Can anybody suggest nail-bitingly suspenseful books?

I've read some King and wasn't too struck by the suspense, though it was interesting enough. I think GRR Martin pulled off suspense masterfully, but only because he killed people left and right, leaving you feeling unsafe.

Maybe I should broaden this up. What makes suspense in an action scene work?

1) The reader has to care about the outcome. At least one one of the combatants should have the reader's sympathy. Nobody cares if Joe Anonymous bites the dust (Sorry Joe, but it's true)

2) The outcome has to be in jeopardy, ususally right up untill the very end. There is very little suspense in a fight where the sympathetic character(s) have an overwhelming advantage. Similarily, if you establish a pattern of having the protagonists escape unscathed, future fights will loose any vestiges of suspense.

(R.A. Salvatore violates these "rules" on an almost religious basis. The hero's always seem to have an overwhelming advantage and his characters just don't stay dead [/rant])

3) Foreshadowing. This is an imprecise term. You shouldn't foreshadow the actual conclusion (obviously) but instead strongly hint at the sympathetic characters loosing the battle. Having the reader watch the intrepid adventurers walk into a trap, or a fully-operation battle-station works wonders.

The reason it was so suspenseful was because Tiptree managed to let me know that something terrible was going on in the background while keeping me fascinated by what was happening in the foreground.

I stayed up late into the night reading to get to a place where I could finally learn about what was happening in the background. I couldn't just skip to that part, because the foreground stuff had me hooked and I needed to know about it, too.

Using this example, you create suspense for the reader (or viewer) by showing the potential for a surprise for the character (can be good surprise or bad surprise, actually), and then showing the character moving inevitably toward the surprise. You may have to remind the reader/viewer of the surprise, to keep up the suspense a few times as you move the character along.

I think fear has a lot to do with suspense. A couple of movies that instantly pop into my head when I think of suspense:

Jurassic Park (the first one)
The Sixth Sense

In both cases there are certain things which are implied, but you don't actually see them, at least, not at first. In Jurassic Park, for example, much of the beginning focuses on the scientists as they talk about the dinosaurs, yet you haven't seen the dinosaurs yet. When you finally do, it's suspenseful. How intelligent is the Volosaraptor? How fast can the T-rex actually run? If you understood the dinosaurs too well then they wouldn't be frightening.

The Sixth Sense? Well, if you've seen it, you know why its suspenseful - I don't need to explain why. The Six Sense made an impression on me for the next three weeks after I first watched it. It still gives me the willies...

Also, like smncameron said, you can't attempt suspense too early. You have to set up the characters first. We have to care about them. It's always the stand-ins who die because they're expendable - the reader doesn't have any emotional connection (or the writer, for that matter), and so its easy to kill them - but that also kills the story.

I think it takes time to build up suspense.

Not only do we have to establish the protag as someone the reader cares--deeply--about, we also have to establish the surprise, whether good or bad, as very credible, almost inevitable, and very, very good (or bad). So for example if the surprise is a bad one--the hero will die at the hand of the antag--the antag must previousy have been established as utterly invincible when she decides to kill someone.

It has to take time to build the suspense, so there are intermediate events which delay the climax. Each such event has to be credible.

It helps if the good or bad thing will be triggered by something--a careless word, stepping on a twig, turning right instead of left. The trigger must also be established (foreshadowed), and during the buildup there must be several almost-triggering events--the protag steps on a twig but the antag is distracted at that moment by something else, for example.

Finally, much is left to the reader's imagination. As someone may have said already, our own fears are way more powerful than anything else. (Hitchcock's "The Birds" comes to mind, although it's a movie not a book.)

An example of suspense I recently enjoyed was Fleming's "The Spy Who Loved Me." The book is very different from the movie. Without spoiling it, by the time the bad guys get the girl, Fleming has carefully established her as nice and innocent, and the bad guys as totally without conscience and liable to do something nasty given the slightest provokation.

