Spacing and suspense: The super(natural) power of the paragraph

Frida Kahlo, Girl with Death Mask [Niña con máscara de calavera], 1938. Nagoya City Art Museum.

The colder shorter days of autumn are here, and that means reaching with pleasurable anticipation for the stack of new horror novels I've accumulated over the last year. I consume much of my fiction as audiobooks which I listen to as I run (sometimes literally!) through my day, but my latest read is an exception – a printed copy of Susan Hill's The Small Hand.

It is an attractively small volume by Profile Books with such a beautiful blue-and-gold embossed cover, I just couldn't leave it behind on the shelf of my local second-hand bookstore. ('Never judge a book by its cover!' they say. Hmm...) The Small Hand is a well-crafted ghost story. Written in the first-person narrative, it tells the tale of a man haunted by a dead child's spirit, made present through the sensation of a soft invisible hand tucking into his own.

Why do people read horror? Part of the attraction of ghost stories and tales of the paranormal is because they provide a safe space to experience the thrill of fear. And though they are a validation of life after death, they also open the door to a twisting reality and making the everyday normal seem uncanny. The Small Hand is scarier as a ghost story because a child's soft little hand should invoke trust and comfort, not mortal terror.

Slowly, slowly, we accompany the protagonist as he is seemingly pushed, slowly, slowly, to the precipice of madness. The author seems to prefer longer chapters broken into sections. As I read, I noticed how a point of dramatic tension in the story was being built up over several long paragraphs, with the narrative climax occurring abruptly in a short concluding paragraph of just one or two sentences. A following section break gifted a brief moment to catch one's breath before the terror continued.

I DO NOT know if I cried out, I do not remember if the hand still clung to mine. I do not know anything, other than that the voice was still in my ears but wavering and becoming fainter and slightly distorted as the world tumbled in upon me and I felt myself fall, and not onto the hard ground but into a bottomless, swirling, dark vortex that had opened at my feet. (Susan Hill, The Small Hand. A Ghost Story (Profile Books, 2010), 124.)

And as I read each page, enjoying the exquisite tension between expectation and fear, I found that I had to fight to keep my eyes on track to read line by line, and not jump ahead to that climatic section break. Just like a ghostly presence divined just outside our field of vision, from the periphery of my eye I could see the final line and the paragraph break further along the page ... something thrilling was surely just about to happen.

Halfway through the book, I found myself having to physically use my hand to cover the lower page and any approaching section breaks, to prevent my cheating eyes from jumping ahead to see what occurs...

A good fiction editor knows that the power of a text doesn't purely reside in word choice and good grammar. Just as the pacing and structure of a plot are crucial for the telling of the story, the pacing and structure of the sentences and paragraphs are just as important for expression. Here in The Small Hand, cadence – the rhythm of sentences and paragraphs – actively crafts the sense of growing suspense. Don't be too surprised if this editor adds a paragraph break or two in your next fiction edit!