Showing posts with label Suspense. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Suspense. Show all posts

Friday, November 03, 2023

Karen S. Wiesner {Put This One on Your TBR List}: The Ruins by Scott Smith


{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: The Ruins by Scott Smith

by Karen S. Wiesner


Imagine a 523 page paperback novel without chapters. Literally, that mass of pages filled with just words, no blank spaces, other than single line scene breaks. Does the mere idea of such a thing make you want to run screaming in the opposite direction? I suppose if I'd glanced through the book before I started reading it the first time, I might have had a reaction just like that. Instead, I just jumped into The Ruins by Scott Smith, a horror, published in 2006. I spent 15-20 hours of that same day absolutely enthralled. I didn't put the book down for any reason, not to eat (I can do that with one hand), not to be sociable, not to sleep, until I finished reading it. In the years since that first reading, I've done the same in re-reading it. I just can't help it.

This story has a pretty simple setup. Two American college couples are on holiday in Cancun. They meet some other foreigners on vacation. Tourist Mathias came with his brother, who'd been persuaded by a cute girl he met at the hotel to go to some archaeological dig site not too far away. Mathias is desperate to find him, since he's been missing for a while now.

Of the Americans, Jeff (who's studying to be a doctor) is the smart one in the group, the Boy Scout, the one who wants to be everyone's hero. His girlfriend Amy goes along with things, doesn't trust herself to make a decision, and ultimately doesn't really know who she is. She's almost pathetically obedient to Jeff's every command. She desperately doesn't want to accompany Jeff to help Mathias find his brother, but she doesn't know how to refuse. Eric is trying to live up to everyone's expectations and therefore fails to meet his own. He follows the prescribed path that's been laid out before him because it's easier than having to figure out something new for himself. Stacy is the oft-troped "lovable slut" who's blown about by every direction of the wind. The group follows Jeff without question.

As couples, these two are the worst. I can't even imagine how they got together. As friends, maybe Amy and Stacy make a little bit of sense but Jeff and Eric really are just thrust together as friends by the girls they're dating. I don't think they even like each other, though the thought never occurs to either of them. Jeff seems to hate Amy most of the time, to despise her wishy-washiness yet he can't seem to stop bossing her around long enough to really decide why he's with her (because she buckles to his demands?). She seems to idolize him. She's Edith Bunker to her Archie, running around rather stupidly to please him. Quite honestly, I didn't like any of the characters and there was nothing admirable about them. Jeff had the veneer of an extraordinary human, but he was no better than any of the others once the surface was scratched. That said, they were engaging, well-drawn, albeit mildly clichéd.

What happens next after Jeff forces the group to set off to find Mathias's brother is a combination of bad luck and pure stupidity on the part of three sheep followers, one anguished brother, and a would-be savior who ultimately doesn't live up to the hype. Believe it or not, none of this made the book any less enjoyable. Like Stephen King, I found The Ruins evocative and one long, screaming close-up of horror.

Beyond the foundational basis of horror in this story, you'll discover a scathing commentary on the dark side of societal conventions when Nature in all its pitiless indifference forces unsuspecting human prey into a very unique cage. From there, all semblance of control slips slowly, slowly away, never again to be recovered.

The only true failure in this literal breath-stealing novel is its end. As one reviewer says, The Ruins "just misses perfection because something's wrong with the final spin". Oh, how polite. In my opinion, the end stinks. Having read the author's other novel, A Simple Plan, I have to say that he seems to love to hate his own characters. He creates beings that you can't really like because bad qualities far outweigh the good and the decisions made by these villainous heroes are always questionable, making you as the reader feel ashamed if you make any attempt to root for them. I can't help imagining the author as a cruel entity setting up his characters for failure, toying with them and tormenting them only to destroy them in the end--all with a robustly maleficent parting laugh. Part of the genius in the author's method of madness is equally what I think might be his downfall: He refuses to look away from anything. Everything that happens is like a train wreck that chops off heads and limbs, burns babies alive, and crushes a pregnant woman flat between cars. In the case of a horror novel, that's kind of what you expect and want, but anyone with an ounce of decency would stop at the end, at least, and dole out some well-earned and respectful mercy. Not Smith. His ruthlessness carries over, unrelenting, into the very last words of the novel.

While I tend to be the type who enjoys the book more than any film adaptation of it and that's definitely the case of the 2008 movie version of The Ruins (an absolute gore-fest from start to finish, though basically watchable) produced by Ben Stiller's production company, Red Hour Films, there is one area that the film triumphs. The end of the movie is what should have been at the end of the book.

