How do the authors create atmosphere and tension in The Monkeys Paw Ess

How do the authors create atmosphere and tension in The Monkeys Paw and The Red Room? A ghost story is a story with intent to scare; it usually builds up tension and suspense by using a lot of intense, exaggerated words. Usually in a ghost story there is a typical dark and gloomy setting and an inhuman object almost always there is a non human force or a supernatural being in the story to give it a scare factor. Supernatural means a power above the forces of nature which implies that it is not human. In the time that the two stories were written, the belief in the supernatural was a lot different to those of today. They believed in such things as ghosts and witchcraft where as nowadays there are only some believers. This could be because they had less technology than today’s world so we have more evidence to whether they are or aren’t real The Monkey’s Paw is a story about a distant friend who has possession of a cursed shrivelled monkey’s paw that grants three wishes to each man that obtains it. Every wish comes true but little do they know that the wish that they asked for would backfire horrifically killing there only child. The Red Room is another story that was written in the 19th century. However different to The Monkey’s paw this story does not have a supernatural or inhuman power. The story is about a man that’s name is not told and his quest to stay in a supposedly haunted room but unluckily for him, the room possessed a far greater force than spirits or monsters but the very thing that eats away at a mans emotions-FEAR! The authors that wrote these stories use a lot of special techniques to make the audience scared and fearful; afterall the intent of the story is to scare people. Some o... ... they both play with your feelings and emotions. Both stories are written with the intent to scare and they do that. Also, they make you feel sad, disgusted and interested. I think that they do this by there powerful descriptions. And in which they use long and short sentences to build up the tension and atmosphere before the ending. Whilst studying the two books I have realise that to write a successful horror story you have to use all of the techniques and in my opinion the most important technique is descriptive language. When describing, you have to use powerful and meaningful words to give a clear visual picture and so the reader is reacting to the descriptions. I feel that if you have good descriptions then everything else will follow and if you draw the reader’s emotions in to the book then they will be more scared after the ending scare factor.