One element of the short story that Poe is famous for is his use of suspense. Edgar Allan Poe has the ability to keep an audience in one sitting. His stories scare and Mystify. As a superb story teller Poe can chill your blood and widen your eyes. Maybe my students will even be held on the edge of their seats. His pages are worth reading and remembering and they do not take much time. Suspense makes our lives exciting by provoking increasingly intense feelings of anticipation, impatience, and even anxiety until at last the suspense is dispelled and the secret has been revealed.
Without suspense, it is hard to imagine that fiction of any kind could exist. Even the dullest, most predictable novels contain some suspense. The writer gives and withholds, gives and withholds, until he finally chooses to give all. To make effective use of suspense, the writer must understand the psychology of the reader. The reader becomes concerned about what’s going to happen. They stew, they sweat, they try to guess. The trick of the writer is to organize the plot so that it unfolds in such a way and at such a pace as to keep them guessing. The thrillers, mysteries, and horror stories of Poe are the kinds of things that could keep us on the edge of our seats, because suspense is never greater than when linked with fear. Suspense often means the question of life and death as seen in murder mysteries. But there is suspense in all good fiction. Suspense can be anything from a little girl rescued from danger to”will girl get boy?” But suspense often comes in waves. Having satisfied our curiosity about what that something is we now turn our thoughts to wondering what’s going to happen next.