Despite the flaws in this nonstop, ruthless horror novel, I heartily recommend it to other lovers of the genre. Just be sure to watch the end of the movie version afterward to see the story's ideal end.

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Friday, October 27, 2023

Karen S. Wiesner {Put This One on Your TBR List}: Cast a Cold Eye by Alan Ryan


{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: Cast a Cold Eye by Alan Ryan

by Karen S. Wiesner


Here's a legitimate question that I posed in an earlier review I did (The Ritual by Adam Nevill https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2023/09/karen-s-wiesner-put-this-one-on-your_0643725852.html): Is a book worth reading if the end is disappointing? In other words, should I "waste" my time, money, and effort on a book if ultimately the story doesn't live up to the promise it initially had? While I'm sure most people would say "don't bother with anything less than perfect from start to finish" (and the logical practicals among us would add that they won't know the truth of that until after they've done the "wasting"), I find myself disagreeing. Before we get into a discussion about my reasons for disputing the majority vote, let's talk first about the basics about this particular book.

I stumbled on Cast a Cold Eye, a 1984 horror story writing by Alan Ryan, while browsing online horror book selections. In this novel, an American writer, Jack, heads to a small, remote village in Ireland to research a book on the Irish famine that took place near the place he settles. In the process, he sees and hears things that hint at a very dark legacy the locals--including a priest--harbor and almost humor. Easier to put up with something, even an evil something, than it is to fight it, right? Interestingly, one reviewer of the book pointed out how this story focused on faith and belief and how those things can sometimes be "horrible and frightening to behold". Indeed.

From the moment I started reading this story, I was intrigued and glued to it. Even when nothing crucial seemed to be happening in the beginning--just a writer going about his usual business--I felt something mysterious and creepy lurking beneath the surface, keeping me on edge as the dangers rousing along the fringes of Jack's present reality become clearer and even more menacing. One of the descriptions reviewers of the work noted was that this is a "slow burn horror" because the story builds slowly but steadily. That's something I love about really good horror novels. The setting was also deliciously haunting and oppressive. When a story's atmosphere settles in my chest like a dense fog, I'm at my happiest. Dread at the horror rising steadily in every direction, hemming in the main character so he was trapped, kept me turning the pages, not wanting to set the book down for any reason.

Sounds ideal for a lover of horror, doesn't it? I was on tenterhooks when I approached the last few pages of the tale. But what should have culminated into a frothing horror instead fizzled and died. Done. Over. Goodbye. All that suspense building only to have that unworthy ending was almost enough to make weep (as a reader and a writer). I'm not the only one who had this reaction. Other reviewers described the end as "inconclusive, anticlimactic" and as a "too quiet" story that "petered out at the end". I read the last few pages over and over, wondering how this had happened. Surely the author himself, his critique partners, his editor, the publisher, advance readers all cried out at the crime that had been committed by failing to make the final denouncement worthy of the rest of the story! I couldn't imagine how any of them could have missed this lamentable flaw in the otherwise flawless material. Speaking as an author, a reader, a fan of truly good horror, in the name of all that's literally good and right, why?

My severe disappointment had me passing the book off to someone else who I expected would enjoy most of the book as much as I had. I wanted to know if another reader would have the same reaction I did to the end. Maybe I was just being overly critical or wanting to rewrite it the way I would have written it? But…no. This person shared my angst at having an incredible story basically come to nothing.

After that situation, I thought I'd trying reading another book by the author. I will note that I had an extremely hard time finding anything. While the books Alan Ryan had written were all listed on his Wikipedia page, finding copies of them proved very difficult. That may be because the author died in 2012, and maybe he gained a post mortem following that caused his books to become scarce as a result. The one short book I was able to purchase of his, accepting a used edition, was Amazonas. This story was written under his full name, Alan Peter Ryan. I'm given to understand that he took a 20-year hiatus from writing horror before this one came out. In any case, the novel was about a man who trespassed the boundaries of something that should have remained untouched. Good premise. Excellent writing. Loving it like I did the previous…and then the end came, and, for me, all the previous tension-building fell flat. Again. I'm sorry to say that this repeated experience did affect my willingness to search harder to obtain the author's other offerings.

