Patterns of creating suspense in Stephen King's "The Shining"

Abstract

<jats:p>The article focuses on the ways of creating suspense in Stephen King’s novel The Shining. Its main purpose is to explore the basic suspense motifs in the book and establish some general patterns of their development and distribution throughout the novel. After providing a theoretical definition of what suspense is, the paper sets to explore the ways it is achieved in the novel. A toolkit is adopted from narrative theory, in order to analyze the ways of building suspense in terms of narration. The study shows that the suspenseful motifs in The Shining can be divided into three groups according to their operation in the text: gradually developed suspense motifs, climactic suspense motifs, and mini episodes of suspense.</jats:p>

Construing Horrific Uncertainty: A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis of Stephen King’s The Shining

“…Additionally, The Overlook creeps into Jack's mind to possess him through the inception of the idea that he should kill his son in some dreams-turnednightmares or hallucinations. All of this essentially creates a sense of suspense and uncanniness that permeates the novel (Anastasova, 2016;Berggren, 2019). In this paper, a cognitive stylistic account of how the horrific aspects of this climactic episode are developed and construed throughout the novel in a way that deliberately induces uncertainty until its final resolution.…”