/lit/ - Literature

Sort of. Reading Stephen King while alone in the dark can produce a similar effect sometimes.

When a book hits you with something that's not text, within a teeming sea of text, e.g. the eyeball in The Sound and the Fury, it can be more immediately upsetting than just about anything in cinema.

>>22977821
No. Jumpscares rely on sudden visual and audio cues, which are impossible to replicate in textual form.

>>22977821
Yes, sort of. If a book suddenly introduces something important without preparing you it can have a similar effect. Of course text is much less visceral than cinema. You're probably not going to jump, literally, the way you might when CARRIE'S HAND REACHES OUT OF THE GRAVE AND GRABS AMY IRVING or whatever.

A common technique is to put the jump in the middle of a sentence with very casual syntax, no buildup. <pic attached> is an example from WIlliam Gass's short story "The Pedersen Kid", in "In the Heart Of The Heart Of The Country".

The context: narrator lives on a farm in Minnesota or somewhere. It's all snowy and they found this neighbour's child frozen outside. They brought him in and tried to resuscitate him. The kid is lying on the kitchen table with melted snow and everything everywhere.

"They":
1) The narrator, a boy, early teens
2) Hans, a hired man working for the family
3) The boy's mother (a downtrodden woman)

The other "missing" character is the boy's father who is a mean drunk. He was asleep in bed and the boy was sent to tell him what's happened and got hit for waking him up. The father hasn't appeared yet. There's tension because he hides bottles of whisky around and the mother found one. Hans is drinking from it and the father is going to be really angry when he finds out. (His natural state is angry).

When he appears, at the top of page 24, it gave me a jolt, as I'm sure it's meant to.

>>22978039
This guy clearly can't rotate a high detail apple in his head

>>22977821
>The hallway stretched into an eternity. Each passage way adjacent to him stuttered with noise, florescent lights unseen flickered in his ears.
>Until Suddenly.
>"BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Ambrose Bierce mastered it.

>>22978443
What would it mean if someone always sees a cartoonish almost anthropomorphic worm when imagining the imaginary apple?

>>22977839
>The woman in the bathtub had been dead for a long time.

Pop-Up books, for sure.

>>22977839
reddit moment

>>22978983
lol