How to Create Suspense: Laura Kasischke's The Raising

Laura Kasischke's 2011 novel The Raising is an absolute page-turner. I raced through the last two hundred pages, both dreading what was coming next and needing to know. I'm not usually a big fan  of horror, but Kasischke's prose is so fluid and engaging that I was drawn in from the opening pages. That and the constant cliffhangers - which, admittedly, began to feel somewhat manipulative somewhere around the middle of the novel.

Kasischke's cliffhanger technique reminded me of Mary Higgins Clark novels that I read in college. Multiple narrative points of view - interlaced with suspense - means that the narrative shifts just as something interesting is about to happen. Each cliffhanger/shift would send me racing through the next section because I wanted to know what had happened to the character we'd just left behind. Then, just as I had become interested in another thread of the story, it would shift again.

I'm guessing this is pretty common to horror and suspense fiction. Indeed, it's a pretty common technique in fiction (see, for example, almost any novel by Trollope) because it's an effective way to build suspense. 

What struck me most about Kasischke's novel, however, was the sheer number of smaller chunks of narrative point of view or chronology that she was balancing. The novel is divided into a hundred or so chapters, as well as six sections, and Kasischke balances both multiple chronologies and points of view. There are 5 main narrative points of view - and even more characters with backstory - and absolutely everyone gets fully fleshed out. Not only does she move between those points of view, but the chronology is completely fragmented so you don't learn about the events that began the narrative until the end. 

And all the narrative units are balanced masterfully here, even managing to camouflage what is ultimately an overly complicated storyline. It wasn't until

I was recounting the plot to my husband in chronological order that I realized how much too much it all was. As I was reading it, I was totally along for the ride.

And all of this made me start wondering about the writer's process. How does one construct, storyboard, and keep track of such an elaborate narrative? Is it all carefully planned out in advance or does the writer create first a straightforward narrative and then slice it up and fit it back together like a jigsaw puzzle until just the right effect has been created? I kind of like the idea of jigsaw puzzle writing, but the narrative process is probably much more deliberate than that. Considering the degree of control Kasischke commands over the narrative, I imagine that the sense of skilled orchestration in the final third of her novel doesn't happen by accident.