First Person POV and Suspense

I have a monster story, sorta, it's told in the voice of a character telling a listener about it. However I realized pretty quick that this ruins any suspense, because you know that the character lived to tell the tale. There's also the fact that he has hindsight now, so keeping the monster low-key or hiding its true nature from the beginning doesn't make sense.

However I really don't want to get rid of the first person format, I've heard input that suggests that that's where most of the narrative's charm is.

Suggestions?

Your storyteller may have survived, but one can survive a monster encounter pretty physically messed up regardless. You can hint to the massive, hideous damage the creature did to this guy, but only as the story is told can the reader find out how it was done and what it is—how the narrator looks today.

I hadn't thought of that

Perhaps I should mention that he's the sort of "loveable coward" type, he's more of an innocent bystander. Heroics and adventure are the last things on his mind. So no badass determinator survival skills... maybe. Things can be modified.

edited 18th Dec '10 4:23:30 AM by melloncollie

Actually... they don't have to know the teller survived the attack. What if you had the listener ask him or her how they got out alive, and then have the storyteller disappear? Would make for a great Nightmare Fuel ending.

You know that he survived. You don't know what happened to everyone else, who he's telling this to, or what state he's in. That is where you can draw your suspense from.

Alternatively, first-person present is a great way to sidestep this problem, letting you experience the story as it happens to your character whilst retaining the intimate, detailed look inside their heads.

Yeah, first-person present tense works more like a recording of consciousness, allowing the narrator to not survive.

However, the suggestions above also work. There are definitely ways of surviving that are "a fate worse than death", at least arguably so.

^__^;

I don't mean to sound incorrigible, but it's not that kind of monster story. The feel I was going for was something like that one time your friend told you how a psycho axe-murderer with flaming red eyes and a pegleg broke into their house and killed their cat, but you totally don't believe them because that's ridiculous, but now you check outside your windows twice before you sleep, just to be sure.

I suppose that format isn't very potent, though. Perhaps I should do some rethinking as to what I want.

Anyway, in the meantime, a more concrete wording of the issue: Would it be sillier for the narrator to spoil his own story by giving away the true nature of the villain (because that'd be more realistic, probably) or for the narrator to keep the true nature of the villain concealed when he has no real incentive to do that? Would the narrator telling you how omgscary that was from the beginning be narm from the melodrama, or would the narrator waiting to reveal the villain come off as forced and silly?

What is the narrator's relation to the in-story audience?

Strangers in a bar.

Then I would make the story appear to be straightforward (have the story be told as a response to a disbelieving stranger, and lay out the basic premise), but end with a Mind Screw. That's just my personal preference, though.