That leads us back to my original question: Should I "waste" my time, money, and effort on a book if ultimately the story doesn't live up to the promise it initially had? The reason I'm saying yes, that Cast a Cold Eye was worth reading despite the crushing dismay I experienced at the end of it, is because--save for a few pages at the end of the book--I would have said it was one of the best horror novels I'd ever read up until that point. True that, if I ever read it again, I will know upfront that I'm probably not going to like the end, though the journey would have been immensely worthwhile.

Additionally, I've found as a lifetime reader, I can actually come back to a story that I once read voraciously years ago but ultimately hated or had a violent response to and see it in a whole new light. This has been the case with The Hunger Games series. My initial reaction was modified by a new perspective I simply didn't have when I was younger. In the case of The Hunger Games, I actually liked the trilogy better the second time around. The first time I read it, I was a young mother who couldn't conceive of a world where a parent would allow something so awful to happen to their children. I didn't buy the premise of the series, so enjoying it was because of that was nearly impossible. All my opinions were filtered through that unwilling perspective. Though the story itself was compelling enough to get through each of the books, I couldn't enjoy them or identify with the characters' struggles. The second time, I was older, and I actually felt sympathy for people I'd once cursed.

Could that happen with Cast a Cold Eye? Maybe. As a writer, I learn something when I love a story from start to finish, and I learn just as much when I don't love it fully. Even if I'm at extremes, these are the stories that are indisputably memorable. The characters and situations stick with me permanently, almost like a haunting. It's the mediocre that doesn't cast a long shadow and soon fades from all remembrance. Better to love or hate a story, rather than being lukewarm or cold to it, because it's then that it becomes apparent the author is clearly capable of rousing strong emotions in me. I want to be moved by every book I read, whether for joy or grief. Even if that means some disappointment, those are the tales that will stick with me evermore. However, after having read two books by Alan Ryan that I hated the last few pages of but loved everything else, I found myself unable to consider the dubious investment worth repeating.

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog 

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Friday, October 20, 2023

Karen S. Wiesner {Put This One on Your TBR List}: Malorie (sequel to Bird Box) by Josh Malerman

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: Malorie (sequel to Bird Box) by Josh Malerman

by Karen S. Wiesner


Bird Box, a post-apocalyptic horror novel by Josh Malerman, was published in 2014. See my review of it here: https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2023/09/karen-s-wiesner-put-this-one-on-your.html. The direct sequel, Malorie, was published in 2020 (two years after the Netflix film adaptation starring Sandra Bullock aired). The initial chapters are set two years after the events of the first story, in which Malorie and her two young children are forced out of the school for the blind they've been staying, safe in a group setting, from undefined creatures that have caused mankind to go homicidally mad just by looking at them. From the school, they flee to an abandoned Jewish summer camp. The story in Malorie really begins 12 years after that point.

The kids are now teenagers going through many changes--for Tom (or Boy, as he was referred to in the first book), it's wanting to rebel against any and all authority. In this case, that's his mother, who forces them to live in fear, always protected against the monsters that have destroyed the world as she knew it. Tom believes he's found the means to combat the madness that comes from seeing the creatures. Malorie refuses to allow him to test his prototype out, since doing so would not only be dangerous for all of them, but deadly for the person who made the attempt. For Olympia (or Girl, as she was called in Bird Box), she fears telling the secret she's been hiding for so long, knowing how badly her mother would react to learning the truth about her.

When Malorie learns that her parents might still be alive, she's too wary to leave their secure hiding place…until, of course, their safety is breached and she has no choice but to flee. Going to the place her parents were last seen seems like the best option, but I'm certain, if not for that immediate threat, she never would have considered leaving.

Malorie is 12 years into raising her children, holding on to them so hard, they're bleeding (not simply chaffing) from her inflexible tyranny in enforcing the rules. In preparation for writing this review, I reread Bird Box and found Malorie even more abusive in that story than I originally remembered when writing the review for the first book. She lives in fear and thrusts the kids into the same terror that constantly threatens to drown her. She justifies this by telling herself that, to survive, she has to be unceasingly disciplined and ruthless. As I said in that review, being cold with children, withholding affection, in no way makes anyone physically safer, let alone happier and well-adjusted. In fact, I think the opposite is actually true. If there's a strong bond of love with open communication and a willingness to listen to other people's feelings and ideas, there's more acceptance and obedience as everyone tries to work together to ensure safety and well-being are achieved. In this case, I don't know that that ends justify the means. In this sequel, Malorie was unnecessarily cruel, harsh, and loveless in her discipline. She never explained anything to her children. She was more like a ruthless drill sergeant. Her unyielding authority led to all the problems that followed in the book. Tom and Olympia are perfect examples of what happens with this kind of parenting. Kids either rebel violently or they become exact matches of their own barbaric authority figure, which is a vicious circle. I believe Malorie's only saving grace was that she didn't ask her kids to do anything she wasn't willing to do herself--and religiously!

