I’ll be comparing two online blog stories, The Dionea House, a haunted house story by Eric Heisserer, and The Sick Land, a science fiction horror story by Jon Hills. Both use the blogging medium for their tales. In The Dionea House, a group of individuals fall prey to an evil house and their stories are told either through postings of emails in blog format or on blogs themselves. Each post builds up tension as characters, one by one, decide to enter the evil house(es). As each blogger succumbs to the house, they either stop posting or the house takes over their missives. Various comments are left on posts by various interested parties, some possibly some by the evil house itself.
The Sick Land is the story of one single blogger on a field study to a remote and abandoned area consumed by illness, destruction, and gory ends for many researchers. You follow one blog writer, Alex, for the entire story and his blog presumably ends with his death after a series of adventures out in the field and in various research facilities.
While reading the second story, I started to think about the use of suspense in the blog format. Suspense is a literary sub-concept of conflict. Conflict can be defined as the challenge or struggles characters face against other characters, situations, or nature. Suspense is an element of a story that introduces anxiety or uncertainty pertaining to that conflict. Suspense brings conflict to life and entices the reader to keep going, to resolve the anxiety. Suspense works on our natural desire to reach conclusion and equilibrium from the ongoing conflict.
In both of these stories, the conflict involves characters struggling against the supernatural. Suspense is created around irrational behaviors, unexplainable events, plot points where a character is about to do something risky or brave.
Here are two examples form The Dionea House. In this first example, Eric ends his first post by saying "I am profoundly sorry." That simple statement is meant to create anxiety for the reader.
What is he so "profoundly sorry" about? What could possibly have happened to warrant such a dire tone? The next example occurs at the end of a post and is stated much more matter-of-factly:
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| from post 9.20.2004 |
In The Sick Land. Hills leads many of his blog posts with a suspense sentence, like the one below:
"Something killed Saul." Very understated but a very alarming way to begin a daily post. What killed Saul! You are compelled to read on to find out.
In online blogs it would seem most logical to place cliff hangers at the beginning and ends of blog posts. Or in the case of The Sick Land, at the end of a grouping of blog posts, the final post in a monthly roll up.
But there are challenges to pacing suspense in a blog versus a physical book. In a physical book, ends of chapters are logical stopping points for readers. Rarely will someone stop in the middle of a chapter. So you place your cliff hangers at the ends of chapters. But in blog posts, there are no logical places to stop reading, other than at the ends of posts. So it's very difficult to predict where suspense is needed. It's a new structural paradigm and might take a reconsideration of narrative timing. For example, you can't overload a reader with suspense in every single post. That would be too fatiguing and your tactics would lose their effectiveness.
Hills used segments of months (see right) like chapters and created suspense in the posts at the end of months. Alternatively, Heisserer's story was a collection of multiple blogs and suspense was created in the final posts of each blog, where characters had a climactic encounter with the haunted house.
Blogs do have affordances that work to aid suspense. Both authors here used common blog functionality to place uncanny tension in their post titles or late-night date stamps. Blogs also seem more real and immediate due to their accessibility online. You make assumptions that blog writers are out there in the real world self publishing their scary experiences in the here and now. Whereas, once you start reading a physical book, the fact of that book's production, having been vetted through a publisher, creates more emotional distance. You assume that story already has a resolution, the writer probably isn't dead or they couldn't have published this book. None of those assurances are available to a blog story.
Ultimately, whether or not the suspenseful tactics of these two stories works on you will depend on your particular threshold of fear. Both authors created multiple suspenseful moments within the allowances of the blogging form. Real cliffhangers were placed in logical locations but you would still encounter them somewhat randomly due to the structure of blogs. However, the form does have an inherent aura of suddenly encountering a "lost diary" and that works well for creating general suspense in a story.
Works Cited
Heisserer, Eric. “The Dionaea House.” Creepypasta, http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/The_Dionaea_House. Accessed 2 February 2019.
Ohdanigirl. Adventures in Babysitting, LiveJournal, https://ohdanigirl.livejournal.com/. Accessed 2 February 2019.Hills, Jon. “The Sick Land.” Blogger, http://thesickland.blogspot.com/. Accessed 10 February 2019.
Levin, Jennifer. Missing Since Sept, Blogger, http://jennylevin.blogspot.com/. Accessed 2 February 2019.
Mathers, Loreen. loreenmathers, LiveJournal, https://loreenmathers.livejournal.com/. Accessed 2 February 2019.
u/HIGHzurrer. “Information I'm dumping here for safekeeping.” Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/2hi7e6/information_im_dumping_here_for_safekeeping/. Accessed 2 February 2019.
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