“Suspense is a feeling of growing uncertainty about the outcome of events. Writers create suspense by raising the questions in the minds of their readers. Suspense builds until the climax of the plot, at which point the suspense reaches its peak” (Wiggins R33).
In the short story The Fall of the House of Usher suspense is used widely throughout to create a feeling of true horror. Poe uses suspense in this point of the story to build to the climax of the story as a whole. It builds up to the turning of events, when not everything is what it seems. He creates the feeling of suspense by the setting, the eerie setting of the house leads the reader to think something out of the blue will happen. Poe uses suspense by creating building a feeling of uncertainty upon the reader, for example, “ I know not how it was- but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible” (Poe).The suspense aspect in the book creates fear within the reader. The setting has a great deal to cause the suspense, because of the cracked house, dead trees and simultaneous lightning set the tone for the story, which just exemplifies the unsettling feeling. Such as the passage states, the narrator, has a level of uncertainty of something he had once trusted.
In The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe, the sounds Poe uses create an unruly sense of suspense. The suspense is created by the building of the variation of noises, it creates the feeling of separation from the rest of the known world. Stephen King in his famous book Salem's Lot stated “Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym” (King) the loneliness and angst felt by the narrator without his lover had driven him mad, his mind created sounds and imaginative voices whispering, not as a way of coping, but as guilt. The noises created suspense because the reality of loneliness frightens humans especially the effects of it. Poe portrays the madness of the narrator by telling, “But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door. That I scarce was sure I heard you-here I opened wide the door:- Darkness there and nothing more” (Poe). Until the entrance of the raven the sounds that are used build the feeling of insanity and creating the feeling of isolated fear of oneself. the raven alone is nothing to fear, but it speaks the word nevermore. The Raven’s word gradually adds to the suspense of the poem until the narrator descends on his own insanity.