Although it was very hard to accept Malorie's justifications as acceptable, I wasn't without compassion. I can't imagine the hell of her situation. How do parents keep children safe in a world where there's literally no such thing? Even in the present day, this is a universal struggle, and no one has found definitive answers since, naturally, no one seems to agree on what's actually right and what's actually wrong. I found it sad (if a little clichéd and pathetic) that Tom became such a reckless, foolish person, damning all when he finally threw off the shackles of his confinement. If Malorie had just listened to his ideas and tried to find ways to encourage him without putting them in danger, he wouldn't have reacted the way he did. If Olympia had felt safe enough to talk to her mother about who and what she is, she wouldn't have had to withhold secrets her mother desperately needed to know. When militant obedience is the only required response…well, what could possibly make life worth living? Mere survival won't be enough for long.

Without these conflicts, the book wouldn't have had much of a foundation, and, given that these very questions are the ones that mirror society as we know it in the present day, they're valid and relatable. Despite the timeworn nature of the plot problems, there's a fresh spin on them here and I enjoyed this book as much as I did the last one. The scenario was compelling and tense, constantly escalating.

However, this follow-up was supposed to provide "the reason for all the bloodshed", and it didn't. Not at all. Instead, the creatures in Malorie are even more mysterious, illusive, numerous, and actually appeared to have evolved since the last story, though again they're never described to us and we don't learn a single thing about who and what they are, where they came from, and what their purpose is (beyond making sure every person on the planet is killed--one can't help wondering what the point of that is from the monsters' point-of-view). That lack of resolution (again) was more than a little unsatisfying. I feel like I've only gotten half of a story because this went without saying (again).

Mild disappointment aside, if you liked Bird Box (the book and the movie), you should equally like Malorie. This tale also serves as a cautionary tale: Instead of treating your children like soldiers under your command, view them as unique individuals, worthy of love and respect. Encourage them to contribute not just to survival but also to the enrichment of life.

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Friday, September 29, 2023

Karen S. Wiesner {Put This One on Your TBR List} Beneath the Shadows by Sara Foster


{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: Beneath the Shadows by Sara Foster

by Karen S. Wiesner



I'm a fan of Gothic suspense thrillers, and there aren't as many really good ones as I'd like out there. I read Beneath the Shadows by Sara Foster right after it came out in 2012. In this book, Adam inherits Hawthorn Cottage from his grandparents, and he and his wife Grace move there with their infant daughter, intending to leave the hustle and bustle of city life. The North Yorkshire moors set the stage for the opening landscape of creepy, moody desolation--with something scary lurking around every corner. Adam disappears abrupt, leaving his young daughter in her stroller on the doorstep. Everyone tries to convince Grace that he left her, but even a year later she can't reconcile what happened with what she knew of the man she loved.

Determined to find the answers the police couldn't uncover, she returns to the cottage. A winter storm effectively cuts her and Millie off from the rest of the world, and Grace finds herself in a spooky house filled with dark family secrets and maybe even a few ghosts. She's living in a small village with odd, taciturn inhabitants who give a semblance of friendliness that, in a room full of shadows, could just as easily be mistaken for menace.

The intriguing characters and atmospheric setting drew me in. Tension kept me riveted to the pages. This story has some minor flaws and inconsistencies that did little more than make me miss a beat. Nothing kept me from wanting to finish the slightly formulaic tale and reread it in the future--as well as look into discovering others that followed from the author. Lovers of Gothic suspense will find this the ideal story to read while housebound during a storm of one sort or another.

Check out my latest novel!

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/bloodmoon-cove-spirits-series.html

https://www.writers-exchange.com/bloodmoon-cove-spirits-series/

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

 

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Friday, September 22, 2023

Karen S. Wiesner {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: The Ritual by Adam Nevill


{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: The Ritual by Adam Nevill

by Karen S. Wiesner



The Ritual by Adam Nevill is a supernatural horror novel published in 2011. Four males who were in college together decide to take a trip together on the cheap (because the main character Luke can't afford anything else). They strike out into the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle. While the old chums begin with intentions of escaping their individual lives (and their problems that come to light as they spend more time together in a harsh environment) as well as reconnecting as friends, it soon becomes clear that these men can barely tolerate each other's company. With conflicts surmounting between and all around them in the deepening disquiet of gloom, they foolishly decide to take a shortcut to get out of the forest. Two of the members of the party are injured and none of them possess anything that passes as survival experience or skills. Soon, they're lost, starving, and all but swallowed up by the dark, ancient forest that's remained largely untouched for millennia.

