How do you write suspenseful endings?

This post discusses major plot twists in The Secret Hours, including events near the end of the novel.

In an earlier post, we looked at how Lauren Groff created resonant endings in Matrix. In this last analysis of The Secret Hours, I’ll focus on how to write suspenseful scene and chapter endings that make readers continue to turn pages. To start, let’s take a moment to define what a suspenseful ending is by comparing two endings related to a single key episode in the novel, when Malcolm Kyle, a government bureaucrat assigned to the Monochrome inquiry, receives the classified file which ultimately puts all of the present-day events of the novel into motion.

Malcolm’s first response after finding the file is, understandably, to panic. Used to having his problems solved by others, he decides to consult his former boss, surprising her during her breakfast in the gardens behind the Savoy Hotel. Not only does his boss sneer at the flowers he’s impulsively bought her and refuse to help him, she also reveals that he won’t be returning to his old job when the inquiry is over, as he’d thought, but sent to labor in obscurity in the provinces. The scene ends on an appropriately elegiac note:

This is a good example of a resonant ending. Herron has finished off this scene; it’s a complete episode, and we don’t expect to get any more information from it than we’ve already received. The simile at the end does not stoke curiosity; instead it highlights a significant step on Malcolm’s character arc. He realizes now that his own notion of himself as the “second-highest achiever of his year’s intake” was incorrect.

In contrast, let’s jump back to the scene in which Malcolm receives the classified file, which is the first cliff-hanger of the novel. The scene starts off quietly. Herron, knowing he is going to end the scene with a bang, takes the opportunity to give us some character background. The scene is set in a grocery store, and as Malcolm shops, we learn that “he never went anywhere without a list,” that he has a “sense of dread when the credit card bill dropped into his inbox,” and that he’d been voted out of the shared house he’d moved into after graduating. (Notice that all of these details show rather than tell: Herron lets readers make their own deductions rather than informing us that Malcolm is fastidious, poor, and unlikeable.) Then, a bit of seemingly mundane action: Malcolm collides with a woman’s full trolley and helps clean up the mess. He goes to the self-service checkout, and there Herron serves up the last line of the chapter: “Under the bag of oranges, he found the envelope.”

Clever, right? The surprise ending is enhanced by the seeming ordinariness of what comes before it. For a cliff-hanger like this to be successful, we need to have enough context to understand that it is significant. In this case, we already know that Malcolm is a member of a government panel tasked with examining classified files, but that First Desk has effectively blocked them from getting their hands on any. So we have good reason to suspect the envelope contains a juicy secret of some sort.

The white space of the scene break gives the suspense a moment to build—and to build even further when, in this case, we realize Herron has flipped to another plot thread and we are going to have to wait to find out what’s in the envelope for at least a few more pages. Be careful not to make readers wait too long, however. It’s fine to follow a cliff-hanger with a few scenes focused on other plot strands or POV characters, but you must immediately address the cliff-hanger when you return to the same story strand.

Picking up the scene immediately after a break is also quite effective. In that case, it’s best to use a chapter break rather than a scene break so the cliff-hanger has more time and space to linger. The most dramatic cliff-hanger in The Secret Hours—the revelation that the Monochrome witness Alison was injured by a car bomb in Berlin—is left to hang over both a chapter break and a part break. Like the grocery store cliff-hanger, Herron delivers it in a single short sentence, though this one is given extra resonance with figurative language. We are deep in flashback when the cliff-hanger comes, following along with Alison in 1994 when she sits down in Otis’s car and turns the key in the ignition: “In the bright moment that followed, her life divided in two.”

In The Secret Hours, the Max thread is the one that has the most cliff-hangers, like the one that immediately precedes the scene where Max confronts his official Security Service handler, John Bachelor, which I analyzed in depth in my post on that scene. Herron uses a structure very similar to Malcolm’s grocery store scene, showing us Bachelor steadily drinking his way into oblivion and wondering how his life has gone wrong. Here are the last two paragraphs of the scene:

The question is innocuous, but we know this is the prelude to a confrontation because previous chapters have prepped us on the background and the stakes. Max believes that, one way or another, Bachelor can get him closer to answering the question of who is trying to capture him. Our own curiosity about that answer (and eagerness to know what form this confrontation takes) pulls us onward into the book.

Note that you don’t want to overuse cliff-hangers. They are a showy, noticeable technique and lose their effectiveness if repeated too often. However, in addition to the resonator endings I discussed in my post on Matrix, you can also use surprise endings, which work similarly to cliff-hangers but have lower stakes. A wonderful example, also involving Max, occurs a few scenes before the one we just examined. First Desk, who has been alerted that Max was the target of an attempted abduction, calls Shelley, his former handler, to see if she’s heard from him. This is our first glimpse of Shelley, and we have no reason to disbelieve her when she declares she hasn’t. Here are the last paragraphs of the scene:

The stakes are lower here because we can guess that Max is there to get Shelley’s help rather than confront her—in other words, we don’t expect a dramatic action scene on the other side of that scene break—but the surprise is still effective.

You can also end a scene with an action that allows readers to fill in a gap by inference rather than having to show a scene that won’t move the plot forward. Here’s an example from near the end of the novel. Alison has just been reunited in the present with the man who was Otis and is now Max in a basement room at Regent’s Park, the headquarters of the Security Service. She’s already been interviewed by First Desk and refused to tell her how she’d recognized Karl Schenker, but she says she’ll tell Max, knowing that First Desk will be listening in. Here are the final lines of the scene, at the end of that conversation:

There are only a couple dozen pages left in the book and we know there is at least one more suspenseful scene still to come—Karl Schenker will be dealt with one way or another. We don’t see Molly find out what happens to him, but we know she will. We don’t need to see the conversation between First Desk, Max, and Alison because Herron has already resolved the Max and Berlin plots via this reunion, and whatever First Desk has to say to them won’t move the plot forward. Readers are just as eager as Max and Alison to find out what happens next, but whatever First Desk has entered the room to say is not how he wants to reveal it. We can imagine the conversation during that brief pause of the scene break before Herron hurries us forward to find out what does happen next.

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