Highway to the Danger Zone – Dark, Dirty, and Dangerous

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Scenes That Grab You and Won’t Let Go

As readers we want scenes that grab us as the MC struggles with the villain and adversity. As writers we want to create scenes that are filled with emotion, rivet the reader to the book, and keep them turning pages, especially on the road to the final battle

So, today, let’s discuss some of the best “approaching-danger” scenes we’ve read or written. Whether it’s conflict building in a dark cluttered alley, an empty warehouse, a haunted house, a bar full of the enemy, a secluded dark country road, a cemetery on a moonlit night, a garbage dump, mob headquarters, or a sky cluttered with enemy jets, show us, or describe in a few paragraphs, a scene you’ve written in one of your books, or a tension-building scene in a book you particularly liked.

And, if you feel extremely creative, you can write one for us today. Here’s some high-energy music to get you in the mood:

Highway to the Danger Zone sound track

 In two or three paragraphs:

  1. Show or describe a tension-building scene in one of your books.
  2. Show or describe one of your favorite tension-building scenes in books you have read.
  3. Write one for us today.
This entry was posted in conflict, Emotion, Tension, Writing by Steve Hooley. Bookmark the permalink.

About Steve Hooley

Steve Hooley is the author of seven short stories published in four anthologies, a Vella serial fiction, and is currently working on the Mad River Magic series – a fantasy adventure series for advanced middle-grade to adults. More details available at: https://stevehooleywriter.com/mad-river-magic/

35 thoughts on “Highway to the Danger Zone – Dark, Dirty, and Dangerous”

  1. In Kelly Martin’s Dark and Deadly Things (a YA ghost story), the MC is exploring an abandoned house. She walks one way down the hall, and all the doors are closed. She walks the other way, and one of the doors is cracked open. The MC doesn’t remember if all the doors were closed or not, but the reader does! That, combined with slight noises and shadows and decay smells make for a tension-building scene!

    • Thanks, Priscilla. Great example. Great use of three senses. And, the reader knowing what the MC doesn’t is the icing on the cake.

      Thanks for participating in the craziness this morning.

      Have a great day!

  2. In Joanna Fluke’s “Blueberry Muffin Murder,” amateur sleuth Hannah Swensen’s investigation takes her and her sister into a closed shopping mall at night, to use a key to get into the murder victim’s store to look for evidence. The echoing of their footsteps in the darkened space, the shadows looming large, every sound of the mall at night, the whoosh of heating system and the loud ticking of a display clock build tension.

    At one point prior to the Hannah Swensen cozy mystery series, Fluke wrote suspense novels and it shows in this sequence.

    • Thanks, Dale, for participating.

      Great example. Your description of the setting elicits tension and fear on its own. It sounds like a great book. And, Swenson’s experience with writing suspense paid off.

      Thanks for the example and excellent description.

      Thanks for your help here at TKZ later today!

  3. My offering: Taking a page from P.J. Parrish, on my nearing completion WIP I decided to open with a promise of the mystery to come, delivered as a hint rather than a hammer.

    Chapter 1 • The Party
    Successes are talked about for days. Disasters for months. This particular incident—years?

    December 1970 ◊ Sam would soon see his position in military strategy terms:
    o Right flank, a furious base commander ready to court-martial him for “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.”
    o Left flank, 25 sets of angry socialite parents, their top-shelf girls’ reputations have been tarnished.
    o To the rear, embarrassed finishing school administrators, livid with Sam for thwarting their guaranteed safeguarding of innocent girls’ virtues.
    o Completing the encirclement of his position and, most dangerous of all, the shadowy path ahead concealed drug gang thugs looking for whoever got the better of three gang members. A slow, painful death awaits him. But do they know their target yet?
    To avoid his own Waterloo, Sam must coax his camel to step “through the eye of a needle.” Ah yes, life on the express caravan to hell. All aboard!

    Any yes there is murder a plenty, with bodies disposed of in a uniquely gruesome method.

    • Excellent, Lars. I like your opening statement with the promise of things to come.

      If paragraph #3 is hung out for bait to readers, or hinted at, that will certainly catch readers’ interest.

      This story sounds familiar. Did you tell us about it in the past?

      Thanks for great examples from your WIP.

