My imagination went into overdrive. I directed the beam of my phone’s torch app into the trees but could see nothing. No yellow tiger eyes blinking at me. Nervously, I continued on the path. But the noise started again, rustling the dead leaves, breaking branches in its progress. The faster I walked the faster the steps became – as if whatever it was wanted to keep pace with me. I broke into a trot. A fallen branch blocked my way and instinctively I snatched it up in one hand and turned to face the trees.
A small deer leapt out of the darkness, hurtling over the path so close it brushed my legs. It crashed away down the slope on the other side of the track. I swung round to watch it, its rump a blur of white in the branches. In under a second it was gone, swallowed by the trees, and I was alone in the silence.
The creature must have been trapped between me and a perimeter fence. Terrified, it had been searching for an escape. It was only when my heartbeat slowed, the adrenalin spike in my blood had subsided, that I realized the encounter had helped me unravel a question that has dogged me for a long time.
What are the mechanics behind creating fear in fiction?
Fear is the most primitive of emotions. A quick glance at the origin of most of our English synonyms for fear show they overwhelmingly come from Germanic and Norse roots. Is this because Viking invaders were more brutal than the Roman invaders, therefore more likely to be associated with fear? Or is it because the Vikings were less sophisticated – thus closer to our primordial survival instincts? Humans have worked hard to eradicate dangers around them, but while the world may be safer, the primitive parts of our brains have not kept pace. Evolution is slower than technology. We stubbornly remain scared of things that would have been sensible for our cave-dwelling ancestors to fear, yet blithely ignore the concrete dangers in our modern life. A recent study showed the majority of parents are terrified of their child being murdered by a stranger, and yet rarely, if ever, consider that the biggest danger a modern child faces is the long-term health effects of a junk-food diet and lack of exercise. Similarly many of us would hesitate to walk alone through dark woods at night, yet would think nothing of getting into a car to drive home, though statistically one is overwhelmingly more likely to die in a car crash than to be set upon by a wild beast or axe murderer.
This basic part of our brain is hardwired to expect a level of anxiety and is bewildered by the lack of threat in our peaceful societies. The ironic corollary of this is that the faster we eliminate sources of fear the faster we strive to simulate them. Almost as if the human race positively pines for fear. Societies protected by armies and police forces breed generations addicted to Xbox war games and battalions of TV viewers soaking up crime drama. Unlike our ancestors, in order to survive most modern humans don’t need to navigate unpredictable river rapids, hunt animals or scale mountains, and yet we do it for fun (witness the rise of extreme sports). If there is no white water or cliff to hand, we decamp to the nearest theme park. The first stories told to us as infants involve fear – the lure of the BOO! to a toddler is irresistible. We need to experience fear to remind us of our true nature – we actively enjoy it.
Thus the industry of fear for pleasure is enormous and profitable. As a writer of crime fiction I count myself a member of that industry. It is my job to give people the thrill their modern brains thirst for, but I’ve never fully been able to articulate or explain how I achieve this. At least – not until the night-time encounter with the deer in the forest. That evening, as I walked home, it became clear to me: in crime fiction the greatest generator of fear is quite simply the power of the reader’s imagination to interpret the unexplained.
The noises in the trees, aided by my imagination, had the power to terrify me until they were explained. This is the mechanism mirrored in mystery fiction. The writer presents the reader with an unexplained stimulus then allows the reader’s imagination to pick up the baton and run with it. In crime fiction the chief unexplained element usually – not always – comes in the form of a violent attack, or the threat of violence, either in the past or in the present. However, the true nature of this attack is concealed from the reader (and frequently from the novel’s characters too). The job of the protagonist, and by proxy the reader, is to understand the nature of the crime. This usually culminates in the moment the antagonist is identified and brought to justice. The ‘unmasking’. The ‘reveal’.