I've learned much from Fleming's writing because he takes a long while to establish things--and it's an entertaining long while. When the action happens, the sentences are short, the action moves quickly and the reader knows where everything and everyone is and can make sense of it all. (If you haven't read Fleming before it might be an idea to read one of the other Bond books first, because TSWLM isn't typical of his style or genre; I suspect it contains some of Fleming's best illustrations of thriller writing though, because it was something of an experiment for him.)

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By the way, I remember reading something about how they create suspense in movies, and it's along the lines of having the camera show someone walking along the street, then cutting to a banana peel on the sidewalk, then cutting to the person walking along oblivious, then back to the banana peel, and finally to the person's foot stepping on the peel and pulling back to show the person slipping, flipping, falling, etc.

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Not wishing to cross swords with She Who Smotes, but isn't that jeopardy, and isn't jeopardy a cousin of suspense.

Correct me if I am wrong but jeopardy is creating in the reader the knowledge something bad will happen by giving them more information than the character has:

A mother rushing a child home. The child needs an insulin injection or they will die. The reader knows already that a drug addict broke into the house and stole the insulin and will shortly inject it into himself, thinking it is something else. This will essentially kill himself and the child--will either survive? How? There seems no way out.

Suspense is the not knowing, (the reader doesn't know any more than the character):

A group of people trapped on an island (let's say their plane crashed). One of their number is murdered, but by who? One of them is a murderer--who can you trust? You glimpsed someone who could have been the murderer fleeing the scene, but they were in shadows. You have to have to pair up to do things, like collect water, but you don't know if your partner is the murderer or not. Will they try and kill you thinking you recognized them, but are staying quiet for some reason. Perhaps they will push you off a cliff and claim you fell.

I am not clear on the difference so the above represents how I see it at the moment. I open to having it re-defined for me, so help yourself.

1. a state or condition of mental uncertainty or excitement, as in awaiting a decision or outcome, usually accompanied by a degree of apprehension or anxiety.
2. a state of mental indecision.
3. undecided or doubtful condition, as of affairs: For a few days matters hung in suspense.
4. the state or condition of being suspended.

In the case of the banana peel, the tension is created by the characters not knowing what's going to happen, but the watcher/ reader does not. I thought this was known as dramatic irony, but rereading the definition of dramatic irony, it doesn't quite fit.

SUSPENSE IN THE FORMULA STORY by George Dove.

He discusses the mechanics of creating suspense quite well.

When we're talking about suspense, we always mean "for the reader" (or viewer). If the characters in a movie are totally on edge, but the reader doesn't care, it isn't suspenseful. So I don't see giving one name to suspense where the characters are aware of the danger and another to suspense where they aren't very useful. (Especially since danger might not even figure into it.)

However, whether the character is aware of any danger is still a useful tool. Let's take the banana-peel example (and assume, for a moment, that the device could actually be used for suspenseful rather than comic effect). The viewer is probably thinking "Oh, no! He's going to slip and fall!" Yeah, there's some suspense in that. But if, just as his foot begins to come down, the character sees the danger, then the suspense suddenly ratchets up. Why? It's not because we feel for the character--who's going to think: "Poor fellow, not only is he going to be hurt, but now he has to worry about it for half a second in advance"? No, it's because now there's a chance that he might avoid it. All of the sudden escaping the fall has become possible.

The point of all this is that to build suspense, the odd must be very finely tuned. People have said above that, if the hero always gets away or has too much power or too many tricks up his sleeve, the suspense decreases. That's true. But sometimes people go too far in the other direction. They make it seem like there's no way out. They block every possible escape path, they give the enemy every advantage. Well, this works in a Bond movie, because no matter what you do the audience has no doubt that Bond will win out. But in most stories, if you actually convince the reader that there's no way--or even that the chances are getting ridiculously small--you're no longer building suspense. You're setting the emotional groundwork for defeat. If the hero wins out, it might be a nice surprise (or it might feel like an annoying cheat); but in either case, you've lost the suspense buildup you were going for.

To keep the suspense high, there has to be SOME chance that the hero will triumph.