The thing this book has in spades is atmospheric setting. Here, the natural world is depicted in such a way that the reader's breath is stilled in the lungs, hesitant to reach toward exhale or inhale for fear of meeting a monster whatever way is turned. One reviewer commented (emphasis mine) on the "isolation, dreariness, and enormous age of the Swedish forest setting", which I heartily agree with because I felt that almost tangibly. The isolated, primal world around the characters becomes oppressive, suffocating, blacker and more menacing the farther in they get, growing to almost painful proportions of horror as their waking and dreaming hours are filled with nightmares that are as real as the enormous trees.

I read through most of this book enraptured by the predicaments of the characters. Mainly, I was spellbound with the setting and the imagery the author conjured in my mind. The anticipation I had was buoyed by a strong sense of expectation about where everything was heading. That crawled to a very abrupt halt somewhere near the three-fourths mark of the novel, where I was filled with startled disappointment at unforeseen and unimaginable events that, for me, came out of nowhere and hijacked the story. One minute, I was hurling headlong into a reader's dream come true and the next I was staring dumbly, going, "Um…what now?" If you don't want a spoiler, skip the next paragraph, which I've placed in very small print so it'll be hard to read without concentrated effort. If you don't mind,  you can read on:


The main character Luke wakes in a strange bed in a house literally in the middle of nowhere, all his friends gone, only to find that instead of discovering the road to salvation and rescue, he's a prisoner of a heavy metal band that worships a creature that requires blood sacrifices. What the actual heck?!


Following the event you may or may not have read about in the last paragraph, the story did get back to something of the hopes I had for a clever twist ending. Other reviewers also found fault in this pre-cursor to the end of the novel, so I'm not entirely sure if I'm in the minority feeling like that aspect didn't live up to the captivating beginning. I also kind of feel like both the book and the Netflix film adaptation (which was pretty faithful) de-evolved into something of a gore fest, something that doesn't really appeal to me.

Here's a legitimate question: Is a book worth reading if the end is disappointing? There's another author I hope to review in this column in the future where it happens with every single one of his books: I'm enthralled all through the story, but the end is without fail a huge disappointment. Was it worth reading if I found out that it ultimately didn't live up to the promise it initially had? My answer is that, yes, if I've taken something worthwhile out of the reading, it is worth the time I've taken, and maybe even the investment. After all, I thoroughly enjoyed three-fourths of the story. In the case of The Ritual, I ended up liking the very end of the novel. It was just that weird blip that ripped me whole out of the story and kind of "harshed my buzz" for a short time before getting back on the road I was anticipating.

Check out my latest novel!

 

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/bloodmoon-cove-spirits-series.html

https://www.writers-exchange.com/bloodmoon-cove-spirits-series/

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Friday, September 08, 2023

Karen S. Wiesner {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: Bird Box by Josh Malerman


{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: Bird Box by Josh Malerman

by Karen S. Wiesner


Bird Box is a post-apocalyptic horror thriller published in 2014. Most people know of the story because of the 2018 Netflix movie starring Sandra Bullock, something that is actually a very worthy adaptation of the novel. However, being a proponent of "the book is usually better than the movie", I had to read it before I watched it. Discovering that this was the debut novel of a singer/songwriter in the Detroit band The High Strung was a bit of a surprise to me. Josh Malerman wrote 14 novels between shows on the road with his band. A high school friend of his in the book business encouraged him to submit something, and the rest is history.


The main character in Bird Box is Malorie. The present story--4 years into the situation referred to as "The Problem"--is woven with flashbacks from two other time periods. The first is when Malorie discovers she's pregnant from a one-night stand. This happens alongside international news reports of people seeing some undefined creature outside that causes them to go mad, then kill others before killing themselves. The second time period is after Malorie is forced to leave the home she'd been living in with her sister in order to seek shelter with other survivors. One of the other women in the safe house is also about four months pregnant (a bit unbelievable, if I'm honest, especially when the two women go into labor almost exactly at the same time). While sequestered with all the windows covered, they discover they can use birds in a box as an alarm system in case anything comes near the house.

