tree, and her accuser is later found dead and blackened in his bedchamber which happens to be near the tree. The only signs of his ailment are small punctures in his skin, so they suspect poison. Forty years later, the dead man’s grandson sleeps in the room and dies as well.

As readers, we know that something is foul in the tree, and we also learn that the remains of Mrs. Mothersole, the accused witch, were not found in her coffin when the graveyard was moved. It’s only at the end of the story when the townspeople see a cat looking inside the tree — and then falling into it and screaming — that they investigate for themselves. They set the tree on fire, and, after several enormous spiders crawl out, they discover the decades-old remains of a woman curled up in the hollow. Within the story, James has interconnected the elements of the plot in such a way that readers anticipate Mrs. Mothersole exacting her revenge from beyond the grave, but he only delivers the final blow — the enormous pet spiders who have been sucking her accuser and his kin dry — on the last page.

This tight plotting and fast ending work well in short horror fiction. There’s no need to tie up all the loose ends in the way of some novels that require more closure. The climax of each story arrives, in some cases, only a paragraph or so before the close. Part of what makes James’s stories effective is the reveal at the end rather than growth or change in the characters. The ends of the stories were generally swiftly paced and gratifying.

Horror writers who negate the importance of plot will only disappoint their readers. Keeping the plot train chugging along is what holds the work together for many readers.

Works Cited

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