Every thriller starts with a question, and then makes the reader wait until the very end for the answer. Will the bad guy be stopped? Will our hero survive? Will my lover be found before she’s killed? That’s suspense at its most elemental.
But the best thrillers do something more: they tap into our most primal fears: Fear of the dark, fear of death, fear of betrayal, fear of a loved one being harmed, fear of strangers. And as all writers know, the only way to frighten a reader is to frighten ourselves, to draw upon our own fears.
One of the scariest books I read when I was a kid was a true crime story called 83 Hours ‘Til Dawn by Barbara Jane Mackle and Gene Miller. It was about Barbara Mackle, wealthy young “heiress,” as she was called, who was kidnapped from her motel room, chloroformed, and buried in a box in the remote woods beneath eighteen inches of dirt. Inside the fiberglass-reinforced box was an air pump connected to vent tubes sticking out of the ground, a battery-operated lamp, enough food to last a couple of days, and some sedative-laced drinking water. Her kidnappers demanded half a million dollars in ransom. She spent three days in that underground box.
That book was absolutely terrifying. Naturally, I made my two younger brothers read it.
One of them grew up with serious claustrophobia, and it’s my fault. He was too young to read something like that. To this day, he can barely stand taking elevators, and he works on a high floor of a Manhattan office tower.
But I remained untroubled by claustrophobia. Until one day, a couple of years ago, when I was touring Israel with my family, and our guide took us down into an ancient labyrinth of tunnels at Beit Guvrin, in the Judean desert. There, far below the surface, a network of tunnels had been dug into the soft chalk bedrock two thousand years ago.
We crawled through narrow passageways that got steadily narrower, the ceiling lower and lower, for what seemed like a mile. You had to stoop down in some places to get through, then crawl on your hands and knees, and at one point, the ceiling height dropped to fifteen inches, and the tunnel became so tight that you had to suck in your breath and slither through on your belly.
And suddenly, at the tightest, narrowest part, I had a terrible thought: what if that overweight woman just ahead of me got stuck and I were trapped down here?
A hundred feet or whatever below ground.
I was overcome with a horror that’s hard to describe, even for a novelist. My heart began racing, and I felt cold and began sweating copiously. For the first time in my life I was experiencing a full-blown panic attack.
Obviously I made it to the surface, though the less said about how the better. But ever since then, I’ve been unable to do the sort of adventurous things I used to enjoy doing when I traveled, like climbing narrow bell towers in Tuscany or visiting caves or exploring tunnels at archaeological sites. I was like a Vietnam vet with post-traumatic stress disorder that can be triggered by the sound of a car backfiring.
I now knew the cold terror of the claustrophobic, because I was one of them.
Why, then, would I decide to write a thriller about a teenaged girl who’s kidnapped, drugged, and then buried alive in a heavy-gauge steel coffin ten feet underground? The answer, I suppose, is that this was just about the scariest thing I could imagine. After all, as Hitchcock once said: “The way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them.” Maybe he had a point.
And here’s the strange thing about the way I write: whenever possible, I like to experience what my characters experience. I won’t set a sequence in Moscow unless I’ve been there. I learned to shoot handguns (and got pretty good at it) because in almost all of my books someone fires a weapon.
Reading about being buried alive wasn’t the same thing, even if I could find an account written by someone who’d gone through the experience and lived to tell. Obviously I wasn’t willing to be buried alive – there are limits, even for me – but I decided I needed to know what it felt like to be locked into an actual coffin. For most people, that would be unpleasant. For me, given my newfound claustrophobia, I knew it would be deeply terrifying.
But do you think it’s easy to find someone who’ll agree to put you in a coffin? I called a dozen funeral homes in the Boston area. Each of them couldn’t get off the phone fast enough. Finally I remembered a funeral home in Quincy, Massachusetts, where I’d made the final arrangements for both of my in-laws. The funeral home director there knew and liked me and immediately agreed to my morbid request.
When I arrived, he told me all about caskets (starting with the fact that no one in the business says “coffin”). He showed me which ones were the strongest and would, therefore, be most likely to hold up under the pressure of six or ten feet of dirt without a concrete vault protecting it. He told me that the number of obese Americans has increased so much that the extra-large size is now in great demand.
Then he and his assistant took one down from the display shelf and opened it and let me get inside.
Then they lowered the lid and locked it.
My first reaction wasn’t what you might expect. It wasn’t gasping, breathless terror. Instead, I was surprised at how comfortable the mattress was. I could take a nice long nap.
Then I felt a strange sense of calm: it was absolutely dark and extremely quiet. I could barely hear the muffled voices outside.
And then, as I shifted position, my hands brushed against the sides, and my forehead touched the hard inside of the lid, and my heart began to pound. I was locked in a box. I began to feel queasy. I spoke, but no one replied. Only later did I learn that they couldn’t hear me through the thick steel walls of the casket.
I lay there for as long as I could stand. I lost track of time – was it thirty seconds? Three minutes? It quickly became warm inside there, and then hot. The air got close, damp and stuffy. I could smell the fresh paint on the steel.
The icy fingers of a panic attack ran itself over me. I found myself unable to fill my lungs with air. I couldn’t take more than the shallowest of breaths. I began pounding on the sides and lids of the casket to let the funeral home director and his assistant know that I was done now, that I wanted out. Now. I wished I’d thought of prearranging a signal.
Eventually they figured out that I wanted to be released, and I emerged, sweat-drenched and gulping fresh air and feeling like an idiot for inflicting this singular horror upon myself in the name of research.
The scenes I later wrote from the kidnapped girl’s point of view would not have been anywhere near as powerful had I not endured this research, as awful as it was. Couldn’t I have simply imagined it, made it up? I doubt it. The details that made it feel so realistic to the reader were all things I was able to evoke while writing it, which I could do only because I’d experienced them all first hand. I didn’t read them anywhere.
So the research was invaluable, yes. But it also taught me that Alfred Hitchcock was wrong. Writing about your fears doesn’t always make them go away. Sometimes it just makes them worse.
The next time I get into a coffin I hope is my last.
Image courtesy of sskennel
Joseph Finder is the author of several previous thrillers, most recently the New York Times bestsellers Paranoia, Company Man, and Killer Instinct. His newest book Buried Secrets will be released in June, 2011. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