In the present, Malorie is alone, raising another woman's child and her own and not distinguishing one from the other in any way. In fact, the reader doesn't know for most of the story which one is her kid. In order to keep them save, she's used harsh training techniques (one being the use of a blindfold) that have heightened the senses of the four-year-olds. She refers to the children as only "Boy" and "Girl". When they have no choice but to seek out a refuge Malorie has heard of that has medical supplies, food, and safety, they venture out into the world again--blindfolded the entire time they travel, even while in a boat.

This is a very intense, suspenseful novel centered around an unlikely scenario that wouldn't have worked at all if it wasn't written as a character driven story. The plot would have fallen apart in a second if not for that, in large part because, as one reviewer said, "The reason for all the bloodshed is never explored or explained."

The main character's choices do prove to be problematic for me, as do some of the scenarios that stretched belief a little too far. First, the "harsh training techniques" give me pause. Malorie is only once shown to be physically abusive toward the children. Outside of that, she's just cold with them, withholding affection. I'm bothered by this because, of course, it makes no sense to me why someone would think that treating others poorly actually makes them physically safer. Maybe it selfishly makes Malorie emotionally safer because she's lost a lot and it would be hard for her to trust again after that. That would have been a better motivation for her than that she actually thought it made the children safer. Additionally, after four years raising these children completely alone--raising them from newborns--I find it 100% unrealistic that she wouldn't have developed a strong, loving, affectionate bond with them. She must have had to hold and feed (breastfeed, I'm sure) both of them. It would have been nearly impossible for her to separate herself from the tenderness a mother feels naturally doing that. Also, because she can't draw attention to herself, she must have had to soothe them both often to prevent excessive crying. But the other part that didn't strike me as realistic is how she managed to keep them safe all by herself for so long. She would have had to either leave them alone or bring them along to get supplies. How she did that was skirted over by telling instead of showing, so it didn't play a large part in the tale. But I found it more than a little unlikely.

Still, as a whole I bought the premise of Bird Box and went along with it because it really is a well done story. I was caught up with Malorie's life and the situation, regardless of the dubiousness of the minor moot points I mentioned earlier. Many times while I was reading the book and watching the movie, I thought it worked extremely well that the source of the horror wasn't revealed in more than fleeting glimpses. Often, when a shadowy corner has been brought into the light, we discover there's nothing to fear lurking in it. Instead of heightening the terror by seeing it fully, sighting it dissolves the tension. In this case, it was much better to almost see the monster through the cracks between our fingers--or, more aptly, in peeks stolen through the top or bottom of a blindfold. That puts the reader on a constant knife-edge of uncertainty.

Incidentally, while writing up this review, I discovered a sequel was released in 2021 called Malorie, which I'll be buying ASAP, and hopefully reviewing here sometime in the future. It sounds like with that follow-up, "the reason for all the bloodshed" is finally explored and explained. Additionally, a spin-off sequel called Bird Box Barcelona debuted on Netflix in July 2023. It doesn't star the same cast, though it has exactly the same premise as the previous movie, only with a male parent and his child searching for a refuge from The Problem. I do intend to watch that as well to see if it's any good.

Bird Box is a unique take on horror that should have readers not wanting to put the book down.

Check out my newly released novel!

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/bloodmoon-cove-spirits-series.html

https://www.writers-exchange.com/bloodmoon-cove-spirits-series/

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Friday, November 05, 2021

Karen S. Wiesner, Tension and Twists, Part 3 (Writer's Craft Article)


Writer's Craft Article by Karen S. Wiesner  

Tension and Twists, Part 3 

Based on COHESIVE STORY BUILDING (formerly titled FROM FIRST DRAFT TO FICTION NOVEL {A Writer's Guide to Cohesive Story Building}) by Karen S. Wiesner 

This is the final post focusing on how (and why) to build tension and twists into your fiction.

Release and downtime are also absolutely necessary in every story. But only with a cohesive logic in the build-up of downtime, suspense, and black moment, and with an equally meshed logical resolution, will your reader be left satisfied and smiling upon closing the book. This in no way, however, means that you can’t throw a twist in at the end of your story—provided that it fits logically and cohesively with what you’ve already set up in the beginning and middle of the book. In this article, I'll provide tips for incorporating effective tension and twists into your fiction. 

