It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Effective Use of Weather to Create Tension and Introduce an Atmosphere of Menace
By Carol Willis
Dark atmosphere and ominous weather can be effective ways to immediately introduce tension and establish a menacing mood. Let’s look at several psychological thrillers for a few excellent examples. Consider Imran Mahmood’s gripping thriller, I Know What I Saw (2021). The book begins with ominous weather:
The sky is a bruised sea. It threatens to burst and split the night.
These two sentences are short, but they create tension and a dark mood. I promise to not bog you down in grammar, but let’s linger on these two sentences a bit longer and consider the word choice. The image of a “bruised sea” immediately invokes an image of violence; a violence that is expansive and dark and deep as an ocean. Then look at the second line. "Threatens" is the main verb in the present tense and "to burst and split" is an infinitive phrase acting as the direct object of "threatens." The verbs "burst" and "split" are connected by "and," indicating two actions that "it" (the sky) threatens to do. The sentence ends with "the night" which is the object of the infinitives "burst" and "split," showing what the sky threatens to affect.
The nouns sky, sea and night are expansive, all-encompassing. We know what they are and can even picture them in our mind’s eye. But they are also difficult to contemplate. The sea and the night sky extend beyond the horizon, beyond the limits of our vision. And the choice of verbs bruised (used as an adjective to modify the noun sea), threaten, burst and spilt are all violent. Two sentences. Fourteen words. There is immediate, almost epic feel of impending doom. Do you feel it? I can.
Writers are often taught, don’t start with the weather. But this example proves that rules can be broken. The short punchy sentences also help characterize the main character who is a battered and bruised homeless man about to stumble over a dead body.
Let’s take a quick look at Black Car Burning (2019) by Helen Mort, a poet and her debut novel.
Today the sky is full of thunder. Great gobs of cloud above the Penistone Road. The girls don’t have an umbrella and they’re shrieking, laughing as the rain starts to strike.
A brief description of weather can lend itself to beautiful and lyrical writing. These three sentences are wonderful – they set the scene but also tell us so much about the novel using weather as metaphor to the loss of innocence that is about to happen.
In The Patient (2022), Jane Shemilt’s moody suspense thriller begins with a dark, rainy night to set the tone and create an atmosphere of menace:
The footsteps were buried inside other sounds to start with. Rain pattering on leaves, branches sighing in the wind, a lorry in the distance on the Blandford Road. I thought I was hearing things again. Things that Nathan had told me weren’t really there. There were few street lights along this path. The floodlit Cathedral behind the trees cast shadows on the gravel. A woman had been murdered here at night a hundred years ago. On cloudy nights like this one, walking here felt dangerous… I was out of luck tonight. I began to hurry. The footsteps were louder now.
As with all great openings, we get a lot of details in a few short sentences. She sets up the atmosphere: dark, rainy night and the sound of footsteps following—something every woman in the world has experienced at one time or another—and the immediate fear it invokes. Then we get the hint that she might not be reliable and the introduction of Nathan. Then we get the sentence about the murdered woman. So, we get a dead body—the body is not described for us—but we see it nonetheless. Murdered. She doesn’t say killed—which could be an accident—but murdered gives us the evil intent and links us to the sound of the ominous footsteps introduced in the very first sentence. Then she says, it felt dangerous. And we feel the danger, too. As the footsteps get louder, we sense the urgency, the immediacy of the situation. So far, the image in these sentences is very effective.
Atmosphere is everything in psychological thrillers, and few things conjure menace more powerfully than the threat of something—or someone—lurking just out of sight. In just a few deftly crafted sentences, the author immerses us in a world of unease, where the sound of footsteps on a darkened path doesn’t just suggest danger—it demands we keep turning the page.
The sky doesn’t have to be dark and stormy to create an atmosphere of menace. Take a look at what Laura McHugh does in What’s Done in Darkness (2021). This is the fifth book by Laura McHugh. She writes books inspired by true crime and often sets them in the Ozarks or rural Kansas. Her main characters are often poor and part of marginalized communities (religious or otherwise) but she does not veer into sentimentality or glamorization. Let’s take a look at the opening paragraph:
Sarabeth – That day, age 17
The blacktop road stretched empty in either direction. The sky hazy. The air heavy as a sodden sponge. The heat of the late morning sun amplified the autumn scent of drying cornstalks. The putrid sweetness of persimmons rotting in the ditch. Insects swarmed the fermenting fruit buzzing like an unholy plague. Sarabeth brushed away a sweat bee. She had walked the long twisting road from the house to roadside stand alone pulling a wagon with one bad wheel, her legs sweating beneath her ankle-length skirt. Her little sister, Sylvie, sometimes worked the stand with her but today she was home with a fever and vicious sore throat. Her mother had spent the morning praying over her.
The book begins with the inciting event: 17-year-old, Sarabeth, is abducted while attending the family’s roadside vegetable stand alone on one hot autumn day.
What do we see in the set up?
We get a sense for the time of year—autumn with its smells, but still hot. The air is hazy and heavy. There is something already oppressive in this opening paragraph. The road stretching empty in either direction is a clear image and as we read on it adds to the characterization of this teenager who is alone and isolated in a rural community. Her family’s religion with a distinct undercurrent of something rotting is conveyed in this paragraph with the use of words like empty/alone/putrid sweetness/rotting/ unholy plague/ankle-length skirt/praying over her.
Just from the opening, we know something is likely off or wonky like the “one bad wheel” of the wagon. Why is she in a long skirt on a hot day? Why is a 17-year-old not in school? Why is her sister, obviously sick and with fever, lying in bed and being prayed over instead of being taken to the doctor? The long twisting road she had to walk—we get the sense that her life is or soon will be a long twisting road. Just like the blacktop road, her life is empty in all directions.
From this opening paragraph we know a lot. We know that Sarabeth is 17 years old, lives in a rural community, is isolated, not in school, and is likely oppressed (atmosphere of menace) and rotting away under a strict religious family. Again, we see the use of a crime or conflict in the beginning. The ordinariness of the day – a girl taking vegetables to sell at a roadside stand. It is the epitome of rural Americana which only adds to the internal dread and anxiety we feel.
This is an excellent example of opening with atmosphere/weather that are brilliantly used to characterize themes of rural life in Arkansas, isolation, religious extremism, loss of innocence, women’s rights/inequality, which are all are part of this propulsive thriller.
Next month, we will consider one of the biggest questions in psychological thrillers: the mind and behavior of the main character.
