How do you keep dread alive when nothing scary is happening yet?

[PudgeThePug]

Hey all, I'm working on a dark fantasy horror novel, and I've hit a structural problem I'm curious how others handle.

My opening chapters are deliberately quiet. My main character is tracking someone through a rainy river town: talking to a crooked toll clerk, reading ledgers, buying drinks for a carter who knows more than he's saying. The real horror doesn't show up for a while, and I don't want to rush it. But I also don't want readers getting comfortable.

So far my approach has been small wrong details. The weird cargo in a ledger entry that doesn't add up. A carter telling a story about his dog that sat down in the road and wouldn't go any further. Nothing supernatural on the page yet, just little cracks in the normal world.

I'm curious how the rest of you approach it:

1) What do you use to build tension in slower chapters?

2) Is there a point where hints start to feel like teasing instead of tension?

3) Any books that do this really well? I'd love some reading recommendations.

Looking forward to hearing how other people tackle this.

 

[Penpilot]

Remember the story is filtered through the lens of the main character(s). What they notice and what they feel will influence how the reader will feel. So if the main character notices incongruities in the world/setting, how they feel and react will be passed along to the reader. Now this doesn't mean the reader will 100% ape how the main character feels. The main character can notice something, dismiss it as nothing, but the reader may feel uneasy about it because the reader knows this is a horror story and will read more into it.

For me, tension is about unanswered questions. As the story progresses, you build up a collection of these questions, big and small. BUT it starts to feel like a tease when you don't pay any of them off. Pay off some of the questions and have them lead into new bigger questions, so the reader feels like they're making progress, and you should be good.

Maybe look into Stephen King. He has stories set in small towns with a growing mystery. I haven't read the book, but I've seen the movies and TV shows base on IT, and to me it sounds like that might be what you're looking for.

 

[ThinkerX]

I had to deal with this situation in 'Empire: Country,' the first book of my 'Empire' series.

I took two approaches:

First, I started the story with the massacre of a handful of peasants, which was attributed to one of the dangerous beasts known to wander into the area. The solution for the characters was a hunting expedition, but things didn't quite add up.

Second, I added backbiting and intrigue among the local aristocrats: an agreement that nobody was happy with, an arrogant noble with questionable dealings, and so on.

All this built up tension without revealing what was really going on.

 

[skip.knox]

1) What do you use to build tension in slower chapters?
2) Is there a point where hints start to feel like teasing instead of tension?
3) Any books that do this really well? I'd love some reading recommendations.

These are good questions. The first one is actually fairly easy to state, but can be devilishly difficult to execute. You find other sources of tension. You raise questions, as others here have said. These things don't need to be connected at all to the main plot or the main theme, though they can be. Most times, it will simply be some short-term objective--I gotta get to the store before it closes. Something trivial (again, doesn't *have* to be trivial). The main thing here is to get inside your characters' heads, see the situation as it currently stands--they don't know what's down the road--and then let them overcome the obstacle or fail to overcome the obstacle.

The second one is more difficult, because now you're talking about reader reaction, and that's unpredictable. My rule is, it has to work for me first. Because I'm the author, this means I'm going to be reading that section multiple times in the coming weeks and months, and it's gotta work *every time*. Beyond that, you'll be looking at raising the stakes as you go. You're moving from getting to the store before it closes toward getting out of town before the zombies arrive. As you work, you'll start to identify steps, increments.

As for books that do this really well, here again let yourself be First Judge. I'd venture to say every great writer does this really well; what matters is what works for you. Consult your own library. Look outside the fantasy genre, too. Thrillers, adventure stories, detective books, even romance (one supposes <g>). Pretty much any and every good book builds tension across the span of the story. The trick is to train your eyes and ears to catch it.

 

[RoccO]

A good way to increase tension is to foreshadow the main villain. It happens a lot in aeroplane fiction, stuff that you just throw away because it is generic. It is done in Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden and Dan Brown’s books. It brings up a pervading sense of evil and strips the meat from the bones of a story which starts unremarkable and gentle.

Another way, would be to have something mysterious happen to a love interest at the beginning of the theme. This happens more often than the first example, I can think of a dozen examples, and I would count them as a block buster approach. This environment weighed against the foreshadowing is a multiple facetted approach which is almost like cheating but might be considered useful.