Three Skeleton Key Suspense Analysis

The most important literary device to create suspense in Three Skeleton Key is danger. My first claim is that suspense literally means fear of danger. My evidence from the dictionary is as follows: “anxious, uncertainty, anxiety, condition of being undecided or undetermined”. That is the definition of suspense, and as you can tell, anxiety is worry, worry is fear of something bad happening, or fear of danger. Someone else might argue that fear is a feeling, and that represents mood, but you could never have mood, or fear, without danger, so your claim relies on us, danger. Without danger, suspense would show no mood.
My second claim is that all the other claims by our opponents rely on danger to be a part of suspense. On page 40 of Three Skeleton Key the text clearly states, “One misstep and down you fall into the sea-not that the risk of drowning was so great, but the waters around the island swarmed with sharks…” The foreshadowing group might argue that the evidence is only suspenseful because it foreshadows danger, but that claim is flawed. They said that it foreshadows danger, if it foreshadowed
My evidence is from Three Skeleton Key when it says, “...on her deck, in the rigging, on every visible spot, the ship was a writhing mass--a starving army coming towards us on a vessel gone mad!”. Another team had argued that diction had caused the suspense, not danger. But that assumption is incorrect because diction is word choice, large v.s. enormous, and is NOT the outweighing character of weather a story is suspenseful or not. The danger of what the rats do and the fact that they are man-eating beasts makes the evidence suspenseful, not diction. If you describe fluffy bunnies on the deck, you still have diction, but without the danger present, diction is not suspenseful on its