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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/234338.Pursuit
36341Thomas Perry230235950falseThu Jun 12 11:16:04 -0700 2008Thu Jun 12 11:16:22 -0700 2008 Here's the first part:
Suspense isn’t a pleasant sensation. 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.
Great suspense writing doesn’t have to include a guy with a gun. When the males in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice are off to London trying to track down 16-year-old Lydia Bennet, who has eloped with the evil Wickham, the Bennet women are reduced to waiting at home for reports to arrive by mail. By now, they’re aware that what Wickham intends for Lydia doesn’t include a wedding. If she’s not rescued quickly, she’ll be lost to the family forever, undoubtedly to suffer degradation, abandonment and a lonely death. Austen’s description of powerless waiting and worry, interrupted only by news of leads followed to dead ends, could serve as a model of suspense writing — properly proportioned, plausible and urgent. When we learn that Lydia has been found, we want to cheer.