  4. The opening chapter of my thriller Deep Fake Double Down:

    Monroe Old Child always wondered if his father knew that Monroe would be born seven months after his death.
    Did his father hear the car roaring behind him as he walked along the shoulder of the road on a moonless Montana night? Or was death silent, wearing moccasins like Monroe’s grandmother who snuck up to smack his head when he was little?
    Mostly he wondered if his father had felt the same sharp edge of a feather that he now felt on his own neck?
    “Get a move on.” Corrections Officer Geblin’s voice urged Monroe forward. “The sooner you finish, the sooner we can both get back to sleep.”
    Monroe didn’t ask why Geblin rousted him from his cell to unload a delivery in the middle of the night. The CO was six-four, two-hundred-fifty pounds. You didn’t ask him anything. You just did what he said. He hadn’t given Monroe time to grab a jacket. He wore only a t-shirt and thin pajama bottoms.
    Geblin’s steel-toed work boots clacked on the concrete as they walked down the quiet corridors of Blue Rock Corrections Center. Monroe’s sneakers were slip-ons that didn’t make any sound. No shoelaces allowed in the prison.
    They passed the commissary and kitchen to the double metal doors leading to the loading dock. Geblin carded the lock and the door clicked open. His chin motioned Monroe through.
    Out into the bitter night air.
    For the past week, days had been warm. But Spring in Montana was a trickster that fooled humans, animals, and plants into believing winter was past. Without warning, a seventy-degree day could turn into a twenty-degree night.
    Like tonight.
    Monroe looked around the service yard. No truck. The loading dock was empty.
    Without moving his head, he scanned the U-shaped catwalk fifteen feet above.
    Usually, a second CO patrolled on the catwalk while deliveries were unloaded, supposedly to prevent theft. What a joke. Geblin and the warden stole a thousand times more every day than any dude doing time could stuff in his underwear.
    The open end of the U was a chain link fence with single-coil razor wire and a rolling gate through which delivery vehicles entered. The gate was closed.
    The freezing temperature heightened the prickling on Monroe’s neck. Gooseflesh rose on his arms as he swung them hard to keep warm. He wanted to pace but knew better than to move without the CO’s permission.
    Geblin stood with his legs apart, thumbs in his belt. He wore an insulated jacket, a watch cap pulled low covering his ears, and leather gloves.
    Monroe didn’t dare make eye contact. “Where’s the truck?”
    Geblin said, “On its way.”
    After several minutes, Monroe could no longer control the chattering of his teeth. Frigid air knifed through the thin t-shirt. Shivering made his whole body quake. He looked sideways at Geblin, still not meeting his eyes. “Can I sit?”
    Geblin shifted. “Yeah, go ahead.”
    Monroe dropped to the cold concrete floor, hugging his knees to his chest to conserve body heat.
    “Stay here,” Geblin said. “I’m going to check on the truck.” The door clicked open then slammed shut.
    Monroe recognized the guard’s lie. He could contact the driver with his phone. He just wanted to go inside to get warm.
    There was no truck.
    Sitting outside in the cold was his punishment. A warning.
    Or was this his execution by hypothermia?

  5. I’m reading A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin. A young man’s girlfriend tells him she’s pregnant, and he decides to murder her rather than face the inconvenience this causes to his life. (The book was written in the 1950s.) His planning and plotting for how he’s going to accomplish killing her so that it looks like suicide is heart pounding in itself, but the scene where the two are on the top floor of a building and he has to figure out how exactly to go through with it was gut-wrenching.

    When one of the murdered girl’s sisters doubts the suicide story and decides to investigate on her own, I assumed she would be the amateur sleuth who brings the murderer to justice. Not so. When she focuses on two men as murder suspects, the tension begins to ramp up again, and the reader is kept in suspense about which of the men might be the psychopath. When the amateur sleuth decides one of the two men is innocent, she accompanies him to his empty home. The tension builds and once again, the reader is completely surprised by what happens next.

    I won’t tell any more of the story because I don’t want to spoil it for others. I’m about 2/3 through, and I’m thoroughly hooked on it.

    • Thanks, Kay, for that wonderful description. It sounds like a back cover blurb. And you have me wanting to read the book.

      Which makes me think, for other writers today, this exercise is a good way to think of your back cover invitation to read the story. Does it grab potential readers, hook them, and drag them into reading the story?

      Let’s see some good back cover blurbs.

      Thanks, Kay!

      Have a great day!

      • I didn’t tell you guys about it in the past. I hinted at it.

        All kidding aside, thanks Steve Hooley for your kind and generous comments.

      • As requested, my back cover blurb. As for being a good one, you tell me.

