Does your horror novel need a little boost in the terror department? Looking for ways to make your horror novel scarier for readers?
You’ve come to the right place. We’re about to explore five storytelling strategies that could help you crank up the fear factor within your fiction.
How to Make a Horror Novel Scarier
What makes a horror novel scary? That’s actually a hard question to answer.
As readers, we are all scared in different ways. A horror novel that scares the crap out of me might have little effect on you — and vice versa.
Our fears often stem from our individual life experiences, which can be as unique as our fingerprints. You have yours; I have mine.
Even so, there are some tried-and-true techniques that could make your novel scarier for readers. Here are five techniques worth considering…
1. Let us get to know your characters first.
If you think about some of the horror novels you’ve read over the years, you might notice a kind of pattern. Most of these novels attempt to establish character first, before they fully introduce the terror.
This is a smart strategy. It gives readers a chance to get to know the protagonist and other main characters, before the true horror begins.
When readers feel connected to a character, they’re more likely to share that character’s emotions. On the other hand, if you reveal the “monster” too early in your novel, you might end up reducing the scare factor. Let your characters emerge as people, before you thrust them into harm’s way.
You can also make a scene scarier by revealing your character’s inner fears and emotions. Let us peek inside your protagonist’s head once in a while, so we know where they are emotionally.
For more on this subject, check out my guide to creating realistic characters.
2. Embrace the unknown.
Fear of the unknown is one of the strongest and most common fears. We have all experienced it at one time or another. As a horror writer, you can use this universal fear to make your story scarier for readers.
According to the Journal of Anxiety Disorders:
“Fear of the unknown (FOTU) will be defined herein as, ‘an individual’s propensity to experience fear caused by the perceived absence of information at any level of consciousness or point of processing.”
The “absence of information.” Think about that for a moment. As a writer, you have a chance to withhold information from both your protagonist and the reader. You can prolong the mystery. You can create some unknown thing that lurks in the shadows. You can make people wonder: “What the hell is this thing?”
There’s nothing like a bit of the unknown to make a scene more disturbing.
3. Raise the stakes for your protagonist.
Raising the stakes is another way to crank up the fear factor in a horror story. If your characters have a lot to lose, your story will be more engaging for readers.
Sure, the characters might lose their lives. It is a horror novel after all. But try to dig deeper. What else might they lose, and how would that danger increase their fear and motivation?
Consider the difference:
- A man is camping in the woods alone, when he hears an eerie voice in the distance. This is followed by footsteps crunching through the dry leaves, approaching his position.
- Now imagine a similar scenario, but this time it’s a couple camping with their young child.
In the second scenario, the stakes have been elevated. After all, we can only be so concerned about some guy in the woods alone. But when we have parents looking after a young child, we become more engaged and concerned.
4. Make your scenes more realistic with sensory details.
Realistic scenes help readers suspend their disbelief. It helps the reader become more immersed in your story, emotionally and viscerally.
Let’s say you’re writing a scene where your main character descends into a creepy basement. (A cliché, I know, but it works for illustrative purposes.) If you write, “Amy entered the basement,” you’re not giving the reader much to go on. You’re not painting the scene. By adding details to the scene, you can bring it to life in the reader’s mind.
This is especially true for sensory details like smell, taste, sight and sound. Maybe Amy smells the dust and cobwebs as she descends the stairs. Maybe she hears the faint drip, drip, drip of a water leak somewhere in the dark.
Details like these can make your scenes come alive. They can also make your horror novel scarier and more engaging for readers.
5. Leave some things to the imagination.
We talked about using details to paint a vivid scene. But you have to be selective as to where you add detail.
Sometimes, it’s better to leave things to the reader’s imagination. If you over-describe every aspect of your story, you’re taking the reader’s imagination out of the equation.
This is especially important when describing the monster or bogeyman — or whatever is pursuing your protagonist. If a monster comes out of the woods, and you spend a full page describing its appearance, you could end up sucking the life out of your scene.
But if you paint the monster with a few brushstrokes (ideally through the eyes of your protagonist), readers can then fill in the rest. And the thing they imagine might be scarier than anything you could describe.
As Stephen King wrote in his book On Writing:
“In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.”
