“Suspense isn’t a pleasant sensation.”

In the L.A. Weekly, Thomas Perry analyzes why suspense novels keep us glued to the page.

We go to great lengths to manage our lives in ways that will keep us from having to go through periods of uncertainty — particularly when it’s prolonged, and when the stakes are high. But in reading fiction, especially a novel, we crave this sensation of increasing tension, and the higher the stakes, the better. We love the experience of sitting somewhere in perfect safety with a book while some character serves as our surrogate in facing a world full of danger. What we’re enjoying is growing excitement, followed by a tantalizingly delayed cathartic ending. It’s a quality of all good fiction, and it’s why the reader keeps turning the pages.

He uses Pride and Prejudice to demonstrate how it works.

And he notes, “As much as they might enjoy suspense, critics tend to be a bit suspicious of it, perhaps because it seems to stimulate emotion rather than intellect: It makes readers care rather than think.”

(Via Sarah Weinman.)