Building Growing Unease in Suspense Fiction
We all know the importance of character and setting in a story. These elements intersect through the story’s voice, as your reader sees everything through your protagonist’s point of view. Let’s take a real life example.
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Imagine you’re at the beach, waves frothing on the rocks like smashed champagne as you celebrate your football team’s victory. You’re at the beach, the waves battering the slimy rocks as you bemoan the ref’s bad call, which robbed your team of a win. Same waves, same rocks, same beach. What’s changed is your mood.
My upcoming novel A Friend Indeed follows two old best friends—Jo, a struggling single mother, and Dana, who’s fabulously wealthy. Jo’s a teacher, while Dana is a socialite and flower designer, creating elaborate floral displays for members of her affluent social circle. Given Dana’s occupation, she’s surrounded by fresh blooms, which most of us see as symbols of love, growth, joy, and hope. Google “flower quotes” and you’ll get the vibe:
“The earth laughs in flowers.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Where flowers bloom so does hope.”
-Lady Bird Johnson
“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.”-Audrey Hepburn
Unfortunately for poor Jo and Dana, they’re stuck in a story of lies, impossible choices, and growing paranoia after loyal Jo helps Dana dispose of a dead body. As the pressure mounts, the old friends see everything—including the flowers—through a dark and ominous filter.
To avoid looking at Stan, I step back and focus on the flowers in the closest cooler.
Obviously, I don’t only use flowers to create ambiance in my novel. I plucked them as an example because they’re unexpected. Who doesn’t love flowers? It never occurred to me that flowers could be creepy until a friend revealed her disdain for cut blooms “because they’re dead.”
What could I say? She’s right. We’ve killed them to admire their fast-fading beauty. Yikes! The whole point of fiction is to see things in ways you haven’t yet considered.
It turns out, there’s a long history of using flowers to express unease in suspense fiction, especially in gothic novels and horror. Blooms are everywhere in Oscar Wilde’s wildly spooky The Portrait of Dorian Gray, published in 1890. When Dorian kisses the woman whose life he will ruin, she trembles “like a white narcissus.” Later, rejected, she falls to his feet and “lay there like a trampled flower.”
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In Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 classic, Rebecca, the newly married protagonist arrives at her husband’s estate to find rhododendrons planted by his late wife. “On either side of us was a wall of colour, blood-red, reaching far above our heads. We were amongst the rhododendrons…. They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic.”
The Victorians were into “floriography”—the language or symbolism of flowers. Mimosas, for example, represented chastity, lilacs spoke of reminiscence, and hydrangeas were a symbol of cruelty. We still follow some of these old codes. Funerary flowers tend to be white, while red roses spell romance.
I was fascinated to find another just-released—and excellent—suspense novel that uses flowers to build tension. Australian author Ashley Kalagian Blunt’s Dark Mode follows Reagan, a young woman who owns a plant shop in Sydney. While she’s sucked into a world of online hate and incels, the story is literally grounded by plants. When Reagan stumbles upon a butchered body, she notes that the victim’s face is “tilted eastward. Like a sunflower,” while the smell reminds her of corpse flowers, whose “giant blossoms gave off a rotting, sweaty, mothball smell to attract carnivorous insects.”
Following in the gothic tradition, in A Friend Indeed, I use blooms to reveal the protagonists’ increasingly anxious and bitter worldview. At one point, a stressed Jo dismisses a bunch of Pink Easter Lilies as “vile, slutty flowers.” Most people view these bright blooms as bold and beautiful. I’m showing Jo’s growing fury. Strangely, I’ve since learned that in Victorian times, the gift of an orange lily symbolized hatred.
Whatever genre you’re writing, character is about so much more than a list of attributes and backstory. Your character’s voice is a lens through which readers encounter your story.
In your first draft, you may very well be discovering your plot and characters. Once you know them well, it’s time to return and rewrite, discovering their world through rose-tinted—or blood-flecked—glasses.
Check out Elka Ray’s A Friend Indeed here:
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