How to handle this moment is a huge dilemma for the writer – because the perpetrator, once unmasked, can never fully live up to a reader’s expectations. Under the full glare of revelation the big cat turns all too quickly into the startled Bambi, scrambling for escape through the trees. The solution to this anticlimactic necessity is to hold off on the reveal until the last possible moment. Unsurprisingly, most novels end fairly soon after the unmasking, however, ideally, throughout the novel, there will be a sequence of smaller mysteries being presented and resolved in shorter time frames. Usually after the resolution of each the emphasis shifts fairly rapidly to another plot strand.
Funnily enough, in my novel Wolf, one of these smaller mysteries revolves around no other animal than a deer. Quite coincidental to my experience, and indeed in the novel the animal features in a less palatable fashion than the one in my forest encounter, nevertheless the deer is a pivotal element. A second example of a smaller mystery sees the central characters in the book, victims of a house invasion, held captive in a darkened hallway. Something is with them in the hallway, but they cannot move, run or hide, nor can they approach to discover what it is. They have only minimal sensory clues and their own imaginations to fill in the gaps. I hope I have ‘held’ this scene long enough for the readers’ imaginations also to go into action the way mine did in the park that night. And I hope that when the lights eventually come on what is revealed is even half as horrific as the image the reader has conjured.
I don’t think I am divulging a sacred secret by pointing out how heavily the author relies on the imagination of his or her reader. Yet it is true – the writer can only point the way – the reader must interpret the signposts and choose whether to follow. I, for one, am immensely grateful that over the years so many readers have allowed me to take their hands and lead them, trick them, guide them and cajole them into using their imaginations to scare themselves senseless.
POPPET
Mo Hayder
A Jack Caffery thriller
The patients at Beechway High Secure Unit are terrified. Unexplained power cuts have led to a series of horrifying incidents. And now fear has spread from the inmates to the staff.
Detective Inspector Jack Caffery is called to investigate, whilst working the most impossible case of his life. Will he be able to stare pure evil in the eye, and survive?
‘With Mo Hayder you never know where you are going until you get there’
The Times
‘Hayder has a profound ability to shock and surprise her readers’
Karin Slaughter
BIRDMAN
Mo Hayder
A Jack Caffery thriller
Greenwich, south-east London.
Detective Inspector Jack Caffery – young, driven, unshockable – is called to one of the most gruesome crime scenes he has ever seen.
Five young women have been ritualistically murdered and dumped on wasteland near the Dome. Subsequent post-mortems reveal a singular, horrific signature linking the victims.
Caffery knows that he is on the trail of that most dangerous offender: a serial killer. Beset by animosity within the police force, haunted by the memory of a very personal death long ago, Caffery employs every weapon forensic science can offer to hunt him down.
Because he knows that it is only a matter of time before this sadistic killer strikes again …
‘A first-class shocker’
Guardian
THE TREATMENT
Mo Hayder
A Jack Caffery thriller
A quiet residential street in south London.
A husband and wif
e are discovered, imprisoned in their own home. Badly dehydrated, they’ve been bound and beaten. He is close to death.
But worse is to come: their young son is missing.
When Detective Inspector Jack Caffery is called in to investigate, the similarities with events in his own past make it impossible for him to view this new crime dispassionately.
And as he digs deeper – as he attempts to hold his own life together in the face of ever more disturbing revelations about both his past and his present – the real nightmare begins …
‘One of the most frightening books I have ever read’
Guardian
About the Author
MO HAYDER is the author of the internationally bestselling novels Birdman, The Treatment, The Devil of Nanking, Pig Island, Ritual, Skin, Gone—which won the 2012 Edgar Award for best novel—Hanging Hill, Poppet and Wolf. In 2011, she received the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library award. She lives in the Cotswolds, in England.
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Credits
Cover photo: Ilina Simeonova / Trevillion Images
Copyright
Wolf
Copyright © 2014 by Mo Hayder.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPUB Edition April 2015 ISBN 9781443433341
Published by Harper Weekend, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Originally published in Great Britain in 2014 by Bantam Press, an imprint of Transworld Publishers.
First published in Canada by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd in an original trade paperback edition: 2014
This Harper Weekend trade paperback edition: 2015
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
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Mo Hayder, Wolf
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