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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33362
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33362
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

There are two lines of thought that come to my mind:

First, this is a first person narrative, so the narration happens at some time _after_ all that happened. Now, having done such a horrible thing, he might be in a state of self-denial. Also, he's a horror story author, so he's used to imagine horrible things that didn't ever happen, in order to then write them down as stories.

So he could start writing things down as a boat trip where he _imagined_ how he would do all those things, and only in the course of the story it becomes clear that it was not just his fantasy, but he _actually_ did it. By hinting early on about the _possibility_ of doing it in real, but at the same time leaving it open for a sufficient time whether those things actually happened, I guess you could keep the suspense for quite some time.

Second: How does he hide the fact from the other people on the boat? After all, a boat is a confined space where it is hard (and gets ever harder the less people are left) to prevent others finding out who did it. But if they found out early on, surely they would stop him, one way or the other.

So his murders need a high degree of planning, and that planning, the question what could go wrong, and whether he _will_ succeed, is in itself a source of tension.

Consider the movie _Kind Hearts and Coronets._ While not horror, but a black comedy, the same principle is at work here: We know from a very early point that he plans to kill, but that doesn't kill suspense. The suspence does not come from the question "who did it" (we know very well the answer), but from the question "how will he do it, and will he succeed?"

Note that this can also work well together with the first suggestion: He may first write several plans that don't work out in the form of real action, in which he then gets caught, and only then a sentence like "that didn't work, I would have to think of a different method" reveals that it was only a planning. That will cause the reader to suspect that the following descriptions, done in the same way, are also just his imaginations how he _would_ do it. All the while making sure that the non-murder related things that go on on the boat are clearly identified as real.

Then you would start making initially only subtle hints on the reality of what he did, e.g. by writing "that worked" instead of "that would work". Only gradually the reader would learn about the reality of the versions that worked, for example because the behaviour of the still living people only being explainable by the murders being real. Or more subtly, simply because the killed ones no more appear in the story.

Original score: 2