4 Tips for Turning Unexpected Settings Into Horrific Playgrounds

Whether it be a screenplay, a short story, or a full-length novel, there’s an old adage I keep on a virtual Post-It stuck to the right frontal lobe of my overtaxed brain. Imagine the following scrawled in Sharpie on a bright yellow square:

Subvert Expectations

This is a phrase you’ll hear time and time again from both book editors and movie producers, and for the most part, they’re right. It’s a good thought to keep around while crafting a new story or thinking through a fresh idea.

Like most things, of course, it’s easier said than done. I mean, how does one subvert the expectations of a reader?

Great question, and there are a lot of different answers—everything from playful text design (you have to read it through a mirror!) to shattering tropes (it’s a rom-com slasher!) to unforeseen plot twists (the dog did it!) to shocking character development (Grandma’s an axe murderer?!).

The one I like to play with the most, however, is the setting. The stage, or stages, where the players perform your literary script.

To that end, here are four tips on how to make setting an effective device for your next story, and help you subvert those pesky reader expectations:

In fiction, you’ll often notice that the description of a story’s primary setting isn’t given a lot of word count. This is particularly true in thrillers, when the author is more focused on keeping the reader flipping pages, relying on plot beats, dialogue, set pieces, and just enough character development to let the reader know who the bad guys are.

By taking more time, and care, with your story’s primary setting, you can better immerse the reader in what’s happening with your plot and characters and set pieces, because the world your character live within will become a living, breathing entity.

Are your characters stuck in a bathroom? Take a few paragraphs to describe it. What color are the towels? What do the tiles beneath your feet feel like? What kind of tub are we talking about? Are there cracks in the ceiling? Spots of mold in the shower?

There’s a big difference between two characters trapped in a clean, well-lit modern bathroom, or stuck inside one where the sink shudders and spits brown water from a squeaky, rusted spout and the walls are covered in aged, peeling wallpaper decorated with sad clown faces.

You can apply this practice to any setting you may be dealing with: A house, a car, a forest, an office building, or even the surface of an alien planet. Make the reader feel and see what your characters are feeling and seeing by coloring the world around them in a way that enhances the creepy, scary, hilarious, despairing, or unnerving actions of the story.

What do I mean by “problem?” There a few possibilities. We could be talking about anything from a haunted house (e.g. The Amityville Horror, House of Leaves) to a deadly environment (e.g. Sahara desert, sub-zero Antarctica). Or it could be something not necessarily sinister in its own right, such as a crowded amusement park (where children get easily lost and everyone, it seems, is screaming), a hedge maze (a la The Shining), or an aristocratic mansion where the eyes of the paintings seem to follow you across the room and there are hidden doors behind the tapestries.

Of course, maybe your story doesn’t have anything that overt as part of the plot. That’s okay, too. For instance, I wrote a book called Sarafina where three brothers go AWOL from the Civil War and have to trek from Tennessee to Mississippi by foot. Part of the drama in the story is how untamed the terrain is—how there’s a concerning lack of food, how swampy the land can be, and how long a trip it is without any semblance of civilization. In other words, in addition to the wild animals, bandits, and scary monsters in the book, the terrain itself is one more hurdle the brothers need to overcome. It’s a problem.

Whatever your story, chances are there’s a way to up the stakes by making the setting itself more problematic for your characters.

One of my favorite tropes is “Isolation Horror,” and it’s no surprise that many of my books and stories use a containment device to make sure my characters’ options are narrowed by external conditions. Much like three of my favorite movies, Alien, The Thing, and Jaws, the idea that the characters are trapped in their setting significantly raises the stakes and the terror. Whether your characters are stuck on a spaceship with a monster, or sheltering in a remote outpost surrounded by hundreds of miles of ice, or in the middle of an ocean with a shark bigger than your boat, the setting itself has dramatically reduced the odds for escape or, you know, living.

In my novel Boys in the Valley, I trap 30 orphans in a remote, rural orphanage, surrounded for miles by nothing but land that’s quickly engulfed by a blizzard (the story is set in 1905, so no snowcats to help them out). Now add demons.

In The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, I use a different form of isolation on my elderly residents—no arctic landscapes, endless desert or monstrous ocean, but instead the characters are trapped by their own physical, social, and economic standing. Whether they are simply too broke to leave, in need of care, or unable to find someone willing to offer them an alternate shelter, it strands the residents just as surely as if I’d dropped them on a remote island, or the surface of the moon.

By creating a “hotbox of horror,” you can amplify the tension of your plot because the reader knows there is nowhere for the character to run, nowhere to hide, and no hope for rescue.

Think about the setting of your story and ask yourself if you can build a proverbial moat around your setting, thereby ratcheting up the stress for both the characters, and your readers.

Referring back to my two novels, Boys in the Valley and The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, one of the things that makes these two stories intriguing for readers—what I implemented to subvert expectations, in other words—is the combination of a traditional trope with a unique or unusual setting.

In the case of Boys in the Valley, I worked from a fairly traditional concept of demonic possession, but then placed that trope it into a 19th-century children’s orphanage. I then amplified the setting by isolating the boys with the help of the aforementioned nasty blizzard, and made the setting a problem by adding a few adult priests who certainly didn’t have the boys’ best interests at heart.

With Autumn Springs, I wrote a story in the vein of the well-worn slasher trope, but rather than put the serial killer in a summer camp filled with horny teenagers, I dropped the story into an upstate New York retirement community filled with kind, colorful elderly people. I then made sure to let the reader know that most of the residents were trapped, therefore isolating the setting, and gave the communal grounds enough description and character that, at the climax of the story, the landscape itself becomes part of the problem.

Writers like Grady Hendrix, who set a horror story in an IKEA-style home furnishings store (Horrorstor), and Bentley Little, who has created horror stories that take place in an office building and even a DMV, are classic examples of authors who have used setting to subvert the expectations of what can be scary, simply by shaking up the venue into something unusual, or even borderline comical. The hit movie Sinners is another example of taking a classic trope like vampires and combining it with a Southern juke joint during the prohibition era, thereby giving it an entirely fresh set of problems for the protagonists.

Placing your narrative in a setting that is surprising, however, does more than just give the reader something different to chew on; it can also create opportunities for you as a writer to invent new directions to take the story you might not have originally conceived of, or create interesting challenges for your protagonists (or antagonists) as they deal with whatever nightmarish destination has befallen them. You might even expand the trope itself into something that breaks entirely new ground in the fiction landscape.

When taking setting into account, and fleshing out your story world in dramatic and interesting ways, you might just find yourself somewhere you never expected—a horrific new playground all your own.

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