It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Effective Use of Weather to Create Tension and Introduce an Atmosphere of Menace

By Carol Willis

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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.  

The Writer’s Playbook | A Ripe Kumquat

By Steven Harms

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“Fumble at the thirty-two-yard line! Rod Smith jumped on that ball like it was a ripe kumquat!”

That line was uttered during a radio broadcast of a Detroit Lions home football game. And I’d bet my life savings that “kumquat” hadn’t been used in an NFL broadcast prior and would never be again. The Lions radio color announcer, Jim Brandstatter, made that rather pointed reference to a Lions defensive player recovering the fumbled ball. The idea of a kumquat on a football field conjures up a comedic image. A fumbled football is sort of one itself: as the ball bounces around, players scramble to get it; sometimes they accidentally kick it or refumble it as they frantically try to hold on. In the context of a fumbled football, using a kumquat simile was perfect.

Why did he say it that way? Well, he and I had a weekly challenge when I was working for the Lions. Each week during the season I would give him a word that he had to weave into the broadcast. I wrote it out on a small piece of paper about an hour before kickoff, entered the broadcast booth, and subtly handed it to him. It was our “thing.” If he was able to insert the “word of the game” into the broadcast each week during the season, I owed him lunch. If he missed one game, he owed me the same. As the weeks wore on, I had to get more creative if I wanted to win, and I thought I had him trapped with “kumquat.” The fumble happened in the fourth quarter, no less, of that game. Jim told me afterward he was on the verge of losing but for that fumble.

The point is, using a kumquat as a descriptive simile worked. In fact, it worked very well. Reimagine the utterance if it was a ripe apple, green bean, onion, or ear of corn. Not quite the same for some reason, is it? Or worse, if he stated “like a ripe egg” or “like a noisy kumquat.”

Bad similes are story killers and can take an author’s credentials down a few notches on the reader’s scale. They undermine a reader’s engagement with the story and implant in them a negative distraction that may carry throughout the rest of the book. 

However, a well-written simile can evoke just the right emotion. As a creative tool, it paints a picture that resonates in readers’ minds—good or bad—but it clicks. Similes can be quite powerful if written well and deployed at the perfect intersectional moment. 

A few rules to follow in writing similes (and there may be others):

KEEP THEM LOGICAL

The simile must be logical in comparison with the moment described, and it must have an immediate connection for the reader. If the reader needs to pause to think through the comparison because it doesn’t compute, don’t use it.

USE THEM SPARINGLY

Overuse of anything is generally not an effective strategy. I’ll relate it back to sports. If a football team always runs to the left on first down, the maneuver becomes boring and predictable and unsuccessful. 

STAY WITHIN COMMON KNOWLEDGE

A simile that uses unique or uncommon elements in the comparison can destroy the moment because the reader can’t grasp what it is you’re trying to say. If Jim Brandstatter had said “Rod Smith jumped on that ball like it was a timorous mangosteen!” (a real fruit from Southeast Asia), he may have been fired the next morning, or at least ridiculed for a full week.

STAY CLEAR OF SIMILARITY

When you’re deciding on a simile, ensure the two components of your comparison are different enough to drive home the point. As an example, a sentence that reads “She ran up the hill like an athlete in training” doesn’t give the reader much clarity on what that character was doing, since athletes do run up hills as part of their training regimen. There’s not a lot of separation. Conversely, “She ran up the hill like a wounded deer” creates an image of a frantic person, hobbled by fear as she’s trying to get somewhere fast and out of sight.

Whenever similes are deployed, read them to yourself to see if they’re effective. As an example, one of my characters in The Counsel of the Cunning voices his feeling that what he and his assistant detective are experiencing during their hunt for a missing person isn’t adding up. He amplifies this and says, “it’s like a duck in robin’s nest.” The point being that while a duck and a robin are both birds, their distinctions are profound, and a duck would never, nor could ever, be in a robin’s nest. He instinctively knows something is “just off,” and he uses this simile to make the point. He’s saying a bird in a nest is right, but the type of bird is wrong, or the nest should be in the water and not in a tree. In other words, their hunt is going in a direction that gives him pause, that makes him think something’s amiss, but he can’t quite put a finger on it.

Similes are a great tool to propel a story or a moment or a character description. But they are a unique tool and need to be done with precision if used. Don’t shy away from using them as writers, but be tactical in placing them and intuitive in writing them.

Motifs for Murder

By Delphine Boswell

No, the title is not a typo, and motifs was not meant to be motives.

If you had asked me, “What is a motif?” twenty-five years ago, I would have had no idea. After earning a master’s degree in Rhetoric and Composition, teaching college and university students, and receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing, I shout out not only the definition but also the importance of motifs in mysteries.

Of course, the definition of a motif, or at least mine, is: a literary device that uses repetition of a key word, phrase, symbol, color, or image to emphasize a subtle meaning. A motif also helps to develop the overall theme of the written work.

In my work in progress, one of my motifs is dead black crows. Some see crows—more than two are called a murder—as a message or prediction of sadness, danger, and even death to come. Further employing crows as a motif also helps to emphasize my overall theme of good versus evil and, more specifically, that even the most righteous can fall from a pedestal of grace into the darkness of sin.

But what exactly is the etymology of the word motif? Interestingly, the origin of the word dates back to the 14th century when the word in Old French meant to “drive,” and in Medieval Latin meant “to move.” Similarly, today, motifs are used to drive or move the theme along.

The use of motifs in mystery novels serve this very purpose, and in fact, Edgar Allan Poe, considered to be the father of detective fiction, used such common motifs as death, fear or terror, and madness in several of his short stories.

In the Sherlock Holmes canon, written by Arthur Conan Doyle, he creates such themes as cunning and cleverness, justice and judgment, and society and class, to name a few. He uses such symbols as Toby the dog to represent devotedness and faithfulness, a coronet as a tool to represent greed and hidden worth, and exotic animals to represent the dark, threatening, and poisonous nature of Dr. Roylott in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.”

Agatha Christie used a rhyming verse of then there were none, well as dreams and hallucinations, as motifs in her novel “And Then There Were None.”

Motifs can be used in character development. If a character is depressed, the description of her clothes as being heavy and black can convey her mood. If a character is arrogant and haughty, the writer might choose to use the motif of mirrors or the repeated phrase mirror, mirror on the wall. The continual wailing of a baby can foster grief, suffering, and pain. 

Motifs can also be implemented to create a mood. A foreboding tone might use motifs such as heavy drapery, dusty furniture, or squeaky floors. On the other hand, a joyous mood could be represented by gnomes appearing in a sitting room or in a garden. A threatening mood might be depicted by thunderstorms, lightening, and thunder.

Another place to incorporate motif is in setting. Rain might imply treacherous conditions or uncontrollable circumstances. Some motifs to describe an isolated setting are weeds, dead flowers, or a howling coyote. A hospital’s motifs are squeaky oxfords, medicinal smells, or overhead public announcements.

In the above examples of characterization, mood development, or setting creation, you probably noticed that motifs are often examples of sensory language, such as sight, sound, and smell. What categorizes them as motifs is the frequent use of them in a written work.

Another literary term known as a tag also becomes a motif if used often. An example of this is a tapping cane, a pipe’s scent, or a twitching eye. Not only are these words used to describe or to set apart one character from another, but they also could imply nervous habits, anxious traits, or restlessness if used as motifs.

In my opinion, this literary device is often neglected in mystery novels. The importance of red herrings, misdirection, and cliffhangers, for example, are a must, but don’t discount the use of motif to reinforce your theme, add depth and meaning for the reader, and contribute a subtle ambiance to the plot.