Annotation 1 - Suspense

Title: In The Flesh

Author: Clive Barker

Publication date: 1986

Genre: Suspense/Horror

Summary: In The Flesh is a collection of four short stories by Clive Barker. The first story In The Flesh is about a prison inmate and the strange obsession his new cellmate has with the dead murders buried on the grounds. The Forbidden is the story of a young woman on a quest for graffiti who finds far more in the slums than she expected to. The Madonna follows a young man who encounters strange, naked women at an abandoned pool and later wakes to find he has been changed into a woman himself. Lastly, Babel’s Children has a woman stumbling across a compound that houses the greatest minds in the world who decide major world events. When all but one of them die, she is forced to jump in and take their place.

Characteristics and Appeal Factors:

Pacing/Timeline:  Each of the stories in this collection is up against the wall in terms of time. The titular story happens over the course of a few weeks and The Forbidden follows the main character from the discovery of the situation through her day-by-day attempt to figure out what is going on. It is also written to be read fast. The author grabs you from the first line and drags you through the pages by your nose. Just like the main characters, there is no escape for you.

Atmosphere: As Saricks said, “A dark, menacing atmosphere is essential and underscores the danger to the protagonist” (53). Never have I seen this idea embodied as well as it was in this book. Every word seems to been specifically picked to increase the stress and dread present in the story. Every sentence, even the most innocuous action seems to add to this atmosphere.

Read-a-likes:

Last Call by Tim Powers

The Tomb by F. Paul Wilson

Banquet for the Damned by Adam Nevill

Book Discussion: The process of finding and reading this book seems to directly speak to the whole point of this class. Suspense is not a genre I read in, so I asked around to find a good book to read in the genre. This was highly recommended as suspense, and it is a very suspenseful book, but in the strictest sense of the genre, doesn’t fit in Suspense. According to the definitions set out by Saricks, this book is a Horror book. But it is still a very intense and suspenseful book and the only thing that ‘definitively’ puts it in one genre over the other is the use of the supernatural. It really made clear the complexity of defining any book by genre, not to mention the complexity of defining any given genre. It brings to mind the frustrations I’ve always had, as a lover of both Science Fiction and Fantasy, because most of the time in libraries and book stores those two genres are treated as one thing. “The SciFi/Fantasy section is over there.” When, according to Saricks’ definitions of them, they aren’t even in the same category of genres. I look forward to seeing if the recommendations I’m getting for my other annotations will actually be the genre I wanted in the first place or not.