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This chapter looks at Conrad's writing during the Great War as his response to the conflict. It then turns its attention to Conrad's lifelong obsession with Napoleon Bonaparte, exploring Conrad's representations of Napoleon throughout his career and culminating with his sustained effort to represent the Napoleonic era in his final works. The chapter places Conrad's interest in Napoleon in a French Romantic literary tradition, drawing comparisons between Conrad's work and that of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. The chapter argues that Conrad's view of Napoleon shifts in response to the First World War. The critical attitude to the French Emperor and his complex position in European and Polish culture seen in A Personal Record and ‘Autocracy and War’ is replaced with a more accepting view of Napoleonic greatness in The Rover and Suspense, one still treated, of course, with Conrad's characteristic scepticism.

This chapter explores Conrad's late works in relation to an earlier popular form of women's writing: the sensation novel of the 1860s and 1870s. By comparing Conrad's final, unfinished novel Suspense, and the sensation fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, particularly Lady Audley's Secret (1862), this chapter shows the extent to which Conrad was indebted to the methods of female sensationalism right up to the end of his life.

The second act of a novel, or the middle of a story of any length, is where plot momentum typically slows down and often the novice writer loses interest, becomes lost, and may even abandon the project. Numerous strategies used to fill the middle include juggling story plates, keeping conflict progressive, increasing suspense, introducing or concluding subplots, shifting viewpoints, building to a large central story event, and revealing hidden and back story. Above all, writers should remember that writing a novel is a process dependent on solid writing craft, and they should trust that process to carry them safely through.

Among the various possible targets of a science of aesthetics, the study of aesthetic experience throws up particular challenges, relating to the much debated question of the scientific tractability of consciousness in general. In this essay I seek to undermine scepticism about this possibility by first underlining how aesthetic experience depends on objective, quantifiable features of the world. Building on this foundation, I argue for the integration and triangulation of phenomenological, psychological and neurological evidence pertaining to aesthetic experience. The method of triangulation is exemplified through the exploration of anomalous suspense and empathy. Along the way, the essay warns against too heavy a reliance on neural evidence, and notes the importance of ‘subpersonal’ phenomena to a science of aesthetic experience.

When American newspapers reported the assassination of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942, Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang immediately seized upon the idea of writing a script for a hostage film. Only two months after the assassination, Brecht pasted into his diary a newspaper clipping of July 28 that announced the production of Never Surrender, a film with a Czechoslovakian locale. The film, to be produced by Arnold Pressburger and directed by Fritz Lang, would prominently feature the character of Heydrich the Hangmen. This chapter discusses Brecht's concept of “dialectic theater” and the principles of film noir as they were employed by Lang in his anti-Nazi film Hangmen Also Die. Brecht had developed the story together with Lang and believed that the film would be constructed in the manner of “epic theater,” but he did not realize that film noir, although dialectical in its story line and manipulation of reality, was based on suspense and surprise, which were anathema to dialectic theater.

This chapter discusses a handicap possessed by narrative images—that of being incapable of structuring the process of their reception as a temporal sequence. As opposed to storytelling by means of words, where the listener has no option but to allow the narrator to lead him or her through the plot and place them in a state of suspense, it is very difficult for an image to evoke such suspense in its beholders. In the late sixth century , however, Attic vase painters began developing strategies to compensate for this handicap. The problem that presents itself here concerns the relationship of images to time—although, as will be shown later in this chapter, the focus of the artists themselves was on the dramatic quality of the scene rather than the temporal aspect.

This chapter focuses on how Roman Polanski exploited violence that can engender a physical response in the audience. It analyses how the feel of violence and emotional response it provokes provide one of the key ingredients that make Polanki's Macbeth a horror film. It also shows how Polanski very cleverly used the traditions of the Gothic horror film to raise an expectation of something supernatural is about to happen. The chapter describes the sight of alternative truths on signs of the supernatural that punctuated Macbeth as the audience are led by Polanski's cinematic sleight-of-hand into thinking the film is about a numinous force controlling the affairs of the humans. It points out Polanski's clever play on concessions to beliefs in the creation of an atmosphere of dreadful suspense.

This chapter discusses how the Thing in human form is ultimately the greatest instigator of fear. Simply not knowing who is who, but knowing what happens when a Thing is hidden inside a man contributes to the film's suspenseful, horrific effectiveness. The chapter gives a brief history of plant-based monsters on the big screen and how the The Thing might be part-plant. It discusses how the word 'man' on the tagline of The Thing may actually refer to 'mankind' which suggests a rapid and complete subsuming of all human life on Earth should the organism be allowed to reach civilization. The chapter relates the characters and how they are constructed to the political atmosphere at the time the movie was released citing the Cold War and the rising fear of Communism in the United States. It also discusses the gender politics that play out in the film.

This chapter chronicles a shift in De Palma's films with Sisters (1973), which marked a departure of influences from Godard to Hitchcock, and a change of genres from political satire to the psychological suspense thriller. Having worked episodic, freewheeling narratives, handheld tracking shots, and semi-improvisational dialogue into his previous films, he decided to try his hand at a tighter script, a more structured plot (one that was carefully storyboarded) and experiments in editing. His low-budget comedies had been shot in long takes for efficiency's sake, which De Palma believed made them come across as “long and talky. It bothers me. I like films that use cuts to build suspense.” Cuts—related to both montage and murder—would certainly be central to Sisters.

