Suspense In The Cask Of Amontillado

Suspense can add a major plot to a story to make it more intriguing. It can be quite difficult to engage the reader into a story if it’s poorly written or it has too little or much information in there. In a way to catch your readers especially with a topic like suspense, you need to know how to perfect your skills to make the story worthwhile. When reading The Most Dangerous Game and The Cask of Amontillado, several things in each story managed to stand out to the reader which made them want to read to the finish. The authors put in much thought about everything they wrote to engage their readers. The suspense is one of the ways in which the two authors engaged their readers into their stories. The setting between The Most Dangerous Game and

General Zaroff in The Most Dangerous Game tells Rainsford that after a while of staying on the island, he was bored of hunting animals so he moved over to humans over a casual dinner. In a way to add more fear into Rainsford, Zaroff tells him, “I hunt the scum of the earth- sailors from tramp ships- lascars, blacks, Chinese, whites, mongrels- a thoroughbred horse or hound is worth more than a score of them”(pg 75). Afterwards, Zaroff began to explain to Rainsford how he prepares the men for the hunt and then warns the latter to avoid going to certain locations to make the hunt last longer. However, when we are talking about the suspense in The Cask of Amontillado, Montresor drags a drunken Fortunato to the chambers of his family supposedly for Amontillado, while in reality, Montresor was planning on killing him. Montresor pretends that he is worried about Fortunato’s cough while he is also throwing around indirect hints that he is planning on killing him. While they are in the crypt, Montresor gives Fortunato no time to answer his questions as he is chaining him to the wall to die a slow and miserable death. Despite the fact that the characters in a story can help out to add suspense to a story, there is also the location which helps out to make the story

In The Cask of Amontillado, Montresor leads Fortunato to the crypt which was described as being dark and moist with bones scattered everywhere. Edgar Allan Poe even go as far to say “Its walls had been lined with human remains, piled to the vault overhead, in the fashion of the great catacombs of Paris”(page 90). The great location shift that happened in The Cask of Amontillado was when it shifted from being at a carnival to the crypts which already added to the suspense. However, when referring to The Most Dangerous Game, the location could fill the reader with an anxiety rush since it was dark and mysterious from the beginning to the end. The Most Dangerous Game starts off with Whitney talking about Ship-Trap Island and how the crew’s nerves seemed jumpy when they were nearby. The story starts off in the middle of the ocean while it is dark and foggy out making the reader worry about what will happen to the characters they read about. During the great hunting scene, the location changes with vivid details to make one feel as if they were alongside Rainsford desperately trying to survive. When Rainsford is being told about the dogs, General Zaroff tells him that het sets them upon those who try to run off. To make the dogs seem more mysterious, the author states