Every time we say to ourselves, 'Oh, I think I know where this is going,' the author's hand reaches out from the page and slaps us in the face. Then there are those books that purposefully and gleefully subvert our expectations. The best writers know how to satisfactorily deliver what us readers expect of a given plot, while simultaneously making their story original and suspenseful enough that we get lost in the narrative.

It's called narrative expectation, the idea that audiences have read more or less the same story over and over, and thus subconsciously anticipate certain tropes to pop up time and again. We expect certain stories to follow a particular path. will follow these plot conventions exactly, but you get my point. Of course, not every example of sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, horror, et al. The aforementioned mysteries/thrillers are concerned with crime-solving, fantasy deals with stopping an ancient evil, and sci-fi grapples with technological problems (or technology gone awry/dangerous technology fallen into the wrong hands). In horror, we turn page after page to discover who will get stabbed/strangled/bludgeoned/eaten next will the protagonist figure out the identity of the killer, or if the protagonist is the killer, will s/he be caught. So in love stories, for instance, we wonder whether the couple will get together/stay together/get back together.

Often, these questions are the same for any given genre. Authors pose the audience questions about the characters' actions and the overall development of the plot. All great stories incorporate some level of suspense, even when they're not conventional mysteries or thrillers.

What is a rotten onion tor