I recently read two Big Scenes (to be fair, I don't think the Lee Child scene is THE Big scene in the novel, but it has that amazing quality of making you feel you're witnessing narrative magic) which illustrated to me the different ways in which fiction writers engage their readers. One was from Lee Child's
Killing Floor , the other from Greg Iles'
Blood Memory. (Sorry about the different sizes of the two cover images; I'm more interested in the text than the covers, though they are very beautiful.)


Let me please issue this SPOILER ALERT. I am about to discuss details in the resolution of suspense in both novels.
Lee Child shows his POV detective (Reacher) going to meet his dead brother's lover, who brings a briefcase full of evidence that will solve the brother's murder and also bring a vicious serial murder/counterfeit case to light and to justice. At the airport, Reacher sees his target as she leaves the plane, she recognizes him, but they are separated by the glass partition between incoming passengers exiting the "sterile area" and the area for people meeting their plane. Reacher sees the woman being carried toward baggage claim, but knows she has no baggage. When he fights his way through the crowd, he finds her rolly bag cycling on the baggage carousel, storms through the curtain into the luggage bays, finds her briefcase, now empty, and then her bloody body. The scene is extremely visual, with sights, crowds, and loud noises. It is intensely cinematic.
In the Greg Iles scene, Cat, the POV, is being raped by her half-uncle who is planning to then tie her up and send her into the river to drown inside her beloved childhood caregiver's Cadillac. He is holding a gun to her head while he rapes her. She lies under him considering how to get away, and goes through various schemes, including biting through his jugular vein or his carotid artery, but rejects each as not feasible. She finally settles on crushing his trachea with her teeth. She licks the rapist's neck to locate the right spot, then savagely bites, reflecting that her father must truly have been her father (something her abusive grandfather has made her doubt) since she has such fine strong teeth, like her father. The rapist is thrown off and it flashes through her mind that she resembles a leopardess, similar to the childhood toy with which her grandfather smothered her father. The scene is full of tension, but the tension is built with scheming and emotion and even symbolism. It is intensely novelistic.
I'm not saying I prefer one or the other of these scenes, but I am saying that cinematic writing is NOT the only way to go. Greg Iles is an intensely psychological writer, and in Blood Memory he has written maybe the best psychological thriller I have ever read, up there with Stephen King though in a slightly different genre.
The cinematic technique is seductive for a writer; for one thing it offers the possibility of the novel becoming a movie. But it has a weakness: sometimes it is hard for the reader to picture the actual scene, the layout of the action. I still am not sure how Reacher's antagonist manages to snatch his target away, and the scene has less intensity for me because I am trying to figure out why his walkway is going opposite the stream of traffic of the exiting passengers. Nor are senses of smell, touch, and taste engaged. In the
Blood Memory scene, we are inside Cat's head. The great strength of narrative is that we identify so strongly with the POV that we are taken outside ourselves and into another person's mind: one writer has pointed out that this is the nearest thing to telepathy that humans ever experience. And all the senses are engaged, not just sight and sound.
Orson Scott Card describes levels of engagement in narrative point of view, and this is what he would call "hot" point of view, something that I confess I am addicted to, not just as a writer, but as a reader.
My message? I guess it's that the novel is a magnificent monument to the human imagination, and it's hard to imagine anything short of full-body, five-sense virtual reality ever to rival it.