Did I scare you?
I’m going to go
out on a limb and say no. No, I did not scare you.
Now, picture this.
You’re in a dark room, covered in spindly cobwebs. There’s a dark stain on the
left side of the floor. There’s a steady drip,
drip, drip of leaky pipes, and suddenly, you hear a woman scream.
Did I scare you
now?
I would imagine
this attempt was better than my first, but once again, I’m going to go out on a
limb and say that my description of a spooky dungeon probably will not give you
nightmares tonight.
Okay, let me try
one more time:
Now did I scare you?
Finally!
Okay, okay, this
was a cheap shot. And we can quibble about the definition of “scare.” I mean,
this startled you. Maybe it made your
heart speed up, or your breath catch in your lungs. Maybe you even let out a
little scream at the very end. Or maybe you’re not someone who flinches easily,
and you’re reading this paragraph wondering when I’m going to make my point.
Movies can rely on
things like startle-scares, eerie lighting, and ghostly music to create horror,
but these techniques simply don’t work in books. I can say that you’re watching
a dimly lit room, staring at a rocking chair, and suddenly the chair starts to
move all on its own, but that isn’t nearly as frightening as the video of it.
And no matter how good of a sentence-writer I am, I am never going to be able
to startle you when the ghost jumps out.
So, if I cannot
rely on startle-scares, eerie lighting, and ghostly music to frighten my
readers, how do I do it? What makes a book scary?
There
are dozens of techniques for making a story scary, and what is scary to one
person may not be scary to another. I was bored silly by Pet Sematary, but someone with arachnophobia might need a
nightlight after reading Charlotte’s Web.
I recently read Slasher Girls &
Monster Boys, which is an anthology of short stories by fourteen different
young adult writers. And while books can’t show you a haunting image of a
dungeon to scare you, books create an imagery all their own. By describing
real-world people with disturbing or even magical descriptions, the reader can
become unsettled in a way that is entirely unique to books.
In
Nova Ren Suma’s The Birds of Azalea
Street we learn the story of a group of young girls who feels threatened by
a creepy neighbor, Leonard. Leonard is a loner who likes to shoot birds and
take photographs of teenage girls, but no one seems to realize it except Tasha
and her friends. This all changes when one night a strange girl comes home with
Leonard.
There
is nothing specifically odd about this visitor (except for the fact that she is
with Leonard), but we sense something strange about her from the beginning. Even
though Suma cannot accompany the girl’s first appearance with trembling violins
and a gray lighting filter, she can
make us feel uncomfortable using her language.
First of all, the girl
is the literary equivalent of Wilson from Home Improvement in that we never see
her face. She begins as nothing more than a shadow:
That night we noted the
questionable shadow in his passenger seat. It was taller than usual. It had a
distinctly human-sized head.
(And a human-esque shadow at that.)
Then, she gets a body, but we don’t
see her face:
She wore a dark hood, and
around it was a haze of fur, like she’d just landed in our subdivision from the
North Pole and didn’t realize that, down here, it was spring.
And finally, we see her legs:
Even with all that, I could
see her legs. Her legs were in black stockings, the kind with seams. At the end
of her legs were little pointed blades that took to the pavement like ice
picks.
As time progresses we get a more
solid view of Leonard’s friend:
The fur
trim on her coat rippled in the wind like a layer of feathers.
His lady friend had dark,
deep-purple painted nails, and they were long and curling, almost like claws
She cocked her head in the
frame of the window.
In every description, the girl is
described as though she’s a bird. Her fingernails are claws, her coat is
feathers, her movements are jerky. When she arrives somewhere she “lands”, and
the words “North Pole” and “spring” evoke images of birds flying south for the
winter. And even though the girl’s legs are described only as legs, they are
long and thin and separated from her coat-body in a way that makes us feel like
they are birds’ legs, even though they are not described as such.
