One gloomy fall in the late 1900s, three insidious forces entered my life at the exact same moment, leading to a season of sorrow and fear the likes of which I have never experienced since. I was a college student, fresh-faced, innocent, and enjoying my first taste of intellectual freedom. Like one of H.P. Lovecraft’s tragic heroes, I was searching for esoteric knowledge to improve my lot in life, and like one of those damned academics, I soon found myself sunk deep into a morass of sinister studies.

It was my treacherous advisor – all helpful solicitation during our meetings – who set me on this dark path with the suggestion that I enroll in an unholy trinity of foul and carnivorous advanced-level courses: algebra, logic, and grammar. All at the same time.

“Get them out of the way,” he tempted. “You’ll be glad you did,” he lied.

That semester was filled with professors of the eldritch arts wielding implements of torture, from sentence diagrams to Boolean operators, and I spent many an evening weeping, gnashing my teeth, and questioning my unraveling sanity. In the end, however, studying those accursed courses concurrently illuminated the profound logical scaffolding that underpins all languages – the mathematical, the rational, yes, even the poetic.

Suddenly, the ebb and flow of sentence structures was not just art, but a versatile formulae, an alchemical equation that could be studied, engineered, and manipulated to create serenity, suspense, or urgency.

I’m talking about pacing, a particularly important skill when you’re crafting tales of terror and suspense (and I hope you are as our October event Ghosts of the Coast will be the perfect time to share and scare). Pacing, like most elements of writing craft, depends in large part on how you construct your sentences. While there’s a dark art to it, there’s also logic and a certain amount of calculation. Let’s look at a few examples.

Sentences that Set the Pace

In the early stages of a horror story, you may want to establish a baseline “normal” pace (so that you can disrupt it later with murder, mayhem, or monsters). For example:

The town clock struck midnight, and the streets were silent except for the rustling of autumn leaves.

The balanced syntactic structure of this straightforward sentence grounds the reader in a tranquil atmosphere before any funny business unfolds. It establishes setting and provides sensory details quickly but without tension or urgency. Instead, the imagery of “silent streets” juxtaposed against the “rustling of autumn leaves” offers a serene moment that will make future action more unsettling by contrast.

Sentences that Build Suspense

Thrillers are only as scary as their most suspenseful scenes, and those scenes often employ hypotaxis, the use of subordinating conjunctions to craft complex sentences with dependent clauses that offer context or depth.

In the dim light of the attic, where memories were cloaked in layers of dust and time, a faint whisper could be heard, growing ever so slightly with each passing second.

Hypotaxis works well for building suspense because it allows you to deliver information in a bread crumb trail, luring the reader deeper into the narrative. In the sentence above, the phrase “In the dim light of the attic” draws the reader into a specific location. The follow-up dependent clause “where memories were cloaked in layers of dust and time” slows the pace, adding history to the environment. Finally, the main clause “a faint whisper could be heard” introduces an element of unease – something that shouldn’t be there in the attic. That anxiety is compounded by the continuation “growing ever so slightly with each passing second.” The sentence effectively stretches out the suspense, causing readers to linger on each word, feeling the whisper grow louder in their minds.

Sentences that Startle the Unsuspecting

On the other end of the spectrum, master horror writers often use parataxis to create a sense of panic. In this case, short clauses or phrases are placed beside one another without the use of coordinating or subordinating conjunctions.

Doors slammed, footsteps echoed, and she ran, heart pounding, as every shadow seemed to reach for her.

Parataxis gives this sentence its breathless feel. The immediate start with “Doors slammed” jolts the reader into the action. This, coupled with the other quick descriptors like “footsteps echoed,” creates a sense of escalating tension. The conjunction “and” then leads to a longer clause, dragging the reader along with the character’s desperate escape attempt. All together, this creates a frantic pace that foments frenzy in the poor reader’s mind.

Building Your Horror Grimoire

In Lovecraft’s horror, several protagonists are undone by the discovery of a grimoire, an ancient spellbook written by a wizard, witch, or alchemist. In the real world, these dusty, old tomes contained calculations and formulae that promised to grant magicians the ability to control the universe with carefully chosen words and images. In the realm of literature, the shared etymological lineage of “grimoires” and “grammar” underscores the dark magic inherent in language. Just as a grimoire holds the potential to conjure spells, understanding the logic of grammar grants writers the power to manipulate pacing, build suspense, and evoke the very essence of horror. This convergence of the historical, the mystical, and the grammatical offers a rich literary grimoire from which we wicked writers can craft tales that captivate, terrify, and mesmerize.

At Ghosts of the Coast, you’ll have five minutes to scare the hell out of your audience, so choose from your own grammatical grimoire with all the obsessive care of Lovecraft’s crazed occultists.