Gerald's Game

As with all works of horror, psychological horror is written with the goal of disturbing or frightening the reader. For this particular genre, the source of fear and concern comes from the mental workings of the characters, whose inner thoughts and anxieties encourage readers to envision themselves in the position of a character that is struggling with personal fears or traumas. Psychological horror is often paired with more viscerally frightening elements such as physical pain, sexual assault, or decisions that grapple with intense moral ambiguity. However, the main source of consistent terror in psychological horror is the glimpse that the writer provides into the mind of a terrified person, and this intense psychological journey is intended to evoke sympathetic fears within the reader even as it enhances the reader’s understanding of the root causes of the character’s struggle. Usually, this genre embraces psychological ambiguity and allows writers to craft characters whose grip upon reality becomes increasingly tenuous as they succumb to paranoia and confusion. Because the reader relies on the novel’s overt exposition to determine what is real in the context of the story, such ambiguities are intended to evoke a state of fearful confusion or fear in the reader, who inevitably questions the narrator’s reliability even as the