Tips for Creating Tension and Suspense

·                     Use doubt to create suspense. The unknown is the “it” factor when creating suspenseful novels—and novels must indeed be suspenseful or your readers will have nothing to stick around for. If you can truly make your characters (and readers) believe that the main character will never reach his goals, you’ll have succeeded in creating a book that absolutely can’t be put down. Involving the reader means making sure that your story is cohesive enough to draw him inexplicably in, right where you want him. A cohesive story will never allow the reader to become too comfortable. 

·                     Let mood and senses create the atmosphere you need for suspense. Remember that mood is a carefully constructed means of building suspense. Essentially, it’s a springboard with limited purpose. In order to sustain it, you must involve the reader. Prepare for it with cohesive characters, setting, and plot, then use all of the senses to build the appropriate tone. You wouldn’t want a slapstick tone in a drama any more than you’d want a sensual tone in playful story intended for children. 

Mood (or tone) is a carefully constructed means to build tension and suspense, and the mood almost always fits the genre, though of course the mood of an individual scene is more changeable. Science fiction generally has an adventurous tone. Suspense has a tense mood. Gothic has a heavy feel of foreboding.

 

The most effective way to capture mood is to use the senses. Where are the characters in your scene; what are they seeing, touching, smelling, hearing, tasting, feeling (the little-acknowledged sixth sense)? What emotions are they dealing with?

 

If you want to create a sensual atmosphere, describe the scent of a candle burning, the touch of silk against bare skin, the strains of romantic music playing, or a heroine’s reaction to the appearance of her lover. If you want to set the mood for danger, make the character tangibly aware of the temperature (cold—goose bumps on skin); the lighting (darkness or shadows); a revolting smell; a sudden sound or the eerie absence of sound. If you want to create a tone for character shock, have him in the middle of a bite of what had previously been a delicious meal. With this mood, the food becomes sawdust in his mouth, the taste unnoticeable or unappetizing, and he chokes when he finally attempts to swallow it.

 

Use sense descriptions at their most potent times. This kind of description brings the reader directly into the story. You give him something tangible in your vision. He moves and uses his senses right along with your characters. Create a natural means to blend all the elements of your story. 

·                     Contrast to keep readers on edge. Pair a pessimistic hero with a bleeding heart heroine. Paint the image of a beautiful rose growing steadfastly in a desolate landfill. Develop character personalities and backstories, settings, and plots that make these contrasts blend together naturally.

·                     Pace your story to keep it flowing smoothly, even as tensions run high. Don’t rush to pick up story threads. Keep the reader guessing. Draw out scenes involving rescues and explanations, and offer readers unsatisfactory alternatives to the problems your characters face. Cohesion is crucial when pacing your story, since organic mingling will create the need for (and enable) pacing that matches. Imagine that you introduce into your plot a time element. If the hero doesn’t act by a certain time, the worst horror he can imagine will happen. Pacing picks up considerably. Now imagine that this hero is given a glimpse of his happily-ever-after, but he no longer believes he can succeed. After all, he’s tried everything and failed. The pacing will naturally slow down because he’s at the bottom. Suddenly, conflict arises and the hero has absolutely no choice but to act. He finds a way to save what he cares about most. The pace picks up again. All of this works causally with your characters, setting, and plot. 

·                     Foreshadow by hinting at what is to come, not by answering the crucial questions of a story. Foreshadowing needs to be built into a story in advance. A writer can’t foreshadow something he doesn’t know will happen. Properly developed foreshadowing brings together all the elements in your story. In Conflict, Action & Suspense, William Noble calls foreshadowing “a fine technique for developing suspense and extending action because it offers a possibility that will pick at the reader”. If your reader cares about your characters, he’ll pick up on foreshadowing immediately and every time it’s touched afterward. It’ll worry him to no end. And that means he’ll be involved and hanging on every word. 

·                     Use flashbacks to slow down the action and/or provide missing details, hidden motivation, or even an answer to a mystery. Flashbacks can be in the form of a scene, a paragraph, a sentence, or even a single word. Flashbacks will come naturally out of character, setting, and plot development. It’s tricky to write an effective flashback. Therefore, the purpose in using it must always be clear to the author and the reader. 

The best part of a creating effective tension and twists is that your readers will invest themselves in it mentally, emotionally, and possibly even physically (if you can make them cry or bite their nails, you’ve got them hook, line, and sinker!). You’ve created a net the readers won’t want to get out of until they know everything, and they’ll feel like they’re leaving a piece of themselves behind each time they reluctantly set the book down—especially that last time when they read “The End.”