Finally, when the
girl gets her revenge on Leonard, we are told explicitly that the girl was a
bird all along:
…and her legs, her beautiful
legs, shrunk in and shifted. Her coat became a part of her body, or maybe it
always was. Her arms—what was left of them—opened wide. A dark streak took off
from the back steps and the sky caught it and it was a bird, it was always a
bird, she was, and the bird soared up into the clouds…
Suma pulls off
this technique of juxtaposition with incredible aplomb. She has a mastery of
language that is evident not only in the fact that she utilizes this technique,
but also in her specific word choices. For example, let’s take a look at this
quote:
She wore a dark hood, and
around it was a haze of fur, like she’d just landed in our subdivision from the
North Pole and didn’t realize that, down here, it was spring.
I am particularly
fond of this sentence, because its word choice is not particularly avian. For
example, Suma uses the word “fur” not “feathers”, and there are not many bird
species that are known for living in the North Pole. But, if we rewrite this
passage using different details, we notice something interesting:
She wore a dark hood, and
around it was a halo of fur, like she’d just arrived from Alaska and didn’t get
the memo that over here it was t-shirt season.
Even though this
sentence is nearly identical to the first one, it carries an entirely different
tone. Suma uses the word “landed”, which implies that the girl herself was the
one doing the landing, whereas when I use the word “arrived”, implying someone
coming in on an airplane. Swapping out “haze” for “halo” suddenly makes the
girl seem angelic, which clashes with Suma’s preexisting avian picture.
Changing “North Pole” for “Alaska” seems like it might be trivial, since both
are places known for being cold, but by using the word “North” right next to
the word “spring” we create an image of birds flying south for the winter. And
by referencing t-shirts, suddenly my imagery becomes almost teeny-bopper. So
even though my rewrite carries the exact same meaning as Suma’s original, I
have stripped the magic of the passage.
The Birds of Azalea Street occupies a
space between reality and magic that Nova Ren Suma has made her home. There are
no ghosts or vampires, and the only monster is a creepy neighbor. There is no
explicit magic—“bird” is another word for “woman” after all—and this story
isn’t the sort that is going to give me nightmares. And yet throughout it all
the reader has a vague feeling of discomfort. The feeling of never quite
knowing what is real and what is not, what is girl and what is bird, leaves the
reader feeling unsettled. It provides creepy imagery without attempting to rely
on movie tropes.
In Leigh Bardugo’s
Verse Chorus Verse the reader learns
the story of Jaycee, a young pop star who goes into rehab. Like Suma, Bardugo
uses metaphor and descriptive language to evoke a feeling surrounding a
character. But where The Birds of Azalea
Street uses imagery to make us wonder what is real and what is magic, Verse Chorus Verse uses imagery to make
us wonder who can truly be trusted.
In the first
section of the story, we’re introduced to Louise. We meet her through the eyes
of Kara, Jaycee’s judgmental stage mom, and we’re immediately drawn to her,
simply because we don’t like Kara and Kara doesn’t like Louise. And when we
first meet Louise in person, we want to like her. She’s the voice of reason in
Jaycee’s chaotic pop star lifestyle. Jaycee claims she doesn’t drink, Louise
calls her out on it. Jaycee says she doesn’t want to go to group therapy,
Louise makes her go. So when we start to see details of Louise’s appearance
that don’t quite line up with our perception of her, we start to get
uncomfortable:
Louise
smiled. She had yellowing teeth, smoker’s teeth.
This bit of
imagery sticks out because “yellowing teeth” is not only a disturbing image in
and of itself, but it contrasts so strongly with our existing image of Louise as
a good nurse and the rehab facility as a pure, pristine place of assistance. Then,
as we progress, the disturbing imagery grows:
Louise took a slim band of rubber from a drawer and
tied it tightly in place above her elbow. Jaycee’s hand started to throb. She
couldn’t stop looking at the thin line of grime embedded beneath each of
Louise’s nails.
