Settings That Build Psychological Suspense: The Human Effect

Now that you’re ready to sit down and write your suspense magnum opus, you want to know where to begin. The Greeks had it right: Know thyself—in literary parlance, know thy character—and you can’t go wrong. The better you understand your fictional creations, the more you’ll know where they belong and why their stories couldn’t take place anywhere else. 

(5 Reasons to Set Your Thriller in an Isolated Town.)

Now imagine you’re seeing these settings through the lens of your characters’ inner lives—the fears, paranoia, or mind games they’re playing with us or themselves. Watch how the tension deepens and the terror builds.

Even a familiar setting like the Manhattan courtroom in my 2022 thriller First Victim can take on sinister meaning when filtered through the psyche of my protagonist, the Honorable Alice D. McKerrity. Suddenly the place where justice is supposed to be dispensed and innocent lives hang in the balance becomes an arena where good spars with evil and a shocking revelation will force Alice to confront her long-held secrets and choose between justice and revenge.

The Metro North is the backdrop for my 2024 thriller The Man on the Train, whose midlife crisis turns into his wife’s worst nightmare when he meets a mysterious woman on his daily ride from Scarsdale to Grand Central Station. An ordinary commute becomes a twisting journey into Guy Kingship’s buried past—and a decades-old, unsolved murder.

When we imagine the places that scare us the most because they harken back to childhood terrors (the monster in the closet or hiding under the bed), nothing ratchets up suspense like a house—the more dark and unsettling history in its bones, the better.

From the moment the unnamed heroine arrives at her husband’s ancestral estate in Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 quintessential gothic novel Rebecca, she’s plagued by growing unease. Dominated by the ghost of Maxim de Winter’s first wife and her obsessively devoted housekeeper, Manderley becomes an extension of the heroine’s increasingly fearful state of mind. The house mirrors her apprehensions—and ours that we project onto her. We’re emotionally invested in the main character, who can make us seesaw between belief and doubting what’s right before our eyes.

Nowhere is this psychological phenomenon more evident than in paranoid thrillers like the 2001 film Memento, in which the protagonist Leonard Shelby struggles to recover the lost pieces of himself and find his wife’s killer by returning to places in his recent past. But he—and we—don’t know if these are true memories or the inventions of an amnesiac or a traumatized mind.

Nor are we sure if the evil stalking the heroine in her late aunt’s Edwardian London townhouse in Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gaslight is real or a symptom of her anxieties as she becomes more and more isolated from the outside world. She’s terrified she’s losing her mind and denies the truth of what her senses tell her, which makes her the ultimate unreliable narrator.

Check out Debbie Babitt’s The Man on the Train here:

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The torment of being caught between fearing for your sanity or accepting the reality of supernatural forces at play doesn’t get more frightening than The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson’s 1959 gothic horror classic. Jackson is quoted as saying she couldn’t have written a ghost story if she didn’t believe in ghosts. The plot follows four people whose lives have been touched by the paranormal staying overnight in a mansion in an unspecified location plagued by a history of suicide and violent death. “The horror does not lie in Hill House (monstrous though it is) or the events that take place within it, but in the unexplored recesses of its characters’ – and its readers’ – minds. This is perhaps why it remains the definitive haunted house story.” (the Guardian).

What about the town that’s so entrenched in the protagonist’s memory it becomes a character in its own right?

The fictional Wind Gap in the “boot heel of Missouri” in Gillian Flynn’s 2006 debut novel Sharp Objects is where journalist Camille Preaker returns to cover a murder. But the past has its claws deep in Camille’s tortured psyche, a reminder that none of us can escape history destined to repeat itself in an endless loop of recrimination and retribution. Despite toxic family relationships, Camille’s town is part of her DNA.

The same holds true for Repentance, the faith-driven, superstitious Baptist town in northwest Arkansas that’s the beating heart of my 2021 debut Saving Grace. The love of my heroine Mary Grace Dobbs for her town goes beyond the tragic events that shadow its history—“a place that’s part of me for better or worse. A connection that runs deeper than blood.”

For built-in terror, there’s no place like the woods, where you can get lost and never find your way home. That’s what happens in Harlan Coben’s 2007 thriller The Woods, where four teenagers disappear there and only two bodies are found. In Tana French’s 2007 thriller In the Woods, three children go into the woods and only one comes out. The woods also plays a crucial role in Saving Grace, where young girls disappear over two time periods and where a real-life Boogeyman lives.

Then there are the stories where character and setting become so inextricably linked that you can’t tell where one leaves off and the other begins. Like the Bates Motel in Psycho, Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel that was immortalized in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film, whose remoteness and flashing Vacancy! sign eerily mimics the precarious mental state of its isolated, cut-off-from-reality proprietor. Or the Overlook Hotel—many theories still swirl around the symbolism of the name—in Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining, that gradually takes control of the mind of its caretaker protagonist, a man beset by psychological demons.

Whether they’re houses that haunt us, home towns that lure us back, or woods waiting to ensnare us, it’s the human factor that keeps us glued to the screen and breathlessly turning the pages to see what these wildly unpredictable creatures are going to do next.

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