        In this social desert, these high society girls sought Sam’s company for the distractions he provided. They would be horrified if they knew what he was capable of. But he had no choice when he tangled with true evil bent on snuffing out four innocent lives.
        Though outnumbered, he got the upper hand. Any challenge to evil’s power had to be dealt with in the most vicious way. But where to strike the necessary blow?
        Covered his tracks as best he could, but going into hiding wasn’t an option. Withdrawing from his role as social director would certainly cause an uproar. Any unwanted attention could prove deadly if the wrong people gave him more than a passing glance.
        His sole option was to keep a watchful eye as he “whistled Dixie past the headstones,” hoping his name hadn’t already been carved into one of them.
        Few suspected Sam was anything other than some sort of trust fund playboy throwing an endless series of weekend parties for his war zone headed buddies. And those few knew him as a commoner of little consequence.
        With his mentor’s untimely death, he had many questions and few answers. The roar of whitewater rapids grew louder by the moment.
        This romantic thriller unfolds at a tumultuous time. The 1960-80 sexual revolution, the Vietnam War, and the “bra burning” feminist wave were all running at full throttle. Coupled with a sharp rise in hard drug use, gang fortunes fueled corruption of local political systems.

          • Thank you. A 300 word reply.

            Been working toward shortening everything. An earlier version of the blurb was 348 words, now 249.

            It fits within the typical constraints of one side of a hardback book’s dust jacket. Font, margins, etc. But, of course, there are other constraints such as attention span of the readers within the segment of the bell shaped distribution of a target demographic. Getting shorter by the day.

            As a romantic thriller, the description has to cover more territory than a standalone thriller or romance. A blurb should briefly cover 6 elements: 1. Hook, 2. Connection “save the cat,” 3. Escalation, 4. Hint at complexity, 5. Ticking clock (ala Dan Brown), and 6 Bait (hint of so much more between book’s covers.)

            I’ve used about 40 words to cover each of the 6 elements. That is about my limit.

            I got shorted on the brevity gene. It all went to my younger brother who can carry on an hour long conversation with just 2 words. Yep and nope.

            When I finally looked up from my first draft of this piece it was circa 737,000 words. No I don’t have writer’s block, much of it was lived experiences. It just needed a little mortar to fill in some gaps between the bricks.

            Now split into an epic double trilogy, it spans 75 years and 4 continents. Total word count is down to about 100k per volume. World building makes Book 1 a bit longer.

            Soon I’ll know if Book 1 can gain enough speed by the end of the runway to climb above the fence and trees or crash and burn. Either way it will be a fun adventure much like my R&D career where it took 12 tries before we got something other than a fireball.

        • Suggestion to shorten:
          Few suspected Sam was anything other than a trust fund playboy throwing an endless series of weekend parties for his war zone headed buddies.
          This romantic thriller unfolds at a tumultuous time. The 1960-80 sexual revolution, the Vietnam War, and the “bra burning” feminist wave were all running at full throttle.
          Society girls would be horrified if they knew what he was capable of. But he had no choice when he tangled with true evil bent on snuffing out four innocent lives.
          His sole option: whistle Dixie past the headstones,” hoping his name hadn’t already been carved into one of them.

  6. Chapter one of Dean Koontz’s “Whispers”. (Thanks, JSB, for suggesting I read this excerpt for a lesson in terror-building…)

    18 pages of scarier and scarier, as a woman confronts a maniac who’d been hiding in her coat closet.

    Now I can’t pass the coat closet near our front door without wondering . . .

    • Great, Deb. Dean Koontz is a master at the slow-cook build to terror. He must have really made an impression on you.

      Great example. I hope you can find a symbol to hang on that hall closet to keep it exorcised.

      Thanks for participating in the fun today!

  7. Loud knocking on her front door interrupted her reverie. What the—? The doorbell rang once, twice, continuously. A lost traveller, but—who’d be so impatient at ten a.m.? She made herself walk to the door against a crescendo of banging. The heavy oak door—had she remembered to throw the deadbolt? She leaned on the door, picked up thudding vibrations from the wood. Thank God the bolt was securely set into the doorframe. How strong are deadbolts?

    The thumping stopped; Kary dared the peephole, while movie images where the assassin shot through it into the target’s brain ran through her mind. Her heartbeat doubled, her heart thrashing wildly in her chest like a frenzied squirrel trying to escape. The fish-eye lens distorted a tall hefty man in a too-tight yellow parka, no hat. A nondescript maroon sedan boxed her pickup into its bay of plowed snow at the end of her gravel drive; she’d had no occasion to clear the hood. Exit blocked. Maybe he’d assume she wasn’t home.

    “Open up! I ain’t leaving till you talk to me. Smoke’s rising. You in there—open the damn door!”

    The panic room to her left, its entrance disguised by a wall hanging? She’d made fun of the previous owner’s conversion of the natural cave in the granite, used it for cold storage. Did the emergency phone even work? The door vibrated as the pounding started up again. She flinched, retreated. Could she cower in a hole behind a steel door? Trapped?

