Repulsion and Fascination : Bringing the Suspense of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” Into the EFL Classroom

Reading and writing are two of the fundamental skills of language learning and, accordingly, are highlighted in the Swedish curriculum for English education. One of the common challenges EFL teachers face is how to carry out reading and writing tasks in a reliable, imaginative, and constructive manner. As an addition to this discussion, I suggest horror fiction to be a viable source for not only engaging students in the act of reading, but also in the act of writing. I therefore perform an analysis of suspense in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” in order to show how Lovecraft builds and maintains suspense. This analysis is then used in order to propose a method for comprehensibly teaching creative writing with a focus on the creation of suspense. Through the merging of two theories—Meir Sternberg’s theory of suspense as a gap in the reader’s knowledge and Noël Carroll’s theory of suspense as the seeming inevitability of an undesirable outcome—I analyse “The Shadow over Innsmouth” in order to show how Lovecraft creates suspense. The gradual introduction and eventual reveal of the monsters of the story, the narrator’s dismissal of crucial warnings, and dangerous seeking of knowledge all facilitate these gaps which finally culminate in the revelation of monstrous ancestry and the narrator being placed in a life-threatening situation. These story moments are explained as key for the creation of suspense. Drawing on this analysis, a method for teaching effective suspenseful writing is then presented, inspired by Christian Knoeller’s theory of imaginative responses to works of fiction, to utilise the established connection between reading and writing in language teaching. In this final section, I simplify the theories of the creation of suspense into concepts of foreshadowing and plot twists, as comprehensive teaching tools in the upper secondary classroom.