How to Write a Chiller Thriller by Sally Spedding

Author:Sally Spedding [Spedding, Sally]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78279-173-7
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2014-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

Exercises

i) Have you experienced any sense of a timeslip? Either forwards or backwards, where a place you’d never been to before, or a person you’d never met before, seemed familiar?

ii) Have you ever, under hypnosis or regression, felt you were someone else? Somewhere else?

Examples

a) Read the remarkable, non-fiction book Adventures in Time by Andrew MacKenzie, details many accounts from ‘ordinary’ people who’ve seen ‘vanished’ buildings, found themselves in distant eras such as three servicemen in the Suffolk village of Kersey on a mediaeval Sunday morning, and others in a cottagelined Nottingham street now lined with factories. Not to be missed!

b) Check out Strangers by Taichi Yamada. A paranormal, slow-burn thriller set in Japan, now being made into a film. The dream-like sequences with the main characters’ long-dead parents who seem to have come alive and live in the present, contrasts with the push and shove of urban Japanese life.

c) From my chiller, The Fold, where ineffectual French teacher, Suzanne Price, recognises the Madonna which the secretive Pierre Arties is carving in front of his hovel in Siguerac. The telegraph wires are significant because they will soon connect the present to a deadly past.

“I bought three identical carvings in Lavelenet,” she ventured. “I might be wrong…” She tailed off at his silence, for there was nothing more to add in the cold detachment that descended between indigene and interloper.

“You are all wrong.” He said.

She noticed how telephone wires connected to his crumbling chimney quivered, emptying of summer birds, and in that moment, felt no warmth from the sun. Instead, the low, threatening pain she’d experienced before the journey, had returned, sapping her earlier confidence and camaraderie.

A feeling of inexplicable dread and desolation gripped her under that holiday-brochure sky, as she followed the fragrant hedgerow which overlooked the summery fields and the serenity of distant country.

Directly ahead, she could see that the minibus had arrived and the student was encircling the waiting group with a loop of loud music from the stereo. An arm dangled casually out of the window, fingers drumming against the yellow door. He was in no hurry to come to a halt and cruised tantalisingly around the parking area several times before the dogs in their wide hawthorn collars lunged at his hand.

“Please stop!” she bleated. “We have to get back as soon as possible!” She knew they’d all stayed too long, and his foot indolently on the accelerator, was delaying their escape. “We have luggage to collect, things to organise…”

But he’d pulled away yet again, turning up the volume until the silent centre of Siguerac reverberated to heavy metal. God on the Rocks.

She ran after him, inhaling the exhaust, making no effort to call off the mastiffs whilst her colleague oblivious to her distress, stretched upwards under the trees, defoliating the lower branches. With both dogs tenaciously clinging to the door, the driver was forced to pull in and amidst deafening noise the group climbed inside.

“I’ll be reporting this tomorrow, make no mistake.” She stood over him, breasts heaving under the downy clinging wool of her jumper.

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