More Twisted

know. New York really is a nice place to visit.”

A FTERWORD TO “A FRAID ”

    I’d like to put on my professor’s tweed jacket for a moment and welcome you to Fear 101, also known as “How to scare the socks off your readers in a few easy lessons.” I’m going to offer some brief comments on how I incorporate fear into my writing.
    I’m a suspense writer, not a philosopher or a psychiatrist. I’m concerned with fear only as it relates to storytelling. I’ve written “Afraid” to illustrate five essential fears that I regularly work into my writing. I’ll also share several rules that enhance the effects of those fears in my audience.
    The first of the five is our fear of the unknown. Throughout the story “Afraid” Marissa never knows exactly what’s going to happen (and neither do we readers). At the beginning Antonio says, “It’s a surprise,” and I sustain the uncertainty established by that sentence for as long as I can. Marissa didn’t know where they were going, what the old woman meant, who Lucia really was, what Antonio was doing at the house in Florence, what was in the wine cellar . . . . In fact, she realizes—too late—that she didn’t really know Antonio at all.
    Second is the fear we experience when others are incontrol of our lives—that is, we fear being vulnerable. Marissa is a shrewd businesswoman, intelligent and strong, and yet I’ve taken away all her resources. In “Afraid” Antonio is the driver and Marissa is solely a passenger, both literally and figuratively. At the end of the story, she’s nearly naked, in a remote country home, without a cell phone or weapon, trapped in a sealed cell, at the complete mercy of a madman with a knife, and nobody even knows where she is. Can you be any more vulnerable than that?
    The third fear is others’ lacking control of themselves. When people play by society’s rules, we are less afraid of them. When they don’t, we are more. Psychopaths like Antonio have no control over their behavior so we can’t reason with them, and they’re not governed by laws and ethics. The fear is greatest when the lack of control is within someone we’re close to. A random murderer or other criminal is bad enough but when people we know and are intimate with start acting strange and in threatening ways, we are particularly terrified. That’s why I made my two characters lovers.
    The fourth fear I use in my writing is our own lack of self-control. I mention the inexplicable drive to throw ourselves off a bridge or cliff—an urge that we’ve all experienced in one form or another. Marissa fears giving in to this specific impulse but in my story I use the impulse as a metaphor for a broader fear: of her loss of self-control with regard to Antonio. I also ply Marissa with drugs to further weaken her self-restraint.
    The fifth fear is actually a broad category, which I call the icons of terror. These are the images (often clichés) that make us afraid either because they’re imprinted intoour brains or because we have learned to fear them. Some of the icons I used in this story are:
    • The harbinger of evil (in Florence, the old woman with the jaundiced eyes, and the twin boys).
    • The religious motifs and violent imagery in the tapestry Marissa was looking at when they met.
    • The poison ring that Antonio bought for Marissa.
    • The echos of evil associated with a particular locale (the Monster of Florence—a real serial killer, by the way—and the fictional torture/killings on the highway between Florence and Siena).
    • The dead boy.
    • Dolls. (Sorry, Madame Alexander, but they can be just plain creepy.)
    • The isolated, gothic setting of the vacation house.
    • The windowless cell.
    • Blood.
    • Various phobias (Marissa’s claustrophobia, for instance).
    • Darkness.
    • The occult (the flowers and cross left by the stream).
    These are just a few of the hundreds of icons of terror that can be used to jangle readers’ nerves.
    Finally I wish to mention two more rules I keep in mind when creating fear.
    One, I enhance the experience of horror by making sure that my characters (and therefore my readers) stand to lose something important if the threatened calamity comes to pass. This means the people in my stories—thegood characters and the bad—must be fleshed out and must themselves care about losing their lives or about suffering some loss. Marissa wouldn’t be afraid if she didn’t care about