Summer Camp & Isolation
SUMMARY:
The setting of a summer camp serves as a perfect sandbox for suspense and thriller writing because it inherently combines isolation with a false sense of security. Nestled deep in nature and cut off from the safety of urban infrastructure, communication networks, and parental protection, a camp forces characters to rely solely on their own limited resources when danger strikes.
The environment also creates instant drama. Campers and counselors are thrown together with strangers who might be hiding secrets, making it easy to build tension and paranoia. Plus, a camp is full of creepy locations like dark cabins, foggy lakes, and deep woods. Writers can easily flip a fun daytime activity, like a campfire or a hike, into a terrifying nighttime nightmare.
“God of the Woods” (Excerpt) by Liz Moore
Louise August 1975
The bed is empty.
Louise, the counselor— twenty- three, short- limbed, rasp-voiced, jolly—stands barefoot on the warm rough planks of the cabin called Balsam and processes the absence of a body in the lower bunk by the door. Later on, the ten seconds that pass between sight and inference will serve to her as evidence that time is a human construct, that it can slow or accelerate in the presence of emotion, of chemicals in the blood.
The bed is empty.
The cabin’s single flashlight—the absence of which is used, even in daylight, to indicate that campers have gone to the latrines—is in its home on a shelf by the door. Louise turns slowly in a circle, naming the girls she can see.
Melissa. Melissa. Jennifer. Michelle. Amy. Caroline. Tracy. Kim.
Eight campers. Nine beds. She counts and counts again.
At last, when she can no longer defer it, she lets one name bob to the surface of her mind: Barbara.
The empty bed is Barbara’s.
She closes her eyes. She imagines herself returning, for the rest of her life, to this place and this moment: a lonely time traveler, a ghost, haunting the cabin called Balsam, willing a body to appear where there is none. Willing the girl herself, Barbara, to walk through the door. To say she has been in the washroom, to say she forgot the rule about taking the flashlight, to apologize disarmingly, as she has done before. But Louise knows that Barbara won’t do any of these things. She senses, for reasons she can’t quite articulate, that Barbara is gone.
Of all the campers, Louise thinks. Of all the campers to go missing…
EXERCISE:
Write a suspenseful short story where a safe, familiar everyday location, like a summer camp, gradually transforms into a terrifying nightmare.