By Elizabeth Broadbent

Mention Candace Nola to anyone in indie horror, and you’ll hear nothing but praise. Nola’s unfailingly kind; she’s tireless at helping and promoting other writers, both privately and through her platform and press, Uncomfortably Dark. Nola’s one of the hardest-working women in horror. She’s won several Splatterpunk Awards. She’s won a Horror Author’s Guild Award. Candace Nola is an all-around great author and stellar human being.  

Ask anyone about her books—any of her twenty-one works, a staggering number—and people will mention Nola’s impeccable plots, pacing, and tension. Her books move with the pace and inevitability of a freight train. She knows when to ratchet up the tension, when to let the reader breathe, when to describe the setting, and when to focus on action. 

I’ve always struggled with plot. Like most Southern Gothic writers, I’m a junkie for lengthy odes to impenetrable swamps and lyrical descriptions of Spanish moss; I struggle to gin up three paragraphs of a climactic fight scene. Though I have an MFA, Caleb Stephens had to teach me to structure a plot (This speaks to both Caleb’s patience and the uselessness of my MFA program, which showed me to write pretty prose and not much else). On the other hand, Nola’s plots slay. Her stories maintain tension and propel the reader forward. The indie horror world knows that; pick up a Candace Nola novel or novella, and you know that book’s going to sprint, in a single direction, with no detours. She’s so good at that that, at the end of March, she’s speaking to students at Duke about how to handle plot. I needed to know how she does it. 

So I turned to Nola’s latest book, Hank Flynn: The Return. I know it well; I reviewed it for Cemetery Dance. Here’s your requisite spoilers alert. But I think if you haven’t seen the second installment of demon-hunter Hank Flynn, this discussion will prove it’s a must-read. 

The Traditional Three-Act Structure

One thing I did somehow pick up in my MFA program—we covered it a grand total of once, and never applied it to anything in particular—was the traditional three-act plot structure. Quick and dirty, because everyone knows it: After some introduction and rising action, the first act leads to an inciting incident, from which there can be no return. The second act advances the plot and complicates it. This is the longest part of any work of fiction—the meat of the story. The third act contains a climax and resolution, which ties up loose ends. Almost every fictional work in Western culture follows this pattern. We’re so used to this structure that authors often accomplish it without planning.

Of course, we see it in Hank Flynn: The Return. The rising action is simple: Hank Flynn arrives in a small town. He’s on a mission to kill demons, and he feels one is close. Call it Chekov’s demon—you mention an unholy adversary in the first act, and you’ve gotta kill it by the end. This act ends when Hank becomes inextricably involved in the action, with the sheriff agreeing to let him help solve a crime.  Through the second act, tension increases as the action complicates and we discover more about the situation. In the third act, Hank and the townsfolk fight the demon and win. Evil is destroyed. Loose ends tie up with the townsfolk and Hank himself. 

Hank actually battles the demon three times before the climactic scene. Each fight, whether it lasts a scene or spans two chapters, is followed by a brief rest. After the first, Hank and Sheriff Townsend take their possessed deputy (whom Hank just fought) to the doctor. After the second, when Hank overcomes the demon’s test, a house collapses (and it’s a testament to how fast this plot moves that imploding buildings count as a breather). The biggest fight before the climax is followed by the longest stretch of rest, which also preps for the climax as Hank and the townsfolk ready themselves for the final battle. The bigger the clash, the longer the rest. 

Zoom in: Plot on a Chapter Level

This three-act plotting also functions on a chapter level. Chapter three of Hank Flynn: The Return is a great example, since it concludes the novella’s first act. Initially, the sheriff distrusts Hank. But after Hank explains his credentials as a lawman, Sheriff Townsend agrees to let him inspect the scene of last night’s brutal murder: the inevitable action from which the rest of the chapter flows, and the conclusion of its first act. In the chapter’s second act, Hank examines the house and relives the demon’s crime. The climax comes as the sheriff asks Hank to help solve the crime, then resolves when Hank agrees to help. We breathe for a moment at the chapter’s end, with Hank returning to the diner. 

