Analysing the Pattern of "Suspense Building" in "Stephen King's the Shining"

Stephen King is an iconic author who wrote several legendary novels in the horror genre. He is a prolific writer who combines various genres and conventions to create stories which explore modern social issues, according to the academics who have gone through his works over the years. To be precise, The Shining is a modern Gothic and American horror novel. The novel explores supernatural elements and more solid threats and explicit metaphors of violence. The Shining consists of various pop - culture references and references to real brands and people. King also uses the effect of reality with various textual approaches like italics, bold text, colloquialisms, and locations. These approaches blur the line between fiction and reality and italics also have acoustic power. This article is aimed to discuss how King builds suspense in "The Shining". The article explores the basic motifs of suspense in the novel and creates some usual patterns of distribution and development across the novel. After theoretically explaining the suspense, the paper explores how King has built the same in the novel. To examine the patterns of "suspense building" in story, this study collects secondary data from various relevant studies. There are three groups of suspenseful motifs in King?s novel as per their operations - small moments of surprises, suspense revealed at the climax, and gradually developed suspense.