Compare the ways in which the authors of 'The Red Room', 'The Black Cottage' and 'The Signalman' Create Fear and Suspense

Essay by tamzenHigh School, 10th grade March 2004

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In this essay I will be examining how the authors of 'The Red Room', 'The Black Cottage' and 'The Signalman', create fear and suspense in the reader.

The fear genre is a huge genre that has thousands of stories within it. The scariest are ones that can make the reader actually think he or she are in the story. They can make the reader feel the different emotions and feelings that occur in the story. The techniques that authors can use to create such an atmosphere are things like personification, similes, metaphors, first person narrative, etc, all these things makes the reader feel like their in the story rather than just reading it. Each story has a way of keeping the reader in suspense. 'The red room' keeps the reader thinking what could be making the candles go out? 'The black cottage' keeps the reader on the edge of their seat by making the thieves persevere at breaking into the cottage.

'The signalman' makes the reader think what could the signalman be haunted by? The endings in each of the stories aren't that conclusive at all apart from 'The black cottage'. 'The red room' reveals that fear itself was making the narrator to panic and finally pass out 'Fear that will...in the room'. 'The black cottage is the exception because the girl, Bessie, gets out and is saved by a young farmer which she then marries. 'The signalman' again has a very strange ending where the signalman dies because he thought the spectre was telling him to beware, 'below there, look out'. He then comes to his death by being hit by a train. This is an example of dramatic irony. It then goes on to reveal that the train driver was saying, 'below there, look...