But this moment both lets the action rest post-climax and ratchets it up. As Hank enters another location, the action moves forward rather than remaining stagnant. It’s a very different ending than saying Hank walks away from the sheriff. There’s an entering, a beginning. Every chapter resolves like this: the reader has a chance to breathe, but even as that moment offers a respite from the action, it also leads to more. A demon chuckles darkly. Hank steps through a door to “his past.” Hank follows someone outside. There’s motion in those endings, as well as a promise of more action. Not quite a cliffhanger—the standard page-turning model for thrillers—but a guarantee of more. Something else is coming. Tension is broken with the resolution of the chapter’s action, and the reader rests. However, knowing there’s more to come, they’re simultaneously propelled forward. 

Zoom In: Tension

Nola’s prologue in Hank Flynn: The Return teaches a masterclass in maintaining tension. In the first paragraph, she orients the reader to the general setting and setup: a family, sleeping. The second paragraph begins with “The stranger,” and the reader’s heart jutters. It’s a sharp contrast to what came before, and all the more effective for it. 

Nola builds tension sentence by sentence. First, the stranger stands still in that sleeping house and listens to the silence. Then, “he could taste it [the silence] somehow.” It’s our first clue that something’s wrong, that this stranger has bad intentions. Shadows deepen; nature holds its breath. The stranger looks at the room. Then, again, he tastes it. And finally, he wonders if he could, in a fragment, “Take it as his own.” Each sentence builds on the last, becoming more and more unsettling until we know something is deeply wrong. Just as the stranger scents the sleeping family, the reader smells danger. Sentence by sentence, in a single paragraph, Nola ratchets the tension to an unbearable pitch. 

Which, of course, is what the beginning of a book should do. 

This tension inevitably leads to a description of what the stranger could take for his own—the immediate setting—which lets the reader breathe after the unbearable tension of the last paragraph. The man inhales again, that same creepy action. In the next paragraph, the setting becomes more specific and visceral, with mention of the scent of sex and excrement. Even as Nola gives the reader a setting description, she continues to zoom in and move the story forward. That paragraph ends as the man smells fear, and he grins. 

The stranger moves forward; he looks through the walls to the sleeping family. We finish with the image of a teddy bear. We know now that he’s both evil and supernatural, but Nola saves the haunting image of the children for the last sentence. In fact, each paragraph itself follows a three-act structure. The action or description begins; it complicates or zooms in; the last sentence serves as the climax. 

The stranger breathes in the fear; he moves closer to the children. He sees the father. We shift to his point of view for a few sentences as it dawns on this family man that the silence is unnatural. Then he screams. 

The man is murdered, then his wife. The children are last, and though what’s come before has been visceral, Nola saves the worst for the prologue’s end, as the stranger “painted the most beautiful crimson pictures on the white walls.” Climax. Resolution: “There, no one ever heard them scream.” 

By utilizing that three-act structure down to a micro level, Nola maintains momentum and propels the reader forward. Everything becomes more as the prologue continues: more specific, more dangerous, more visceral. She gives us three acts and a climax in each paragraph, and by handing the reader brief rests instead of too much resolution, she maintains that tension and pacing. We can’t help but keep reading. 

Every paragraph has a three-act structure. Together, those paragraphs form the three-act structure, including resolution, in each chapter. Those resolutions let the reader rest from the climax, but each inevitably leads to further action. The three-act chapters work together to create the novel’s overarching structure. Nola carefully balances the explosiveness of the climax to the reader’s need for a breather; the bigger the action, the longer the rest. She uses the classic structure on both a micro and macro level. 

That’s how Nola keeps the plot moving. Every paragraph does work; each both advances the plot and builds on what came before it. By using the three-act structure in each paragraph, but often omitting the resolution, Nola keeps her plot fast, inevitably moving forward, and her reader keeps reading. And by giving the reader periodic rests with the promise of more action, they continue to the next chapter. 

Now I understand why I usually read Nola’s books in one sitting. Her forward motion remains inevitable on a sentence level, paragraph by paragraph. Hank Flynn: The Return might not be the best known of her novels, but it’s a study in maintaining action, moving a plot, and keeping the reader’s attention. This is why her work remains so beloved in indie horror. No one does a plot like Candace Nola. 

Learn more about author Candace Nola here!

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