A few years ago, I remember returning home one day to discover our dog had eaten a giant chocolate off a tabletop. We stuffed her in the car and rushed her to the vet in time to save her life. Later, we’d wonder how our dog could have even reached that high table, but what lingers most in my mind is the sheer, stomach-plunging panic of the moment.
Thrillers often benefit from an occasional jolt of horror, and when I aimed to scare readers with my newest novel The Last Word, I started with my own real experiences. The death of a pet is an everyday anxiety – certainly not as dramatic as the murders and mayhem that thrillers offer – but it’s intense all the same, relatable and close to home. Most people (luckily) haven’t been stalked by a crazed killer with a knife, but parents and pet owners alike can relate to the stress of being responsible for the safety of something that sometimes, inexplicably, tries really, really hard to kill itself. Along those lines, The Last Word’s protagonist Emma finds herself facing a vengeful author who isn’t just determined to kill her – he intends to hurt her as much as he can, and this makes her beloved golden retriever a target as well. I find the idea of someone attempting to poison my dog deeply skin-crawling. Who wouldn’t?
It’s fitting, then, that the protagonist’s canine sidekick is actually my own dog: our beloved English Cream golden retriever Laika. I’d written Laika into the first draft as a placeholder, fully intending to concoct a fictional dog in a later draft, but the more time I spent with the story, the more I liked having Laika there. Maybe it’s a weird choice – especially given how fictional Laika is in extreme danger for most of the story – but I found it to be a helpful personal link to the protagonist and a reminder of what’s truly at stake. (And Laika gets to bite the bad guy at the end, which I think is only fair).
Moreover, I think fear in fiction is most effective when it’s grounded in the real world – specifically, in the normal. The worst day of your life will often start like any other, and that’s how it blindsides you. Protagonist Emma’s fight for her life is heralded by, of all things, an online book review and a spicy back-and-forth in the comments. The mundane gives us a relatable entry point into the nightmare, and troubles us by illustrating just how easily a normal day can veer disastrously south. Heck, all it took for me was a giant piece of chocolate and an ill-timed trip out of the house.
Another way to incorporate reality into your fictional fear? Humor. Real life is messy, random, and full of chaos – and as a writer, a similar unpredictability in tone is a powerful tool to harness. As I plotted out the novel’s suspense sequences, I tried to anticipate what readers might expect to happen and then veer hard in the other direction whenever possible, often into comic relief. A well-timed joke can momentarily puncture a scene’s building tension, inviting the reader to lower their guard while the real shock secretly waits just around the corner. I tried to pair the humor in The Last Word with some of the nastiest and most visceral scares. An uneasy push and pull with reader expectations – is whatever hides behind that door going to make me laugh or scream? – can be all too true to life.
I tested this theory to the extreme with the story’s villain; aiming to create an antagonist who is terrifying in the dark, but pathetic and even laughable when the lights are on. As anyone who watches the news can tell you, real-life evil is often performed not by criminal masterminds, but the merely weak and wounded. When crafting the villain’s dialogue and his opinions (right down to his dubious writing advice), I gravitated toward things that made me cringe or even laugh, and tried to invite the reader to react similarly. In any other setting, this guy is an angry wannabe straight from the internet’s deepest echo chambers – but the night he attacks Emma and Laika with a deadly weapon in hand and the intent to harm human and canine alike, we fear what he’s capable of. He may not be the 80’s slasher villain he tries to present himself as – but a hateful, clumsy idiot is arguably even more dangerous. It’s downright unfortunate how many real-world inspirations exist.
One true-to-life element I believe to be overrated is violence. Graphic description can be effective (and certainly one I haven’t been shy with in my past thrillers), but as I read, learn and hopefully grow as a writer, I’ve come to the opinion that the more blood and guts in a thriller, the further you’re stepping away from what the reader can relate to. While writing a certain character’s death scene in The Last Word, I found myself continually deleting sentences because it was less and less effective the more I described it. Fear is all about dreading the unknown, and being certain that Very Bad Things lurk just out of view, even if they can’t be seen. A gruesome death can certainly amp up the adrenaline – in the short term – but in the longer term, you’ve shown the worst thing that can happen. Afterward, the horror becomes more difficult to maintain because the reader has already witnessed the “worst case scenario.” You’ve shown your cards and as grisly as those fates may be, they are no longer unknown. I tried to keep the horror in the reader’s real world, where violence is alluded to but rarely seen firsthand, because the imagined threat to Emma and Laika is almost always the scariest.
I had a blast writing The Last Word and experimenting with ways to make the story’s horror elements more relatable. To fellow writers looking to punch up their thrillers with a tasteful dash of terror, my advice comes down to this: zero in on those small but familiar everyday fears. Don’t be afraid to let the absurd details of the real world peek through. And keep the ugly stuff imagined but unseen for as long as you can.
As for the mystery of how our dog ate that near-fatal chocolate? We later determined our cat knocked the chocolate off the tabletop for the dog to eat.
So like any good thriller, there was a plot twist.
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