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

Abstract

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.