This chapter marks another comeback for De Palma, this time in a return to a genre in which he feels most at home—the suspense thriller. In Raising Cain (1992), De Palma also goes home in another sense, because the film turns out to be very much about his own family, present and past. In Raising Cain, Carter (John Lithgow) is a child psychologist who is taking time off from his practice in order to remain at home and observe the growth of his daughter, Amy. De Palma himself had recently become a father for the first time. In addition, Michael Powell's film Peeping Tom is cited as another important influence in Raising Cain, as it depicts a powerful doctor-father whose influence proves destructive—a figure seen time and again in De Palma's other works.

This chapter explores how the law of correlation became inextricably entwined with Victorian Britain’s most distinctive and prevalent mode of publication: serialization. Owen’s celebrated reconstructions of prehistoric creatures from just fragmentary parts were published sequentially in serial form, and rendered considerably more remarkable and compelling by the suspense and anticipation involved. Owen, at the same time, was particularly enthralled by the dynamics of serial fiction and his literary reading practices shed important light on his Cuvierian paleontological procedures. This connection between correlation and serialization was one that was also recognized by many of the leading serial novelists of the period including William Makepeace Thackeray and Henry James, who adopted metaphors from paleontology to describe their own authorial practices.

Chapter 4 argues that techniques of illustrating early modern plays were designed to correspond to the effects those same plays were said to have had in performance. It studies the careful composition of custom-made woodcuts in a trio of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher quartos: The Maid’s Tragedy (1619), A King and No King (1619), and Philaster (1620). These plays cemented Beaumont and Fletcher’s widely acknowledged reputation for creating a pleasurable sense of not-knowing for playgoers through clever plotting. The title-page images present seemingly contradictory but equally viable forecasts of the plays’ endings and enhance readerly uncertainty through visual paradox. By contrast, the engravings made for the 1711 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Works depicted single, isolated moments. In step with the resurgence of neoclassical principles of dramatic decorum in the late seventeenth century, these engravings attempted to unify readers’ attention where the earlier woodcuts had sought to confuse it to pleasing effect.

A detailed analysis of BBC Radio's most famous horror radio show in the 1940s onwards. The most significant and long-running horror series in the history of British radio is Appointment with Fear (1943-55). This series was established following the phenomenal success of the CBS radio series Suspense in the US. The writer John Dickson Carr had played a central role in establishing Suspense and it was his idea to transfer the formula to the UK. Dickson Carr contributed numerous of his own Suspense scripts for Appointment with Fear, but the series also featured some excellent examples of adaptation including dramatizations of fiction by Edgar Allan Poe and others.

A prominent characteristic of Greek narrative is the critical literature that reflected on it. The scholia especially can fill out the brief treatment of the narrative genre in Aristotle's Poetics Chapter 23. Despite their generic differences, epic and tragedy present similar narrative issues. Starting from question ‘where to begin?’ ancient critics discussed issues such as plot structure or the selection of suitable topics (what to include and omit). A related concern was how to create and maintain suspense (or put negatively: how to avoid boredom and surfeit; scholia contain practical recommendations on how to reach this goal. identify similiarities and differences in how this is done in each genre in general and in specific texts/plays in particular.

This chapter fuses ideas from Roland Barthes and Thierry Groensteen to examine the use of moments of mundanity between turning points in a story. Its insights have implications for the construction of both suspense and humor, two emotions in which Hergé’s books certainly excelled.

This chapter examines how Hitchcock and his writers transformed his chosen sources, revealing two tendencies which are important in understanding how the director and the three writers went about adapting their sources into films. The first tendency has to do with Hitchcock's attitude toward adaptation and the viability and literary stature of the works he chose; the second with the genres he characteristically drew from. Throughout his career, Hitchcock focused on source material—plays, novels, and short stories—that used to be called “suspense fiction” but today is usually classified by bookstores and reviewers as “crime novels,” sources tailor-made for his thrillers. This chapter thus analyzes the three novels on Hitchcock's filmic triptych is based: Robert Bloch's Psycho (1959), Daphne du Maurier's The Birds (1952), and Winston Graham's Marnie (1961).

This chapter explores how Bolaño’s work affects the individual reader, and specifically how it generates and manages narrative tension. His capacity to maintain narrative tension while eluding predictability and eschewing familiar plot shapes prompts the reflection: what could be “mere” about storytelling in itself, as opposed to a particular set of narrative clichés? Bolaño’s fiction sometimes produces generic suspense. However, suspense arises from uncertainty about the kind of story that is being told. Bolaño’s narratives often seem to conceal what Ricardo Piglia calls a “secret story,” but they rarely expose it unequivocally at the end, as the classic short story does. In the long novels, the production of narrative tension is decentralized, depending more on glimpses into the lives of marginal characters than on the answer to an overarching question.