Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?

Walker draws an analogy between narrative suspense and the psychology of fear. Fear, like a well-told story, narrows perception and organizes experience around anticipation—an urgent desire to know what comes next. The line suggests that fear is not only an emotion but also a meaning-making mechanism: it edits the world into a plot, foregrounding uncertainty and consequence. Read this way, the quote comments on why fear can be so gripping (it supplies momentum) and why it can be distorting (it reduces the present to a prelude). It also implies that managing fear may involve changing the “story” we think we are in.