This quote evokes
and even more visceral description. The reader can almost feel their arm
throbbing, and they shiver slightly as they imagine someone touching them with
dirty fingernails. And as Louise begins to take Jaycee’s blood, the reader is flooded
with grotesque details:
Up close, her teeth looked
more brown than yellow. They were thick, with dirty little ridges. Not like teeth, Jaycee thought. Like tusks.
Louise took hold of Jaycee’s
arm and Jaycee saw that the nurse had coarse, dark hairs on the backs of her
wrists.
The smell coming off of her
was sweat and the ashy vegetable stink of dumpsters in a hotel alley.
Moments ago her laugh had
seemed warm and friendly; now it had an ugly, knowing sound to it.
And finally, as the nurse starts to
probe further and further into Jaycee’s life, the disturbing descriptions reach
a climax:
The nurse’s eyes looked
bloodshot, her nostrils curiously wide and dark. Flecks of foam had formed in
the corners of her mouth. Jaycee tried to stand, but her knees buckled. Dimly
she was aware that there was a needle still in her arm. The room tipped and she
hit the white floor with a loud crack. She saw the soles of Louise’s purple
Crocs. They were caked with something black and foul.
Looking at
Bardugo’s passages, there is an overarching theme of color. In the beginning of
this passage we are in a hospital room: sterile, pristine, white. Then, slowly,
color starts leaking in. Louise’s teeth are yellow. No, not yellow, brown. The
hairs on the backs of her hands are dark, and the red blood is so dark it’s
almost black. Let’s take a look now at the climax of the passage:
The nurse’s eyes looked
bloodshot, her nostrils curiously wide and dark. Flecks of foam had formed in
the corners of her mouth. Jaycee tried to stand, but her knees buckled. Dimly
she was aware that there was a needle still in her arm. The room tipped and she
hit the white floor with a loud crack. She saw the soles of Louise’s purple
Crocs. They were caked with something black and foul.
While the earlier
passages have a splash of color here and there, this paragraph sloshes them all
together at once. We have bloodshot eyes, and dark nostrils. When Jaycee falls
she hits the white floor, and Louise’s Crocs are purple, but they’re covered
with something black. This scene, when taken as a whole, makes me think of a
Pollock painting; it’s a white background with splatters of color. But the last
paragraph makes me think of someone smearing all the colors together to cause
chaos. Now, let’s see what happens if I rewrite this passage without using
color words.
The nurse’s eyes were watery,
and her nostrils so wide that Jaycee could make out every hair. Flecks of foam
had formed in the corners of her mouth, and when Jaycee tried to stand, her
knees buckled. Dimly she was aware that there was a needle still in her arm. The
room tipped and she hit the linoleum floor with a loud crack. She saw the soles
of Louise’s Crocs. They were caked with a smelly muck.
Watery eyes can be
eerie in their own way, but bloodshot evokes images of spidery, almost
Pollock-esque veins. And even though nose hair is gross, Jaycee’s ability to see
them directly contradicts the previous images of darkness. Linoleum floor
implies cheapness, not sterility, and removing the word “purple” as a
descriptor of Louise’s Crocs removes the shock of bright color against this
black-and-white background. And even though smelly muck is unpleasant, it
doesn’t evoke darkness and grime the same way that “black and foul” does. Even
though this rewritten passage has the same sentiment as the original one,
removing the colors disrupts the feeling of a crescendo of chaos coming to
surround Jaycee. Bardugo’s precision of language in this scene is expertly done
and creates a terrifying tone that is perfect for horror.
When it comes to
scaring your readers, there is no one formula that works for everyone, and what
works in one story may very well fail in another. But we want to take advantage
of the medium we’ve chosen to tell our story. So even though a literal
description of a haunted dungeon isn’t as scary as an image of it, the opposite
can hold true as well. A picture of dirty crocs doesn’t scare us:
nor a picture of yellow teeth:
but when we use these details as
descriptors, our stories go from flat to frightening.