Find out more here about COHESIVE STORY BUILDING here: 

http://www.writers-exchange.com/cohesive-story-building/ 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QJ09DQM 

Do you have a tip for writing effective tension or twists? Leave a comment to tell me! 

Happy writing! 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 140 titles and 16 series. Visit her here:

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

https://www.goodreads.com/karenwiesner

http://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/ 

http://www.writers-exchange.com/blog/ 

https://www.amazon.com/author/karenwiesner 

Friday, October 29, 2021

Karen S. Wiesner, Tension and Twists, Part 2 (Writer's Craft Article)

Writer's Craft Article by Karen S. Wiesner 

Tension and Twists, Part 2 

Based on COHESIVE STORY BUILDING (formerly titled FROM FIRST DRAFT TO FICTION NOVEL {A Writer's Guide to Cohesive Story Building}) by Karen S. Wiesner 

This is the second of three posts focusing on how (and why) to build tension and twists into your fiction.

Release and downtime are also absolutely necessary in every story. But only with a cohesive logic in the build-up of downtime, suspense, and black moment, and with an equally meshed logical resolution, will your reader be left satisfied and smiling upon closing the book. This in no way, however, means that you can’t throw a twist in at the end of your story—provided that it fits logically and cohesively with what you’ve already set up in the beginning and middle of the book. Let's talk about incorporating effective twists into your fiction. 

Incorporating Twists 

Most twists come at the end of a story. But this isn’t to say you couldn’t have twists at other points in the story as well as more than one twist, each coming at various intervals. Adding twists to your stories are exciting to read because the author leads the reader so effectively to believe one thing (a thing that also makes perfectly logical and cohesive sense) while completely turning the tables at the last minute.

Putting twists into each story spark is a sure-fire way to turn a suspenseful story into a nail-biting one. To get started, ask yourself, In light of the rest of my story and the cohesiveness I need to provide, what’s the most shocking thing I could have happen? What is the reader absolutely not expecting? 

A twist should be set up properly from the very beginning of the book to make it believable. It must fit logically and cohesively with what you’ve already set up in the beginning and middle of the book. Using an outline can help you prepare for that without requiring you to write an entire draft before you realize your resolutions are too predictable. Resolutions need to fit perfectly with every angle this twist presents. 

Think about the book (and the movie, which is just as good) Presumed Innocent, by Scott Turow. If you haven’t read or watched this before, I encourage you to do it at your earliest opportunity. The twist at the end utterly haunted me for years afterward. The truth was there before my eyes the whole time, yet I never saw it, and it punched me in the stomach brutally when it came. 

A twist is so breathtaking because it comes out of nowhere (despite the fact that the reader will have to concede that all the evidence to point to it was there from the start) and it satisfies the reader worlds more than a predictable outcome ever can. In some cases, the twist may be the very thing the reader wanted to happen but didn’t dare let himself hope for. 

When I finished the outline for my action/adventure romance Undercover Angel, the seventh book in Incognito Series, I found myself with a story that made complete sense, following the course that I’d set up from the beginning and throughout the middle to the end. Nevertheless, I was ultimately disappointed with the outcome and knew my readers would be, too. The resolutions were simply too predictable to truly satisfy me. So I sat down and thought to myself, What is the most shocking thing I could possibly make happen in order to make the reader gasp when she gets to the end of the story? When I realized what it was, I went back into my outline and reshaped it from start to finish to fit this new twist as well (better, really) as the predictable resolutions did. When my critique partner read the outline, she said she’d fully expected the predictable resolution and never had the slightest clue about the twist until it hit her square in the stomach—and she loved it. This trick worked to fulfill the breathtaking longing in the reader for an unexpected shock. 

Always look for the unexpected twist in your story because it makes it so memorable. There are always obvious scenarios that can be developed in response to the sparks introduced in your story but your goal is to generate the unexpected in your readers. Discombobulate them within the confines of logic, satisfactory resolutions, and cohesion. 

In Part 3, we'll talk about tips for creating tension and suspense.       

Find out more here about COHESIVE STORY BUILDING here: 

http://www.writers-exchange.com/cohesive-story-building/ 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QJ09DQM 

What's your favorite twist in a book or movie? Leave a comment to tell me about it! 

Happy writing! 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 140 titles and 16 series. Visit her here:

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

https://www.goodreads.com/karenwiesner

http://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/ 

http://www.writers-exchange.com/blog/ 

https://www.amazon.com/author/karenwiesner