Three Subtle Signs Suspense May Be Taking Over Your Life

 1. You Question the Actions of Strangers

In the normal course of your day, have you ever seen someone and wondered what they were up to? Your brain sifts through all the possibilities, and comes up with whatever crime they were probably in the process of committing? You want to trust people ... to believe they are innocent until proven not to be ...then your suspense-brain steps in. It's a very real problem, and sometimes it doesn't just impact the lover of suspense. It can creep into the people closest to them. 

Let me tell you about the first date I went on with my husband. We'd talked for quite a while before meeting in person (and yes, I performed a thorough background check before meeting him in real life), so he knew that true crime and criminal psychology books were my jam. We were walking on a path beside the river on a really pretty day. The road led us away from the river bank into a stand of trees for a few hundred feet before curving and spitting us out near the river again. There, standing right at the edge of the drop off over the water stood a man in a dark hoodie. He peered over the edge in a highly suspicious manner. What was he doing? Well, my brain came up with a plethora of possibilities all of which I kept to myself so the man walking beside me wouldn't think I had three screws loose.

 "Do you think he's throwing a body into the river?" 

To my surprise, those words hadn't come out of my mouth. I glanced over at my walking buddy and grinned. "I think that's exactly what he's doing." And that was the moment I knew I would either marry this guy or be murdered by him. Only time would tell. 

Fast forward several years and I still have no idea what that guy was doing that close to the river, but I do know that being suspicious of him is a red flag that my love of suspense and crime has slithered into many parts of my life. 

2. Everything Looks Sinister

When you're driving down the highway and see a random garbage bag in the road. Do you just drive past without considering what might be inside? Or maybe you figure that a bag of grass clippings blew out of the back of a pickup. Or it could just be a bag of trash retrieved by someone completing community service hours. If any of these are your first guess, suspense may not have completely taken over your life yet. For those of us who are too far gone down this worm hole, we have a pretty good idea what's in that garbage bag. At best, it's a bunch of bloody clothes and maybe a gun left by an amateur killer who's only seen a few episodes of Dateline and has yet to learn the finer points of not leaving the evidence where literally anybody can find it. At worst, the bag contains a human head or any other body part that wasn't kept as a trophy.

Maybe you've seen an unoccupied car on the side of the road. If suspense has taken you over, your first assumption won't be that the driver ran out of gas and had to walk to a filling station for more. Nope. You know that he and his family were dragged out of that car and are probably with a psychopath in either a cabin or cave where he's holding them for ransom. 

3. You Have a Favorite Serial Killer

If suspense has taken over your life, this might come as a surprise. MOST PEOPLE DON'T HAVE A FAVORITE SERIAL KILLER. I know, I don't understand it either. And just for clarification for those of you that don't have a favorite, we don't have some weird obsession where we think they're great people. We absolutely know they're horrible. But they're fascinating, too. For me, the interesting part is digging into their origin story to see what happened to make them the way they are. Some suffered unspeakable things. Some had model childhoods. All were people, just like you and me. 

I'd like to know if I missed anything that you as a lover of suspense feels should have been included on this list. Comment below for a chance to win an eBook copy of Criss Cross by C.C. Warrens. It's the first book in the Holly Series which is one of my personal favorites!