    She couldn’t. Ever. She jumped. The front door boomed as if a large weight had been hurled at it. One of the boulders lining the drive? Fear drove her toward the kitchen phone. No one knows. If the door broke, if he followed her, could she circle around through the living room and still slip…? She dialed the emergency number with useless fingers, connected with a disembodied voice, gave a panicked account of herself.

    “Calm down, Ma’am. Ma’am? Ma’am?”

    “Yes, I’m here.” Kary stared, hypnotized, out the kitchen window; the sedan’s trunk now stood open. “He’s coming back.”

    “Stay by the phone. Are you okay? I’ve dispatched an officer—”

    “He’s heading toward me with some kind of a pipe—the jack handle from the car—” The window shattered; glass shards sprayed over sink, counter, floor. Her mouth went dry, she couldn’t move; she had never been this terrified. The kitchen smelled of the cinnamon she’d sprinkled on her hot cereal. Part of herself dissociated to record in slow motion and vivid color. For heaven’s sake—will I watch my own murder? And do what with it?

    Adrenaline cleared her mind. Adrenaline can be your friend. She set the frantic receiver gently on the counter. How long would the police be? No idea. Would they come from Enfield? Or further, from Hanover or Lebanon? I could be dead.

    She ignored the yelling, started thinking logically in spite of the hammering of blood in her eardrums. The window was too high, the man too fat. He hadn’t brought a weapon—why else the tire iron? Her icy calm would have pleased the dispatcher. She scooped the contents of the knives drawer into a dishtowel. No point in giving him any help. She left out the largest. What had she done to bring down this incoherent rage upon herself? Later. Time for that later.

    She was surprised how efficiently her mind considered escape routes: if he broke in, she wanted out. The pickup was useless. Unless he moved his car—to reach the kitchen window? She pocketed the keys from the kitchen hook. It would have to be the woods. She knew her woods.

    Something hard smashed at the deadbolt. The frame around the lock was splintering, but held. She trusted it long enough to grab winter gear, snowshoes, from the coat closet, stuffed the bundle of knives and the wicked kitchen shears into the backpack. No time to be angry now. She’d take the door out from the lower level: it was unreachable from the front.

    She clattered down the stairs, sat on the bottom step to order her fingers to lace her boots. If he got in, he’d waste precious time deciding where she was—the lower level was not the first place he’d search. She put the long knife at her side. If she had to use it, if he grabbed her, his short parka left his legs and groin, with the femoral arteries, vulnerable. Lovely.

    She buckled a snowshoe. No point going out if she couldn’t get away—her footprints would lead him straight to her, and he was big enough to bull his way through snow faster than she could. She reached for the second snowshoe. Would he trash the house? Too late—and she couldn’t carry anything that would slow her down. Mostly everything was replaceable. She would not think about it. She stood. Coat, pack. Knife, keys.

    The unnerving yelling and clatter from upstairs stopped suddenly. Was he looking for an easier entry? She’d be far away before he got in… And heard the sirens.

    Her legs shook. She sat abruptly, placed the knife carefully on the step. Primum non nocere? It made no sense to do him no harm first, if he was meaning to harm her. She put her head between her knees to keep from throwing up.

    The doorbell rang insistently. How could an inanimate object sound so different? “Police! Open up!”

    Ehrhardt, Alicia Butcher. PRIDE’S CHILDREN: PURGATORY (Book 1 of the Trilogy) . Trilka Press. Kindle Edition.

    • Riveting passage, Alicia, which creates a nail-biting tension. Kary’s arc–the door pounding, looking out the peephole, and her frantic and her increasingly determined effort to survive as the apparent mounting rage of the man outside increases grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. Then there’s the surprising twist-development at the end with apparent police arrival. The uncertainty thorough put the reader squarely in “the danger zone.”

      (Steve is way from keyboard this afternoon and asked me to sub for him.)

      • I should have mentioned that Kary is a reclusive writer living in an isolated house in New Hampshire.

        She had allowed herself to be interviewed about her books – and her life (she has ME/CFS) – by a New York talk show, Night Talk, so a ‘fan’ figured out where she lived – and decided to demand information from her about why she had, in his mind, libeled him by using something he thought was recognizable as his name in one of her historical novels!

        He wasn’t quite prepared for NH snow – and this leads her to put up a gate later which is relevant for the rest of the novels (PC is a mainstream trilogy).

        I love learning to write new kinds of scenes when they come up. This one fit your prompt – except for length – so I waited until Debbie Burke also posted a longer example.

        Thanks for the kind words.

    • Wow, Alicia! Great spellbinding scene. You have our attention. Anybody would keep reading.

      I want to know what happens next. I bet you sell some books today.

      Thanks for that excellent example!

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