Every moment we can’t be sure the next moment will come. Life is a battlefield no one survives; death is the midnight prowler who gets us all in the end. So we love suspense literature because it reminds us of this while reassuring us it’s happening to someone else. The same reason we slow down to see the bodies of a car wreck: horror and obsession. Trying to understand death. Hoping, perhaps, for a clue that something survives. And so we love risk. We climb cliffs and jump from airplanes, drive too fast, live as dangerously as we dare, and sometimes kill ourselves in the process. Why? Because risk and suspense are living deeply. At times when my own life has been most in danger, although terrifying, are among those I’ve lived most deeply and instinctively. Danger brought me back to my primeval bones, an atavistic hunger to survive. Suspense reminds us of our mortality and deepens our hunger for life. And a good novel can put us so deeply into its suspense that we become silent characters – terrified, loving, joyous or sad – just like the others. Begging for one outcome yet dreading the worst. As if it…