Writing Between Blood and Bone

Mastering Silence and Suspense in Fiction

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Photo by Andy Li on Unsplash

For My Paid Subscribers

If you’re subscribed to the paid tier, I’ve included:

• Writing techniques I use to build dread without revealing too much.

• Recommended reads by authors who excel at subtle, layered suspense.

• Writing prompts you can use to infuse quiet horror and suspense into your own fiction.

This space, after all, is also about process. I want you to write stories that leave readers breathless.

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What Even Is Horror?

It’s Fall, and you know what that means: it’s horror season.

My daughter has already picked out her Halloween outfit (it’s her favorite holiday). Every year, she plans to be a witch, but this year, she wants to be the Devil. Did I mention she’s five?

I think horror as a genre has a reputation problem. Most people hear that word and immediately recoil. They can only think of slasher flicks, cheap jump scares, and Halloween masks. And Hollywood has done a wonderful job at painting these images for us through an abundance of Halloween movies, with a terrified Jamie Lee Curtis fleeing her insane brother Michael, who refuses to die in every episode.

There are endless movies and books in the genre, and they all entail terrifying encounters with serial killers or supernatural entities out for the same thing: slashing the protagonist and dicing them into tiny pieces.

Here’s something you may not know about me. I don’t write a lot of short stories (in fact, I have more essays written or poems, even, than short stories – but my very first short story was actually horror). It was a story taking place in Haiti, about a supernatural phenomenon involving a game of dominoes. I should probably bring this story back from the dead, as it was published in a newsletter with a tiny circulation that was eventually discontinued.

Nowadays, if you’ve read my work, you already know that I’m not interested in chasing the scream. This level of slasher horror does not interest me. I do relish, however, in a little bit of a shiver.

Horror, at its core, is about fear. It’s about dread. About knowing something is wrong and not being able to name it yet, or even do something about it. I know most of us immediately think of the master, Stephen King, when we think of horror, and with good reason. The Shining is an incredible work – reading it is a completely different experience on the page than it is on the screen. But: stories by Shirley Jackson, or Joyce Carol Oates, or Patricia Highsmith create such unease in your body as you read them that you want to crawl out of yourself. Think of the first time you read The Lottery, and think about how this story lingered in your mind because of the shock and discomfort it caused. As a writer, this kind of discomfort is unsettling, yes, but it makes me want to know: HOW DID THEY DO THAT?

So, let’s pause and define horror.